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the literary and the martial arts.
    I see Mishima both as a writer and as a “soldier.” To understand the man, one must study his aesthetic; his exploits in the field of military endeavor are intriguing and reveal that he had
something
of the soldier in him; but he devoted almost all his adult life to writing, not to the Jieitai and the Tatenokai. My purpose here is to explain Mishima’s idea of beauty, which he developed during his adolescence.
    My study of Mishima’s early life relies largely on a single source, his autobiographical masterpiece,
Confessions of a Mask
(published by New Directions in 1958 in a translation by Meredith Weatherby). This novel is the most striking of Mishima’s many works. It reveals more of his character and of his upbringing than anything else he wrote: it gives a crystalline account of his aesthetic.
Confessions of a Mask
describes the genesis of a romantic idea which impinges directly on his eventual decision to commit suicide: the notion that violent death is ultimate beauty, provided that he who dies is young. Thus Mishima drew on an ancient Japanese inspiration that beauty is temporary. This is a particularly Japanese idea and recurs often in the classical literature; for example, in the ancient chronicles, the eighth-century
Nihonshoki
and
Kojiki
, and in the monumental eleventh-century novel
The Tale of Genji
. Mishima, however, gave a romantic twist to the classical tradition; he had as much in common with contemporary culture in the West—for example, the cult of violence in Western rock songs andin films—as with classical Japan. He was always, from an early age, accessible to Western ideas and to our childhood classics! One of the most striking features of his early life was the influence upon him of Western literature, from the fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen to the novels of Raymond Radiguet and the plays of Oscar Wilde. Mishima knew a great deal more about Western culture than his contemporaries in Japan; that is one reason he could make friends with foreigners so easily.
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    Birth
    Yukio Mishima was born Kimitaké Hiraoka on January 14, 1925, in the Tokyo home of his grandparents, Jōtarō and Natsuko Hiraoka, with whom his parents lived. The Hiraokas were an upper-middle-class family—Jōtarō had been a senior civil servant, and his only child, Azusa, Mishima’s father, was also a government official; and in Japan, which has a Confucian tradition, government service is considered the most honorable employment. The high social standing of the Hiraokas had been underwritten by Jōtarō’s marriage to Natsuko, who came from an old family; Kimitaké’s grandfather was the son of a farmer, but his humble origin had not counted against him in the late nineteenth century, when there had been great social mobility following the Meiji Restoration of 1868. The Meiji Restoration, in which Japan opened her doors to the West (as the cliché has it), had ushered in a period of social instability and great commercial and industrial progress. In this new era, men of ability had been promoted regardless of birth, and Jōtarō had attained a high rank, serving as a provincial governor in Japan and as the first civilian governor of Karafuto (Sakhalin), the island to the north of Japan which has since reverted to the Soviet Union.
    A week after the birth of Kimitaké, the first child of Azusa and Shizué Hiraoka—Mishima’s mother was the twenty-year-old daughter of a Tokyo school principal—the family held the traditional naming ceremony, the Oshichiya. “On the evening of the seventh day,” Mishima recorded in
Confessions of a Mask
, “the infant was clothed in undergarments of flannel and cream-colored silk and a kimono of silk crepe with a splashed pattern. In the presence of the assembled household my grandfather drew my name on a strip of ceremonial paper and placed it on an offertory stand