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Biography of Yukio Mishima
Name: Yukio Mishima
Birth Date: January 14, 1925
Death Date: November 25, 1970
Place of Birth: Tokyo, Japan
Nationality: Japanese
Gender: Male
Occupations: novelist
Yukio Mishima
Yukio Mishima (1925-1970) was a Japanese novelist and playwright. He wrote in a multitude of styles, from ornate to plain, and dealt with a variety of subjects drawn from both literary sources and contemporary life.Born and raised in Tokyo, Yukio Mishima attended the Peers School before enrolling in the Law Department of Tokyo University. Upon his graduation in 1947 he worked as an official in the government's Finance Ministry. He resigned his position within a year in order to devote his energies totally to writing. After a highly successful yet controversial career he committed suicide in 1970.Exceedingly well read in both classical Japanese and Western literature, Mishima produced works of intellectual brilliance and stylistic diversity. Certain of his novels and stories directly portray contemporary life; other works--his modern N plays, for example--draw on various literary and philosophical writings for context. Some critics single out certain works by Mishima as …showed first 150 words…
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…showed last 150 words…especially in the notorious short story "Yukoku" ("Patriotism," 1960), this depiction of ritualistic suicide came to appear to be a harbinger of the author's own death. On November 25, 1970, after haranguing an assembly of self-defense personnel on imperial loyalty and military discipline, Mishima disemboweled himself with a sword, exactly as a samurai warrior in medieval Japan might have done.Yukio Mishima was the first Japanese writer of the postwar generation to attain international fame. Before his sensational death he was generally considered the most likely Japanese writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. Further Reading Three biographies of Mishima in English are: John Nathan, Mishima (1974); Henry Scott-Stokes, The Life and Death of Yukio Mishima (1974); and Marguerite Yourcenar (translated from the French by Alberto Manguel), Mishima (1986). Criticism is available in a number of sources, such as Makoto Ueda, Modern Japanese Writers (1976); Masao Miyoshi, Accomplices of Silence (1974); and Donald Keene, Landscapes and Portraits (1971).
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