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Mishima Yukio was the modern Japanese author who, until the arrival of Murakami Haruki and Yoshimoto Banana, had won the largest readership outside of Japan, at least in part because of the dramatic way he ended his life. A versatile and prolific writer as well as an astute critic (some would rate his criticism higher than his fiction), Mishima seems assured of a reputation as one of Japan's most important postwar writers.
Mishima was born in Tokyo as Hiraoka Kimitake. His father, Azusa, was an official in the Ministry of Agriculture; his mother Shizue was the second daughter of a former principal of Kaisei Middle School, Hashi Kenzō. The influence of Mishima's autocratic grandmother, Natsu " who had Mishima live in her room and forbade him to play with other boys " is frequently cited by biographers as the source of Mishima's later deviation from normality. Donald Keene and others, however, also point out rightly that she helped Mishima develop his precocious taste in literature.
Throughout his youth Mishima attended the Gakushūin (Peers School), serializing his first important prose work, Hanazakari no mori(The Forest in Full Flower), in the magazine Bungei Bunka (Literary Culture) in 1941. This also marked his first use of the pen name Mishima Yukio. The war had a decisive influence on Mishima, who was wrongly diagnosed as having pleurisy and thereby avoided being conscripted. This cheating of impending death, along with Japan's eventual defeat, seems to have engendered in him a complex dialectic between the exultation of survival and the exaltation of death which was to characterize the romantic nihilism of the mature Mishima. In 1948 Mishima resigned from the Ministry of Finance to devote himself to writing, and in 1949 he met with critical and popular success when he published the affecting novelKamen no kokuhaku(Confessions of a Mask).
The fifties saw the appearance of a long series of important novels, as well as Mishima's turn toward bodybuilding and the cult of the physical. In the sixties this physicality took on the specifically political coloring (refracted rather than reflected in his novels) that ultimately prompted Mishima to form his own private army, the Shield Society (Tate no Kai), in 1968. The bizarre and fascinating confluence of life and art that marked Mishima's final years was symbolized by the near-simultaneous completion of his final novel and his ritual suicide by seppuku. The true meaning of this act continues to be debated, but the intense and often diametrically opposed reactions it elicits in readers and critics can surely be adduced as testimony to a strength of personality unique in modern Japanese literature.
- Kimball, Arthur G. Crisis and Identity in Contemporary Japanese Novels. Tokyo: Charles E. Tuttle, 1972.
- Keene, Donald. Dawn to the West. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1984.
- Keene, Donald. Landscapes and Portraits. Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1971.
- Miyoshi, Masao. Accomplices of Silence. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974.
- Morris, Ivan. The Nobility of Failure. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1975.
- Nathan, John. Mishima. Boston: Little, Brown, 1974.
- Petersen, Gwenn Boardman. The Moon in the Water: Understanding Tanizaki, Kawabata, and Mishima. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1979.
- Scott-Stokes, Henry. The Life and Death of Yukio Mishima. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1974.
- Tsuruta, Kinya and Thomas E. Swann, eds. Approaches to the Modern Japanese Novel. Tokyo: Sophia University, 1976.
- Ueda, Makoto. Modern Japanese Writers and the Nature of Literature. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1976.
- Wolfe, Peter. Yukio Mishima. New York: Continuum, 1989.
- Yamanouchi, Hisaaki. The Search for Authenticity in Modern Japanese Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978.
The Mishima Yukio CyberMuseum: A site in both Japanese and English organized by Yamanaka-ko Village, home of the Mishima Yukio Museum, which opened in July 1999. A fairly detailed "chronological history" of Mishima's life and career is provided, as is a GIF-image version of the Studies of Mishima's translated Translations published by the Japan PEN Club. Of special interest is a bulletin board where readers can ask questions in English about Mishima and receive answers from members of the museum's organizing committee (although activity appears to be rather slow). An English map showing the museum's location has also been posted.