MISHIMA

On November 25, 1970, one of the most famous writers in the world stepped out onto a military balcony in Tokyo, called on the soldiers below to rise up for the emperor, and, when they jeered, went back inside and took his own life. He was forty-five. He had been talked about for years as a possible Nobel Prize winner.

How did a brilliant novelist come to this?

Yukio Mishima was born Hiraoka Kimitake, a pale, sickly boy raised for twelve years in his grandmother's darkened sickroom. He chose his pen name at sixteen to hide his writing from his father. Over the next thirty years, he remade himself again and again: into the celebrated author of Confessions of a Mask, The Sound of Waves, and The Temple of the Golden Pavilion; into a bodybuilder, a film actor, and a swordsman; and finally into the commander of a private army of students.

Told as a narrative history from beginning to end, with a cast of characters, a map, and a travel guide to the places you can still visit today, this book says plainly what the records show, what biographers still debate, and which famous stories are only legends. It describes his death without graphic detail and without presenting it as admirable.

Inside, you'll find:

The boy in the sickroom, and the grandmother who took him to kabuki
The pen name, the disapproving father, and the medical examination of 1945
Kawabata Yasunari, the mentor, and Confessions of a Mask
Greece, the island of The Sound of Waves, and the body he built
The burning of the Golden Pavilion, and the novel it inspired
"Patriotism," the Nobel Prize, and The Sea of Fertility
The Shield Society, and the debate with radical students at Tokyo University
What really happened at Ichigaya, and what happened after
Why the world remembers two very different Mishimas
A guide to visiting the places in this story today, from Lake Yamanaka to Kamishima and Kyoto
If you want a legend of a last samurai, this is not your book. If you want the real story of a great writer who made his life into a work of art — and why the best way to meet him is still in his books — turn the page and meet the real Mishima.