The Last Samurai

Blood flows, existence is destroyed, and the shattered senses give existence as a whole its first endorsement, closing the logical gap between seeing and existing . . .And this is death. In this way I learned that the momentary, happy sense of existence that I had experienced that summer sunset during my life with the army could be finally endorsed only by death.

--Sun and Steel

By the age of 45, Yukio Mishima had just about run out of challenge. He had produced 20 novels, 33 plays, a travel book, more than 80 short stories, and countless essays. He was a major contender for the 1968 Nobel Prize for Literature that went to his countryman. Novelist Yasunari Kawabata. He sang on the stage, produced, directed and acted in movies. Often called "Japan's Hemingway" because of his love for physical contest and the outdoor life, he lifted weights and became proficient at karate and kendo, the ancient swordfighting game once practiced by the samurai warriors. He was a perfectionist, a man of overriding obsessions. One of these obsessions was with his own death.

Drained and Exhausted. Early one morning last week, Mishima turned in to his publisher the final portion of his quartet of novels, The Sea of Fertility. Named after one of the moon's cold, empty seas, the quartet describes the conflicts of Japan's hereditary aristocracy and the nouveau riche from 1912 to 1970, and portrays the barrenness that Mishima saw in contemporary life. In a letter written on Nov. 17 to Harold Strauss, his editor at Knopf in New York, Mishima said: "In it I have put everything I felt and thought about life and the world." He added that he felt "utterly drained and exhausted."

After sending off the novel, Mishima joined four young students who belonged to the ultranationalistic paramilitary Shield Society that he had formed two years ago. For the first time in weeks, the sky over Tokyo was free of smog. When Mishima and his companions reached Ichigaya Hill in western Tokyo, the headquarters of Japan's Eastern Ground Self-Defense Forces, sunshine bathed the midday. Mishima had arrived on the threshold of his life's climactic act. It was the sort of act, Japanese Literary Critic Kenkichi Yamamoto wrote later, that "reached its apex in one pyrotechnic explosion beyond time and space--one flash in the darkness and nothing else."

Sacred and Inviolable. In his personal life and his earlier writings, Mishima had openly expressed his despair over the materialistic decadence that he saw in the Westernization of his country. Largely at fault, he felt, was the U.S.-imposed constitution, which "forever renounces war as a sovereign right of the nation." Mishima wanted the prewar constitution restored so that the Emperor would once again be "sacred and inviolable" and so that Japan could regain the honor it had lost in its defeat. To that end, he created his private army, which numbered fewer than 100 young men, trained regularly, and wore expensive uniforms designed by Mishima himself. Most Japanese considered his army only a harmless and eccentric aberration of a talented man.

Seeking converts for his cause, Mishima last year trained with defense-forces commando units and since last March repeatedly visited Japan's 32nd Infantry Regiment. He had little luck in winning converts, but he then concocted a fantastic plan: to make a dramatic "last appeal" to the defense forces at Ichigaya in the hope that they would overthrow the government. Mishima sought and was granted an interview with the garrison commander of the defense forces, General Kanetoshi Mashita.

Sword and Dagger. Dressed in their natty uniforms, the novelist and his four acolytes entered the general's office bearing swords and daggers. Mishima drew and raised his mean-looking blade before the general, exclaiming: "A good sword, this?" Believing that Mishima was joking, Mashita grinned and nodded his head. The drawn sword was a signal. Without warning, Mishima's men pounced on the general and tied him to his chair. When Mashita's aides realized what was happening and rushed into his office, the students slashed eight of them with their swords and daggers. After locking out the injured aides, the students demanded through the closed doors that soldiers be assembled on the parade ground below to hear a speech by Mishima. Some 1,200 gathered rapidly, and the police arrived.

Mishima went onto a balcony, wearing, in kamikaze style, a headband that fluttered in the wind. He spoke for ten minutes, his words often inaudible because of the lack of a public address system and noises from the men. His expression frozen in a fanatic vise, Mishima shouted: "Listen to me! I have waited in vain for four years for you to take arms in an uprising. Are you warriors? If so, why do you strive to guard the constitution that is designed to deny the very reason for the existence of your organization? Why can't you realize that so long as this constitution exists, you cannot be saved? Isn't there anyone among you willing to hurl his body against the constitution that has turned Japan spineless? Let's stand up and fight together and die together for something that is far more important than our life. That is not freedom or democracy, but the most important thing for us all, Japan."

