Yukio Mishima

Yukio Mishima (Kimitake Hiraoka, 1925–1970) is one of the most brilliant, contradictory, and unforgettable figures in the history of world literature — an author of staggering technical mastery and genuine visionary power whose life ended in an act of theatrical political violence that has overshadowed his fiction ever since. Born in Tokyo into a samurai family, he published his first novel at nineteen and went on to produce forty novels, eighteen plays, and over a hundred short stories in a career of extraordinary productivity.

His major works — Confessions of a Mask, Thirst for Love, The Sound of Waves, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, Runaway Horses, and the tetralogy The Sea of Fertility — are at once aesthetically ravishing and morally complex, obsessed with beauty and decay, with the relationship between art and violence, and with a Japan that he felt was destroying itself through Westernisation. On November 25, 1970, he staged a coup attempt at a Tokyo military base, delivered a speech from the balcony, and then committed ritual suicide by seppuku. The spectacle overshadowed everything, but his fiction remains, and it is among the most remarkable produced in the twentieth century.