1970 Mishima (birth name ‘Kimitake Hiraoka’) was born in Tokyo in 1925. He suffered, while under the custody of a relative, childhood disciplines that verged on the sadistic and that are plausibly credited with the morbid obsessions of his later life.
He had the education and military indoctrination typical of a young Japanese male of his upper class in the nationalist-imperialistic 1930s. But, while absorbing samurai codes he was also fascinated by the writings of European ‘decadents’, such as Wilde and Rilke. His sexuality was ambiguous and his narcissism pronounced from his earliest years. He published his first book in 1944, and adopted the pen name by which he was later famous (it was initially a nickname given him by schoolmates). He was obliged to write in secret – being forbidden by his father to follow such an effeminate career.
Mishima was called up for military service in the final desperate years of the war, when boys were being recruited. He dodged the draft by faking TB (he had a bad cold at the time of the medical). He went on to graduate from university in 1947 and entered the civil service. After a year he resigned and devoted himself thereafter to literature.
Fame, in Japan, came with Confessions of a Mask (1948), in which Mishima explored the delicate subterfuges required to be homosexual in a homophobic society such as Japan’s. He was, as his career progressed, regarded as the country’s strongest candidate for the Nobel Prize (in fact it went in 1968 to his mentor, the novelist Yasunari Kawabata).
A flamboyant figure, dedicated to body-building, Mishima appeared in films and modelled. In the last decade of his life he became increasingly obsessed with bushido codes and ultra-nationalism (at a period of general westernisation in his country). He formed a martial cult around himself, the Tatenokai (Shield Society), fanatically dedicated to the imperial traditions of ancient Japan.
On 25 November 1970, Mishima and four of his followers invaded a military camp in Tokyo, taking its commander hostage. He apparently aimed to trigger a coup d’état, although he may also have intended self-immolation on the world stage.
After an address to the soldiers below from the camp balcony (who jeered), Mishima retired to commit the act of seppuku – self-disembowelling – curtailed by beheading by one of his followers (the designated attendant botched the job, horribly).
It was, as Gore Vidal cattily pronounced on the death of Truman, ‘a good career move’. Better, in point of fact, than a Nobel would have been.
One response in the West was amusement at the strange ways of the Japanese. Private Eye had a spoof headline, ‘Famous British Novelist Commits Public Suicide By Drinking Himself To Death’, over a picture of Kingsley Amis (who did indeed drink himself to death in 1995).
More significantly, Mishima’s headline-reported suicide provoked a wave of interest in his fiction. Particularly successful in its translated form was his 1963 novel, The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea, the story of a widow with a son who schemes hideous violence against his prospective stepfather (the sailor of the title). The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea was adapted in 1976 as a film, its setting moved to England, starring Kris Kristofferson.
More successfully, the distinguished director Paul Schrader did a biopic, Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, in 1985. It is, Schrader claims, the best film he ever made (judges at the Cannes Festival agreed with him, audiences less so). Mishima remains the only Japanese novelist with high name recognition outside his country – less, alas, for his works than his spectacular death.