Yukio Mishima: Confessions of a Mask

Abstract

Yukio Mishima (1925–70) was born in Tokyo, the son of a senior government official. He was a delicate and precocious child, and from adolescence was deeply affected by pictures of physical violence and pain, and especially by Guido Reni’s Saint Sebastian — all of which is reflected in Confessions of a Mask. During the Second World War he met the writer Yasunari Kawabata; this was the beginning of a lifelong friendship. He entered Tokyo University to study law in 1944, and in February 1945 was conscripted for war service. He did not see active service although the war experience affected him profoundly, and laid the foundation of the death worship which he later developed. He graduated in law in 1947, spent one year as a civil servant, and then turned to full-time writing. After a depressing visit to New York in 1957, he developed a philosophy which he called ‘active nihilism’, an element of which was the idealising of suicide as the ultimate existentialist gesture — a gesture which he was to perform in 1970, at the headquarters of the Japanese defence forces. He was married and had two children, but it is clear that he was homosexual and not bisexual.