The life and death of Yukio Mishima: A tale of astonishing elegance and emotional brutality

A novel by one of Japan’s most revered writers is to be published in English for the first time. But the facts surrounding Yukio Mishima are almost stranger than fiction, discovers David Barnett

Thursday 25 July 2019 17:44 BST
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Minutes after speaking to Japanese Self-Defence Force soldiers at Tokyo’s military garrison station, Mishima committed ritual suicide by disembowelment
Minutes after speaking to Japanese Self-Defence Force soldiers at Tokyo’s military garrison station, Mishima committed ritual suicide by disembowelment

On YouTube you can find a couple of videos of the Japanese author Yukio Mishima being interviewed in English, conducted in the late 1960s. In one, the grainy black-and-white footage features Mishima talking about hara-kiri, the ancient form of ritual suicide practised by Japan’s samurai class. He spoke first about what he saw as two “contradictory characteristics” of the Japanese; elegance and brutality. He said: “The two characteristics are very tightly combined, sometimes, and the brutality I think comes from our emotions. The elegance comes from our nervous side, and sometimes we are too sensitive about defining elegance or sense of beauty.”

As an example he said that in the samurai tradition – Mishima was descended from Japan’s warrior class – “duty was always connected with death” and if a samurai committed the ritual suicide he was “requested to make up his face with powder or lipstick in order to keep his face beautiful after suffering death”.

Elegance and brutality. But, noted Mishima, hara-kiri was very different from the western notion of suicide, which he said was born of defeat. He added: “Hara-kiri sometimes makes you win.”

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