SubscribeThe endings of few people are as clearly prefigured in their life and work as was Yukio Mishima's final act. he had fantasized suicide as a child, written about it as an adult, and enacted ritual seppuku onfilm. no ending of a famous figure was more predictable or rehearsed.
His end was, in a way, seeded in his beginning. Born on November 14, 1925, to a father who deeply admired Hitler and Nazism, Kimitake Hiraoka later took the pseudonym Yukio Mishima, which he scripted in Japanese so that the characters also read "mysterious devil betwitched with death." As he liked to tell friends, "It's eerie, but that's the way to write my name."
He was raised by his paternal grandmother, an ailing, embittered invalid who kept Mishima in her darkened sickroom until he was twelve. She nurtured the boy, frail and introspective, on legends of medieval Japan. It was a story-book world of violence, pageantry, and nobly inspired suicides that the lonely Yukio hungrily absorbed, finding it infinitely more colorful and compelling than the real world around him.
For amusement he drew pictures of handsome knights dying of battle wounds. And he was appalled to learn that a martyr whose picture he mooned over was not a man, as he had thought and eroticized about, but a boyish-looking French girl named Joan. From that revelation onward, Mishima hated the sight of women in mannish attire and forbade his wife to wear slacks.
Sex and death were bizarrely fused in his mind by age twelve. He then had his first orgasm, fantasizing on a picture of St. Sebastian bound and pierced by arrows, an incident he featured in his first novel, Confessions of a Mask, published in 1949 when he was twenty-four. Partly autobiographical, it served as Mishima's homosexual coming-out, and once out publicly, the now famous young writer became notoriously promiscuous.
Mishima's ritualistic death is eerily prefigued in his 1966 short story "Patriotism." And when it was made into the film Yukoku, Mishima directed and playe dthe lead, literally living out his fate of four years later. Mishima wrote of the character, a lieutenant, who has just ripped open his gut with a knife:The five or six inches of naked point vanished completely into his flesh...
He returned to consciousness. The blade had certainly pierced the wall of his stomach, he thought. It was difficult to breathe, his chest pounded, and in some deep distant region which he could hardly believe was part o fhimself, a fearful excrutiating pain came welling up as if the ground had opened to disgorge a boiling stream of molten lava...
So this was seppuku!
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posted by a louis wain cat at 10:52 PM on March 31, 2006