Yukio Mishima, the literary genius who committed harakiri

Everything was going well on the day of Kimitake Hiraoka's death. He and his gang of Tetonkai fanatics—the fascist paramilitary militia that Kimitake himself had founded two years prior—had successfully infiltrated the barracks and tied the commander's hands and feet. Dressed in the scarlet uniform of the army and adorned with the bandana on which the kanji "Serve the country for seven lifetimes," Kimitake Hiraoka walked to the final stage of his life. He had watched his nation slowly die for far too long, dishonored by defeat in World War II and humiliated after accepting the fate imposed by the United States. From the balcony of the Tokyo headquarters in the Shinjuku district, he unfurled a manifesto and began to read his demands. pathos It was about to come true. Not what he wanted, but what he had written so many pages about before his death.

Kimitake Hiraoka, better known as Yukio Mishima, is one of the great exponents of 20th-century world literature. Born in Tokyo in 1925, he studied law at the University of Tokyo, a profession he never practiced. With his first work, Confessions of a MaskPublished when he was 24, his literary career had already begun to take off. From then on, and motivated by Yasunari Kawabata—the first Japanese writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature—Kimitake Hiraoka, by then known as Yukio Mishima, focused body and soul on literature until the end of his days.

No author has written so beautifully about the aesthetics of death and martial glory as Mishima. Raised amidst the ruins of a defeated imperial Japan and under the shadow of foreign occupation, Mishima forged his character from that defeat. But it would be his obsessive reading of Hagakure which would end up sculpting the contours of a wounded personality, fascinated by the idea of ephemeral beauty and destruction: "I started reading the Hagakure During the war, I always kept it close to me or on my work table; and if there is one work to which I have constantly referred, for twenty years, rereading a passage here and there, without ceasing to feel moved, it is this one. Hagakure"," Mishima, by then a firmly established figure in the Japanese literary scene, had explained in an interview.

The Hagakure It is a book of reflections written by Yamamoto Tsunetomo at the beginning of the 18th century in which the author develops the lessons that the samurai of the Nabeshima clan intended to leave as an exclusive legacy for the members of his group, but which quickly became a kind of universal code of conduct for all good samurai: "I have discovered that the way during the way. As many possibilities of life as of death, we must choose death," the first lines emphasize.

Yukio Mishima, the literary genius

Already in Confessions of a MaskIn his first semi-autobiographical novel, Mishima lays bare his own relationship with the idea of dying young, preserving beauty, and seeking a heroic, almost ritualistic death. The sailor who lost his way at seaA 13-year-old boy named Noboru lives with his widowed mother, Fusako, who runs a shop selling Westernized antiques. Noboru belongs to a group of nihilistic and violent teenagers, led by an unnamed boy who despises adult hypocrisy and preaches a kind of brutal return to primitive values. One day, Fusako meets Ryuji Tsukazaki, a merchant marine officer, and a romantic relationship develops between them. Noboru, who idealizes Ryuji as the embodiment of a virile, heroic, and oceanic ideal, feels betrayed when he discovers that the sailor is willing to abandon that existence for a domestic life with his mother, an act perceived as an intolerable betrayal of that ideal. It is then that Noboru and the other boys decide they must punish him with the only price that can be paid: death.The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, a true classic of Japanese literature based on the historical event of the burning of the Golden Pavilion Kinkaku-ji; or of Death on a Summer Afternoon, one of Mishima's short stories that begins with an epigraph from Baudelaire, one of the Japanese writer's influences: "Death… new affections plus deeply salaries the règne pompeux del été"[Death... affects us most deeply under the pompous reign of summer]. But if there is one text in Mishima's work that illustrates like no other the union between personal belief, literature, and politics, it is this one." PatriotismA short story, inspired by the act of seppuku (Suicide) of a soldier and his wife, in which the author imagines the couple's final moments before confronting their own deaths. As in the HagakureIn a society where the idea is to die for the feudal lord (daimyo), there is nothing more beautiful than giving one's life for one's country. Nor is there anything more functional to the interests of the lord.

Roland Barthes, in The death of the authorHe would claim that "everything that is written is autobiographical," and Montaigne begins his Essays by saying, "I am the subject of my book." None of them would be as faithful to their thinking as Mishima. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize three times, but never won. The debate about whether it is necessary to separate author and work is irrelevant in awards dominated by political calculation, where the focus is more on the message sent by awarding a person than on the work for which they are being rewarded. And the world emerging from World War II did not look favorably upon a clearly brilliant artist with a fascist and anti-American ideology being awarded the Nobel Prize. Today, history might be different.

In a similar way to how the work of the philosopher Martin Heidegger was consciously ignored for decades by German society due to his connection with Nazism, Mishima's artistic fate would pay the price for the actions that Kimitake Hiraoka had carried out in his life.

The day of Kimitake Hiraoka's death

On the day of Kimitake Hiraoka's death, November 20, 1970, the renowned writer began reading his demands from the balcony. First: to restore the sovereignty of the Japanese emperor as absolute head of state and commander-in-chief of the armed forces. Second: to abolish the Pacifist Constitution of 1947. Third: he called upon the army to rise up in defense of traditional Japanese values. Fourth: reconciliation of body, spirit, and nation. But something was amiss.

In the courtyard, the soldiers watched the figure on the balcony. Mishima was reading, but the words faded, caught between the distance and the drone of a Japanese television helicopter that shook the scene from above. The deafening roar of the rotors prevented the words from taking flight. The recruits watched the spectacle with a mixture of astonishment and embarrassment. pathos Kimitake was approaching. His attempted coup was failing live on air.

Mishima had long planned this moment. It was, in a way, the culmination of his life's work. However, unlike his prose, his "political work" held nothing original. The culture of death takes many forms and always ends up reproducing the same logic. Shamans who sacrifice lives to honor the gods. Feudal lords who claim to kill for a wounded honor. Politicians who send children to the trenches to save the fatherland.

When the coup failed, Mishima retreated to one of the offices in the barracks and, just as he had fantasized so many times before, proceeded to disembowel himself. seppuku either harakiri (terms worship and vulgar(respectively, which designate this form of ritual suicide). Masakatsu Morita, the second-in-command of the Tetonkai, was tasked with beheading him, but the sword blade kept getting stuck in the writer's flesh, to the point that another member of the group had to finish the job. Even that didn't go well.

The romantic veil that is drawn around death through obedience to authority produces brilliant poets and obedient soldiers. But death, in the real world, has nothing poetic about it. It only works well in fiction.