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Yukio Mishima
(January 14, 1925 - November 25, 1970) Japan

Yukio Mishima

Novelist

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Yukio MishimaBorn in Tokyo, his real name was Kimitake Hiraoka. Mishima was taken from his mother at two months of age to spend all his time with his grandmother, a woman disliking boys' behaviour, who brought up the boy in a feminizing way. This may have been the source of Mishia's misogyny. Until the age of thirty he was rather feminized and weak but he then embarked upon a quest of masulinizing himself.

In the 1950s he started weight-lifting, traditional martial arts, and wearing particularly male attire such as sport gears, uniforms, and leather. He also organized the "Shield Society", a private military group dedicated to traditional samurai ideals. He was a denizen of the Brunswick gay bar in the Ginza, where he met 17-year-old Akihiro Maruyama, who later became a famous actor/female impersonator.

Yukio MishimaHis work often deals with sexual desire and perversion, as in Confessions of a Mask (1949), and The Temple of the Golden Pavilion (1956).

His fine novel Forbidden Colours has an explicit homosexual theme ("colour" in Japanese has also the meaning of "sex", hence "Forbidden colours" is unterstood by Japanese as "Forbidden sexuality").Yukio Mishima

Mishima combined a mastery knowledge of Western culture, from ancient Greece to Freud and Havelock Ellis, combined with the Japanese tradition at his purest form.

He also combined a military strenght of a true samurai with a delicate, feminine sensitivity.

Yukio MishimaYukio Mishima
Yukio Mishima posing as a samurai wearing just a "fundoshi" for the cover of his book Sun and Steel

Yukio MishimaIn November 1970, together with four young men whom he had chosen for the purpose amongst his followers (amongst them his youthful disciple and probable lover Morita Masakatsu), he attempted a coup d'état at the Ichigawa, Tokyo, the headquarters of the Japanese Self-Defence Forces.

His attempt proved unsuccessful and Mishima committed seppuku (or "harakiri" = ritual suicide, performed cutting his own belly) as a demonstration against the corruption of the nation and the loss of the samurai warrior tradition, the coup de grâce being delivered by Morita.

Yukio Mishima
1966 - Yukio Mishima posing as Saint Sebastian for his friend the photogrpher Kishin Shinoyama

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