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.