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His was a battlefield without glory, a battlefield where none could display deeds of valor: It was the front line of the spirit …. What he was about to perform was an act in his public capacity as a soldier, something he had never previously shown his wife. It called for a resolution equal to the courage to enter battle; it was a death of no less degree and quality than death in the front line. It was his conduct on the battlefield that he was now to display.
All art is ultimately about death. In Mishima's case life imitates art. This is true in the intensity and complexity of his daily existence and his choice of demise. A man with closely cropped hair, the commander of his private army of 100 men, the man with a remarkable physique who, like Teddy Roosevelt, went from a weakling to an athlete; a man who could be the life of the party, yet a man who could be angry and hold grudges; a determined goal-directed obsessive man preoccupied with rituals and blood-signing oaths; a man remarkably traditional yet remarkably modern, a cult figure for some; a man who wanted to live forever yet a man who took his life as a martyr of heroic Japan; a man who obeyed an order “that no earthly emperor was ever again going to give”; a man who coveted the possibility of winning the Nobel prize yet in his moment of triumph was preoccupied with the urge to destroy himself—all of this, and more, was Mishima.
In 1965 Yukio Mishima was rumored to be a candidate for the Nobel prize. In 1968 that honor was bestowed on Yasunari Kawabata who called Mishima “the Japanese Hemingway.” Kawabata was the first Japanese novelist to win a Nobel prize and said of Mishima: “A writer of his calibre appears only once every 200 or 300 years” (Yamamato and Igo, 1977, p. 88).
In November 1970, after berating a group of soldiers he insisted be