How Yukio Mishima led me to Christianity

Fifty-three years ago, Japan’s most famous writer took a short sword and sliced open his abdomen, disemboweling himself. As prescribed by the ancient ritual of seppuku, his second was standing by to slice off his head at the same time; it ultimately took three strokes of the blade. Yukio Mishima, novelist, playwright, poet, screenwriter, and actor, was 45 years old. He and a few members of his right-wing paramilitary group, the Shield Society, had commandeered a military base outside Tokyo. After appearing on a balcony and exhorting the assembled soldiers to overthrow the government and reinstall the emperor, Mishima retreated inside and ended his life.

It is hard to overstate how shocking Mishima’s suicide was. It was if Seamus Heaney were to blow his brains out on the steps of the McKee Barracks in Dublin at the height of his popularity. Mishima was also famous abroad: Just three months earlier, a cover story in the the New York Times magazine had dubbed him “Japan’s Renaissance Man.” Well over 10,000 people, including fellow novelist Yasunari Kawabata, attended his public memorial service.

Yukio Mishima was born Kimitake Hiraoka to a samurai-descended Tokyo family in 1925. His childhood years instilled in him the sense that he was unworthy of this pedigree. Mishima was raised by his cruel, neurotic, death-haunted grandmother, who forbade him to play outside with other boys and confined him indoors with his female cousins. When he went to live with his parents at age 12, he fared no better. His father was harsh disciplinarian who despised Mishima's pursuit of writing as effeminate. When Japan entered the Second World War in 1941, Mishima was called up for military service and subsequently deemed unfit, being so weak and sickly that he was misdiagnosed with tuberculosis. With Japan’s humiliating surrender in 1945, Mishima’s homeland seemed to embody the weakness he loathed in himself. Less than two months later, Mishima’s beloved sister Mitsuko died of typhus.

These formative experiences led Mishima to return again and again to the same themes in his work: death, sexuality, youth, and idealism. From “The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea,” which centers around a gang of schoolboys who reject the morality of the adult world, to “Runaway Horses,” which follows a group of young radical nationalists during Japan's turbulent 1930's — both of which culminate in gruesome endings — Mishima's work is, to paraphrase his own words, a line of poetry written with a splash of blood. Few of his works have happy endings. Mishima frequently called attention to the link between his life and his work by giving characters personalities and upbringings strikingly similar to his own.

Today, of course, Mishima’s suicide — along with his nationalist politics, ambiguous sexuality, obsessive bodybuilding, and fascination with violence and death — are part of his legend. Such a figure may seem an unlikely conduit to Christianity, and yet that is exactly where reading Mishima led me.

It begins to make sense, however, when you consider the spiritual hunger at the heart of Mishima’s restless artistic ambition. The emperor was believed to be a descendant of the sun goddess Amaterasu; his surrender required both political and spiritual abdication. Forced to renounce his divinity, the emperor could no longer serve as the force holding together Japanese identity, leaving a void that liberal democracy rushed to fill. Mishima could only understand this as a degradation. Losing its divine emperor turned Japan into “an impersonal, empty, neutral, intermediate, opulent, shrewd, economic giant” that faced the same communist and anarchist youth movements that were roiling Western societies. It was to combat this malaise that Mishima formed the Shield Society in 1968, recruiting Japanese students who shared his disillusionment with postwar Japan.

For Mishima, this disillusionment went beyond the political. In a 1966 interview with the magazine Sunday Mainichi, Mishima claimed that the “modernization” of Japan left individuals isolated and unable to connect: “For people who live in such a modern society love is impossible. For example, if A believes that he loves B, there is no means for him to be sure of it, and vice versa. Therefore, love cannot exist in a modern society — if it is merely a mutual relationship. If there is no image of a third man whom the two lovers have in common — the apex of the triangle — love ends with eternal scepticism. ... From ancient times the Japanese have had an image of the apex of the triangle (God), which was a God in a physiocratic system; and everyone had a theory of love, so that he should not be isolated.”

When I first read Mishima as a lonely 16-year-old, I recognized his profound yearning to live for something larger than oneself. This yearning consumed me, as well, and my readings in philosophy and political theory had failed to offer any relief. The fundamental dilemma, as Mishima pointed out in a 1966 interview with the Japanese news service NHK, was that “human beings aren’t strong enough to live and die only for themselves. That’s because we have ideals. We can only act for the sake of something. We soon tire of living only for ourselves. It necessarily follows that we also need to die for something. That something used to be called a 'noble cause.’ To die for a noble cause was thought the most glorious, heroic, or honourable way to die. But there are no noble causes today. Democratic governments obviously have no need for noble causes. Yet if one cannot find a value that transcends oneself, life itself, in a spiritual sense, is rendered meaningless.”

“Human life is limited but I would like to live forever,” wrote Mishima. He was not a Christian, but it was through him that I eventually found my “noble cause”: to die to myself and follow the One who died for me. Coming to Christ was the natural conclusion of my counterculture teenage angst. My dabbling in radical politics and strange and esoteric religions yielded intimations of the ultimate reality, but it was only in Christ’s mercy that I found the fullness of the truth. I often ponder why Mishima, so wise in so many ways, so principled and steadfast in his pursuit of the truth, could never accept that mercy for himself.