Securing a post at the Ministry of Finance after graduation in 1947, Mishima worked by night on his writing until achieving a breakthrough in 1949 with the publication of Confessions of a Mask. One of his teachers at school helped him to get a story of his published in a well-known journal, and furnished the young writer, it is claimed, with a pen name, “Yukio Mishima”. It was also at school that Mishima’s love of romance blossomed: the European Romantic poets – not least for their propensity towards dying beautiful and young – along with the Japan Romantic School of writers, for whom the Emperor and Japan’s shining cultural achievements were central. During his time at the elite Peers’ School, Mishima began writing poetry, completing around 500 Western-style poems alone by the age of 16, with many more in Japanese styles. Japanese responded in horror at a well-known postwar novelist and playwright – a household name nominated three times for the Nobel Prize, and sometimes compared with Oscar Wilde – appearing to be sucked back into the very thing that they had been working so hard to escape: the emperor-centred authoritarianism of the 1930s and early 1940s.īorn Kimitake Hiraoka in Tokyo, in January 1925, the young Mishima’s imagination was fired by his aristocratic grandmother’s recounting of classic Kabuki stories, by magazine images of violent battle deaths to which he found himself strangely attracted, and later by trips to the theatre – Kabuki alongside the more rarefied Noh. Heckled in response, Mishima withdrew back into the General’s office and performed seppuku – ritual suicide by disembowelment. He berated the men for defending the famously pacifistic postwar constitution that appeared to reject them, insisting that true samurai would instead defend Japan’s traditions – the Emperor most of all.

But arriving with four members of his private army, the Tatenokai (Shield Society), he proceeded to tie him up before heading out onto the balcony and insisting – on pain of death, both his own and the General’s – that rank-and-file SDF members gather below to hear him speak. Mishima had made an appointment for that morning to see the General in command. The balcony was part of the Tokyo headquarters of the Japanese Self-Defence Forces (SDF), established a few years after the end of the Second World War. The photograph was taken on November 25 1970: the last day of Mishima’s life and the end, for some at least, of his reputation as one of Japan’s great novelists. A rising sun bandana wrapped around his head, he rests one gloved hand on his hip while thrusting the other outwards as he addresses the crowd below. One of the best-known images of Yukio Mishima shows him standing on a balcony in tight-fitting military dress uniform, shiny buttons arrayed up both sides of his broad chest.

A beautiful star mishima