This web site is devoted to the life and writings of the twentieth century Japanese writer Yukio Mishima. November 25th 2023 will mark the 53rd anniversary of his death. During his life time, Mishima was an author, an essayist, a poet, a playwright, an actor, a model and a film director. He was an ardent nationalist and an imperialist, as well as being opposed to Japan's postwar democracy brought on by the peace treaty ending the Second World War. Mishima was also opposed to globalism, and communism, worrying that by embracing these ideas the Japanese people would lose their national and cultural identity.
Mishima was one of the most accomplished and celebrated writers to come out of post-war Japan. For many literary critics and scholars, he was considered the most accessible Japanese writer for a westren audience. Mishima has been compared to both Ernest Hemingway and Marcel Proust. Over the course of his career he wrote 40 novels, 50 plays, 25 books of short stories, at least 35 books of essays, one libretto, and one film. He also kept up a robust writing schedule creating articles for magazines and newspapers, both in Japan and throughout the world.
Starting in 1949 with the publication of his autobiographical novel "Confessions of a Mask", the subject matter of his books and the specifics of his life caused him to be the source of a great deal of controversy both in Japan and throughout the world. Mishima's writing career would span many of the events that would see Japan change from a defeated country at the end of the Second World War to its rise as a global power. Mishima's writings chronicles this history through the lives of his characters and the unique circumstances that they find themselves in throughout his stories.
Since his death in 1970, Mishima has been the subject of several works of literary criticism, at least two biographies, and his life was the subject of a film by the filmmaker Paul Schraeder entitled "Mishima:A Life in Four Chapters".
Mishima was the author of hundreds of plays,stories,essays and novels, but he was best known as the creator of the "Sea of Fertility Tetralogy", a four volume work that chronicled the history of Japan throughout the twentieth century. Although he was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for literature in 1968, the ideas behind both his writings and his life are greatly misunderstood in the west and continue to be a source of debate to this day both in Japan and throughout the world.