Yukio Mishima: From Sheltered Boy to Failed Coup and Seppuku

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

I want you to picture something for a second. Try to imagine a guy who has been nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature five times.

SPEAKER_2 (0:09)

Right, so you're thinking of a very serious, very distinguished intellectual.

SPEAKER_1 (0:12)

Exactly, but now picture that exact same guy stepping out onto a balcony at a military headquarters right in the middle of Tokyo, and he's wearing this perfectly tailored military uniform that he actually designed himself.

SPEAKER_2 (0:27)

Yeah, it is quite the visual.

SPEAKER_1 (0:29)

It's wild, because he has literally just taken a commanding officer hostage, he barricaded the doors, and now he is standing there trying to convince an entire garrison of soldiers to violently overthrow the government.

SPEAKER_2 (0:42)

Which is just, I mean, it completely shatters every expectation we have of what a celebrated author is supposed to be. We usually think of writers of that level as quiet observers. They sit at desks far away from actual physical combat or political violence.

But here is one of the greatest literary giants of his era, attempting a literal actual coup d'etat.

SPEAKER_1 (1:02)

And that incredibly jarring historical moment is exactly what we are getting into on today's Deep Dive.

We are looking at the life of Yukio Mishima. He was one of Japan's most famous, most prolific, and undeniably most controversial writers of the 20th century.

SPEAKER_2 (1:18)

Truly a fascinating figure.

SPEAKER_1 (1:20)

Right. And our mission for this Deep Dive is sort of, well, pull apart the layers of his life. I want to understand this massive transformation. Like, how does a kid who was incredibly frail and hyper sheltered grow up to be this martial arts obsessed radical who actually believed he could change the fate of an entire nation just through sheer willpower and frankly, theatrics? Yeah.

SPEAKER_2 (1:41)

And his personal evolution is, it's actually this perfect lens for looking at Japan's own identity crisis during that century. Yeah. I mean, Mishima lived through a period of just extreme volatility. He was essentially a man trapped in this violent friction between ancient aristocratic Japanese traditions on one side and this incredibly rapid, almost disorienting wave of post-war westernization on the other.

SPEAKER_1 (2:02)

It really is like a Greek tragedy where the main character is just determined to write his own fatal ending right from the very first act. The line between his art and his real life gets completely erased.

But to understand the militaristic radical he became at the end of his life in 1970, we really need to rewind. We have to look at the incredibly fragile boy he was at the very beginning.

SPEAKER_2 (2:24)

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_1 (2:25)

Because he was born in Tokyo in 1925, but not as Yukio Mishima. His birth name was Kimitake Hiraoka.

And right from the start, his childhood was intensely claustrophobic.

SPEAKER_2 (2:36)

Yeah, claustrophobic is almost putting it mildly. To really understand his psychology, you have to look at his paternal grandmother, Natsuko.

She was the defining figure of his early years. And Natsuko carried this absolutely massive burden of status anxiety.

SPEAKER_1 (2:51)

Status anxiety.

SPEAKER_2 (2:52)

Right, because she could trace her lineage all the way back to samurai lords. She was actually a descendant of the founder of the Tokugawa Shogunate, the military dictatorship that ruled Japan for centuries. But she had married into a family of commoners, just regular bureaucrats and farmers.

SPEAKER_1 (3:06)

Oh, wow. So she felt like she had married down.

SPEAKER_2 (3:08)

Exactly. She viewed it as this severe downgrade in her social standing. So to compensate, she maintained this incredibly haughty aristocratic attitude.

SPEAKER_1 (3:18)

And she didn't just tell young Kimitake stories about the good old days, right? She actually took over his life.

SPEAKER_2 (3:23)

She did. She completely seized control. She physically separated him from his own parents and moved him into her darkened sick room.

SPEAKER_1 (3:30)

Which is just terrifying for a kid.

SPEAKER_2 (3:32)

Oh, it's incredibly traumatic. She wouldn't let him go outside into the sunlight. He wasn't allowed to play sports or even run around with other boys. He was totally isolated. He was only allowed to play quietly indoors, mostly with his female cousins and their dolls.

SPEAKER_1 (3:45)

Didn't she also have some pretty severe health issues?

SPEAKER_2 (3:47)

Yeah. She suffered from chronic illness, which meant she was prone to these very volatile, violent emotional outbursts. You think about the sensory reality for this toddler. His entire world is this dark, quiet room, totally dominated by an unpredictable sick woman who is just obsessed with a glorious aristocratic past that doesn't even exist anymore.

SPEAKER_1 (4:11)

Right. It's just this morbid, death-haunted environment. You can see how that would permanently rewire a kid's brain when it comes to aesthetics and control. But then when he turns 12, everything flips, right?