Yukio Mishima

Yukio Mishima was Japan's most internationally celebrated postwar novelist and ended his life attempting a coup and committing seppuku on a balcony in central Tokyo. He was born Kimitake Hiraoka, raised largely by a domineering grandmother, and failed his army medical in 1945 after a doctor misdiagnosed him with tuberculosis - an escape he described afterwards as a wound. Confessions of a Mask, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion and the Sea of Fertility tetralogy made him a candidate for the Nobel Prize three times. He also bodybuilt obsessively, acted in films, modelled as Saint Sebastian, and from 1968 ran the Tatenokai, a private militia of about a hundred students, drilled with the tacit permission of the Self-Defence Forces. His politics were an aesthetic objection to the postwar settlement: a country that had renounced war, prospered, and in his view become spiritually empty, with an emperor reduced to a symbol. On 25 November 1970 he and four cadets took a general hostage at the Ichigaya headquarters, and he addressed the garrison from a balcony calling on them to restore the emperor. They jeered. He went inside and disembowelled himself, and the beheading was botched. He had delivered the last volume of his tetralogy to his publisher that morning. The February 26 incident of 1936, a failed coup by young officers, was his lifelong subject. His publisher received the manuscript that morning and the news that afternoon. Reaction in Japan was overwhelmingly that he had gone mad rather than that he had made a political argument, and the coup attempt had no sequel. The novels have outlived the politics: he is among the most translated Japanese writers, and the arguments about whether the two can be separated have never settled.

• Lived: 1925 CE – 1970 CE
• Nationality: Japanese
• Roles: writer