Persona: A Biography of Yukio Mishima

865 Pages·2012·3.18 MB·English

by  Naoki Inose

Persona
A Biography of Yukio Mishima

Persona
A Biography of Yukio Mishima
Naoki Inose
with Hiroaki Sato
Stone Bridge Press • Berkeley, California
Published by
Stone Bridge Press
P. O. Box , Berkeley, CA 
-- • [email protected] • www.stonebridge.com
Front jacket design by Noda Masaaki and Noda Emi.
Back jacket photograph © Museum of Modern Japanese Literature, Tokyo.
Used by permission.
Text ©  Naoki Inose and Hiroaki Sato.
This is an expanded adaptation in English of Persona: Mishima Yukio den,
published in  by Bungei Shunjū (Tokyo, Japan).
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission from
the publisher.
Printed in the United States of America.
              
   -- 
Inose, Naoki.
[Perusona. English]
Persona: a biography of Yukio Mishima / Naoki Inose; with Hiroaki Sato.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN ---- (cbk); ISBN ---- (ebk).
. Mishima, Yukio, –. . Authors, Japanese—th century—
Biography. I. Sato, Hiroaki, –. II. Title.
PL.IZ 
.'—dc
[B]

For Ron Bayes and Rand Castile
The range, variety, and publicness of the career sound
ominously familiar to me. . . .
I only regret we never met, for friends found him a
good companion, a fine drinking partner, and fun to cruise
with.
 
Mishima definitely lived. He was a true genius in
living.
 
Contents
Preface ix
Prologue 
  Peasant Ancestors and Grandfather 
  Samurai Ancestors and Grandmother 
  “The Boy Who Writes Poems” 
  Literary Correspondents 
  First Love 
  The War and Its Aftermath 
  To Be a Bureaucrat or a Writer 
  Confessions 
  Boyfriends, Girlfriends 
  Going Overseas 
  The Girlfriend 
  The Kinkakuji 
  Overseas Again 
  Marriage 
  Kyōko’s House 
  The . Incident, Yūkoku 
  Assassinations 
  Contretemps 
  The Nobel Prize 
  Shinpūren, Men of the Divine Wind 
 - “The Way of the Warrior is to die” 
 - Death in India 
 - The Anti–Vietnam War Movement 
 - Sun and Steel 
 - The Shield Society, Counterrevolution 
 - The Yakuza 
 - Wang Yangming: “To know is to act” 
 - The Constitution 
 - Hailstones, Ghouls, Golden Death 
  Toward Ichigaya 
 -: The Seppuku 
Epilogue 
Notes 
Bibliography 
Index 
Preface
This is an expanded adaptation in English of Inose Naoki’s biography
Persona: Mishima Yukio den (Bungei Shunjū, ). Inose’s Persona is a
unique depiction of the bureaucratic and political aspects of Japanese
history since the late nineteenth century as they relate to Mishima. This
English adaptation greatly augments Mishima’s literary, theatrical, and
ideological theories and activities, not to mention his pursuit of various
sports, to suggest how he brought them all together into one focus: death.
Since Inose wrote Persona, partly based on interviews conducted in
, a number of things have changed—notably, Japan’s bureaucratic
structures and positions in consequence of administrative reforms in the
past dozen years. But such things are left as they were up to the mid-
s so far as they do not affect this account of Mishima’s life.
In this book, all Japanese names are given the Japanese way, family
name first (except on the cover). Following Japanese custom, Japanese
people are sometimes referred to by their personal name, rather than
by their surname. Among the prominent writers since the late nine-
teenth century this occurs most notably with Natsume Sōseki, who is
usually called Sōseki, and Mori Ōgai, Ōgai. Mishima Yukio was the
penname of Hiraoka Kimitake. His teachers and school friends most
often addressed him by his surname with or without a post-nominal
compellation: -sama, -san, -kun. His family members or close friends
usually called him by his personal name, often by his pet name, Kimi-
chan or Kō-chan, the second one because the sinified pronunciation of
Kimitake is Kōi.
/ ix