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Ichigaya, just in time for a late afternoon edition. “Go back and check your facts,” the desk editor who took the call instructed him; and he drafted the headline INJURED MISHIMA RUSHED TO HOSPITAL .
    At his home in the suburbs Azusa Hiraoka, Mishima’s father, had been having a quiet smoke and watching television when the first report of the “Mishima Incident” flashed on the screen.
    â€œYukio Mishima . . . made an attack on the Jieitai camp at Ichigaya.”
    Azusa’s thought was: “Now I will have to go and apologize to the police and everyone else involved. What a bother!”
    The next line read: “
Kappuku
” (cut his stomach). Azusa worried that his son’s right hand might have been injured too. Modern surgery would take care of him otherwise.
    The next announcement was: “
Kaishaku
” (beheaded).
    â€œI was not particularly surprised,” Azusa said later. “My brain rejected the information.”
    The first official comment on the affair was made by Prime Minister Eisaku Sato.
    Sato, a stocky, handsome figure in a morning coat, emerged from the Diet, the parliament. He had been making a speech atthe opening of the autumn session, in the presence of the Emperor. Sato had known Mishima personally and had helped him, indirectly, to have his Tatenokai trained by the Jieitai.
    Reporters gathered round the Prime Minister. “Would you comment on the Mishima Incident, Prime Minister?”
    â€œHe must have been
kichigai
, out of his mind,” Sato said. And he got into his big, black President car and was driven away to his office.
    Shortly afterward the police announced the results of the autopsies on the bodies of Mishima and Morita. Mishima had a cut five inches long in his lower abdomen; in places, the wound was as deep as two inches. Morita had only a light scratch across his stomach; he had not had the great strength required to drive a dagger into his body.
    What had led the two men to commit hara-kiri? The answer was not as simple as the Prime Minister had suggested.

TWO
    Early Life (1925–39)
    But my heart’s leaning was for Death and Night and Blood.
    Yukio Mishima,
Confessions of a Mask
    1
    The Chrysanthemum and the Sword
    One of the last remarks made to me by Mishima was that it was virtually impossible for a non-Japanese person to understand Japan. We in the West, he went on, consistently underrated the importance of the “dark” side of Japanese culture and chose instead to concentrate on the “soft” element in the Japanese tradition. This was a theme that Mishima often brought up late in life; he usually enlarged upon his point then by saying that there was too much emphasis in Japan itself on “the chrysanthemum” (the arts) and an insufficient understanding of “the sword” (the martial tradition). And in this context he had referred approvingly to the work of the American sociologist Ruth Benedict,
The Chrysanthemum and the Sword
, a book known to all non-Japanese interested in the culture of Japan. Always, he insisted on the duality of the Japanese tradition, and he praised Benedict for having understood the nature of this duality.
    I accept Mishima’s point. Before and during the Second World War, Western commentary on Japan was almost exclusively preoccupied with the martial aspect of the Japanese tradition; it was said that the Japanese were soldiers at heart—ruthless, barbaric men who would not hesitate to commit the gravest atrocity as at the “Rape of Nanking” in 1937. After the war, Western scholars changed their thinking, and most writing about Japan since 1950 has dwelt upon the Japanese aesthetic. Writers on a variety of subjects—the classical literature of Japan, Zen Buddhism, the tea ceremony—have delineated the Japanese sense of beauty. Neither school of thought gives a complete picture of Japan; the Japanese are heirs to a dual tradition of