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Born in 1925, Yukio Mishima was the greatest Japanese writer of the postwar era and a serious candidate for the Nobel Prize. A brilliant novelist, he was also a playwright, stage actor, director, movie star, and orchestra conductor. But he was not content with artistic fame and became a political activist. In the aftermath of the defeat and destruction of Japan, he was disgusted with the decay of the national spirit and the loss of traditional values. For all his scorn of modern life, he was also adept at public relations. He established a glamorous public persona, arranged his own publicity with an adoring press, and created his own legend. An expert swordsman, he aspired to be a military leader and founded a rightwing paramilitary cadre, the Shield Society, whose members he dressed in handsomely designed uniforms. His personality was pathological, morbid, and masochistic, and his whole narcissistic career seems to have been driven by a death wish. But he did not succumb to depression nor surrender his life to drugs or the gas oven. When he could not rally the masses to his point of view, he decided to stage his own spectacular suicide, in a traditional seppuku, or ritual disemboweling.
Many modern writers have killed themselves, but Mishima's was an unusual and politically motivated act. He did not want to die as a literary man but, by uniting art and action, as the warrior he had never been but always wished to be. Like the Buddhist monk who immolated himself in Saigon in 1963 to protest the corrupt Diem government, Mishima hoped his death would spark a revolution in thought and conduct. What was the effect of Mishima's suicide? At the time it certainly drew attention to the writer and his work - it was "a good career move," in the famous words of the poet Anne Sexton - but it did not find favor with the Japanese military or people. Recently I had the opportunity to record the response of an eyewitness to this strange episode: Tetsuo Oe, who was a thirty-nine-year-old major at the time.
On November 25, 1970, Mishima and four members of his militia entered the headquarters of the Japanese Self-Defense Force (JSDF) in Tokyo. Previously Mishima had used...