The soldiers were incredulous. "Fool," they shouted, and "You idiot! What the hell are you talking about?" Gesticulating with his white-gloved hands, Mishima shouted himself hoarse trying to be heard. Finally, he realized the futility of continuing and turned to re-enter the general's office, first declaring: "We are going to enter our protest against this constitution with our deaths." His last words to the crowd were: "Tenno Heika Banzai!" (Long live the Emperor!)

As General Mashita looked on in helpless horror, Mishima stripped to the waist and knelt on the floor, only inches away. "Don't be a fool, stop it!" the general cried. Mishima paid no heed. He followed to the letter the seppuku, the traditional samurai form of suicide sometimes called harakiri. Probing the left side of his abdomen, he put the ceremonial dagger in place, then thrust it deep into his flesh. Standing behind him, Masakatsu Morita, 25, one of his most devoted followers, raised his sword and with one stroke sent Mishima's severed head rolling to the floor. To complete the ceremony, Morita plunged a dagger into his own stomach, and yet another student lopped off Merita's head. Shedding tears, the three surviving students saluted the two dead men and surrendered to the general's aides.

Ultimate Dream. Evidently Mishima hoped--vainly--that his seppuku might arouse the 125,000 Japanese who belong to the 400 or so right-wing organizations in the country. When a similar revolt was staged in February 1936 by a group of young soldiers who tried to overthrow the government, it foreshadowed the disastrous Tojo regime of four years later. Mishima had written a short story, Patriotism, about that revolt, and in 1965 he made it into a movie. He himself acted the lead role of a young army lieutenant who commits hara-kiri with his wife after a night of passionate lovemaking. Writing about the experience afterward, Mishima referred to it as "the ultimate dream of my life."

His real dream was to die a hero's death for Japan. He was born Kimi-take Hiraoka, son of an aristocratic samurai family, and was imbued with a warrior code that apotheosized complete control over mind and body and loyalty to the Emperor. At 18, he felt an almost erotic fascination with the death that, he was certain, awaited him when he would be drafted. But his wish to die for the Emperor was thwarted by a weak body and a frail constitution.

His "romantic impulse toward death" prompted him to begin writing--and building his body to be worthy of destruction. After publishing his first book at 19--a pretty, sensitive collection of short stories called A Forest in Flower--he finished his studies at Tokyo University and took a job in the Finance Ministry. In 1948 he quit the ministry, changed his name to Yukio Mishima, and published Confessions of a Mask. A fierce portrait of homosexuality--a subject with which Mishima had a lifelong fascination and, some say, involvement--Mask brought him fame. His best-known work, Temple of the Golden Pavilion, brought him a small fortune as well. From that point on, even his art was devoted to the spirit of the samurai.

His highly polished style, stripped of embellishment in order to emphasize action, helped him to create the psychological realism that led to great critical acclaim and commercial success in Japan and abroad. Perhaps better than any other contemporary Japanese author, Mishima was able to articulate the conflicts of his people in their transition from the old culture to the Western mode of living.

Although Mishima lived in a luxurious house with his wife and two children, incongruously surrounded by English antiques, he was fundamentally an ascetic. He wrote at night and for years spent hours each day punishing his body with weight lifting so that it would be --in both the Greek and the Japanese ideals--"beautiful" enough for the noble death he wished.

Mishima was an impassioned romantic whose real despair at his country's course commingled like sacrificial blood with his own deep need to return to an earlier and, in his view, much nobler Japan. Many critics in Japan felt that he passed the peak of his career as a writer--Sun and Steel, an autobiographical and philosophical book published this year, was not very favorably received--and that he feared reaching old age in obscurity. Said Critic Yamamoto: "He was already 45. After 50, he couldn't have achieved such beauty in his manner of death."

Last summer, Mishima agreed to a Japanese publisher's proposal to do a photographic study of various postures of man's death, and happily posed for 15 postures, including drowning, death by duel and harakiri. Then, at an unprecedented show in a Tokyo department store that ended only three weeks ago, he displayed a set of photographs of himself in the nude. Last week the body that he had trained until it became his pride, together with its severed head, was cremated. Yukio Mishima left two farewell waka, the 31-syllable Japanese poems, that he had composed, like a good samurai, on the eve of his death. One of them read:

The sheaths of swords rattle As after years of endurance Brave men set out To tread upon the first frost of the year.

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