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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.