The views on the meaning of Mishima's death explains the views on Yukio Mishima's suicide in the Mishima Incident that various persons have considered from various angles.
There are many different views about Mishima's death, including that it was an aesthetic suicide for the artist's sake, or that he was politically serious, and while many knowledgeable persons are eager to share their opinions about the mystery of his death, some of his fellow literary figures and left-wing intellectuals at the time remained silent and said nothing, or even chose to ignore the incident, feeling guilty for not taking any action themselves.
After the end of the Shōwa era, following the collapse of the Cold War and the bursting of the asset price bubble in the early 1990s, Mishima's prophetic words, which seemed to anticipate a period of emptiness in Japan, had ironically begun to be felt as reality in Japanese society, where it had become difficult to base one's identity on the economy anymore. Furthermore, Mishima's feelings toward Emperor Shōwa, which initially received little in-depth consideration, had also begun to be discussed, and detailed interpretations of his work "Voices of the Fallen Heroes" and its connection to the February 26 Incident have emerged. There had also been a growing trend to examine the relationship between Mishima's works and his actions in terms of his upbringing and the trauma of not being able to die during the war.
More than 40 years have passed since the incident, and the initial reactions of dismissing it as an "act of madness" have largely disappeared. Instead, views that seek to understand Mishima's resentment toward the era and society that drove him to his actions, and the political message he left behind, had become mainstream. Furthermore, more than 50 years later, a wide variety of research into Mishima continues, including new views that see his actions as his "ultimate literary work" making an attempt to create a new myth, based on the connection to the Japanese mythology and the long history, as seen in the Kojiki and other myths, from the episode that Mishima said, "Japan must revive the new Tenson kōrin."
Views on factors that led to his suicide Criticism of the postwar system / Death by remonstrance Mishima left behind many criticisms and lectures criticizing the Constitution created by GHQ after the war, and the , which had led to the decline Japanese spirit, as well as and warnings about the ambiguity of the JSDF' mission under the Japan-US Security Treaty system. For this reason, many his friends, writers and researchers have interpreted the meaning of Mishima's death, as a committing ,Dialogue between Taijun Takeda and Takeshi Muramatsu Suicide of Yukio Mishima. or as a that expressed disappointment, anger, despair and criticism toward the politicians who disregard the national polity and are preoccupied with party interests and self-preservation, and the postwar intellectuals who belittled traditional Japanese culture.
, a non-fiction writer, referring to Mishima's comment in an essay he contributed to "Takigahara", the organizational newspaper of the JGSDF Camp Takigahara, that "having become a man who 'knows too much' about the JSDF", and Sugiyama has taken notice, "Indeed, Mishima had become a man who 'knew too much', and as he wrote in his Geki, he was able to foresee the true nature of the JSDF, 'It is patently obvious that the U.S. would not be glad to see a truly independent Japanese military defending Japanese land.'," and he has mentioned about Mishima's despair, combining it to Sugiyama own view of the JSDF that he experienced as follows:
, a literary critic and Mishima researcher has argued that Mishima's death cannot be limited to a death for the sake of literature, but was also a death of criticism, namely, "death of remonstration" against the hollowing out of the cultural identity of the Japanese, which had reached a point of no return. Inoue has mentioned that Mishima thought that the last year in which his act of death could have meaning in the history of the community in Japan was 1970, the year the Security Treaty (Anpo) was automatically extended, and Japan's spiritual hollowing out would become truly irreversible after this year.However, he has interpreted that, at the time of November 1970, the Japanese may have already lost the of ability to understand the spiritual meaning of his death, which may have been a miscalculation of Mishima, who believed there was still time for the Japanese make a recovery.
It can be seen from Mishima's works and essays that his criticism of the postwar system also included resentment toward Emperor Shōwa Hirohito, who had made the Humanity Declaration. And it is said that Mishima's final cry of was a cheer for the "Emperor of " that was his ideal, and some researchers has interpreted it as representing the final voices of soldiers on the battlefield, spoken for them who died for the Emperor.
Regarding Mishima's view of the Emperor, Fusao Hayashi has interpreted that Mishima's aspiration was not to revive the Emperor as a political concept, or in other words, to restore the Meiji Constitution, but to revive and establish the Emperor as the unifier of Japanese culture as the only philosophy that could oppose totalitarianism of both the left and right, that communism and fascism. Donald Keene has interpreted that Mishima's Emperor worship was not simple fanaticism, but an expression of faith in an ideal that transcends reality. And he has explained that Mishima preached the infallibility of the Emperor, but that does not mean the Emperor's personal human abilities were flawless, that what the Emperor Mishima called was the embodiment of Japanese tradition in human form with divine status and the one and only treasure trove, in which the experiences of the Japanese ethnicity have been stored, and that for Mishima, protecting the Emperor was the same as protecting Japan itself. Also Keene has mentioned that Mishima's love for Japanese traditions developed into the unchanging element in his aesthetics.
Dislike of ugly old age And, there have been many studies into Mishima's suicide from the perspective of his aesthetic sense, and as he himself wrote in his essays, during his adolescence, he admired the premature mortality of Raymond Radiguet, and some have speculated that he was avoiding old age, given that he depicted ugly old characters in his works, for example , the secondary protagonist of The Sea of Fertility tetralogy, in which particular depicted in The Temple of Dawn, the third novel and The Decay of the Angel, the fourth novel.Tatsuhiko Shibusawa To try to catch a glimpse of the Absolute.... , collected in , , ,
According to who was Mishima's editor at Shinchosha, while writing The Sea of Fertility tetralogy, Mishima once said, "Growing old is ridiculous; I can't forgive it," and "I can never forgive myself for getting old." However, Mishima's thoughts on aging were not always one-sided, also he once told Kojima that "Yasunari Kawabata and Sato Haruo are good examples of people whose spiritual beauty begins to emerge as they age." Mishima also said on the a radio program that in his old age he wanted to write pure mystery and that he wanted to die on tatami mats.
According to , a 3rd generation member of the Tatenokai who joined in March 1969, during a casual conversation with him who a new student member, Mishima said that the name in kanji was too young for a pen name, and that when he grew old, he planned to change it to ( means old man) inspired by that is kanji reading 's honorific. When the Murakami asked in surprise, "What, aren't you going to die young, Sensei?" Mishima's expression turned into sour as if he had bitten something bitter and he turned away. From this, Murakami has considered that Mishima had intended to live a long life in real outside of his novels at around March 1969.
On the other hand, according to , Mishima's girlfriend when he was in his 30s, he told her, "I feel like when I get old, I'll become a cranky, lonely old man like Kafū Nagai, and I absolutely hate that. That's why I don't want to live past 50," and "Honey, you are 10 years younger than me, so when I die, I want you to lay my favorite yellow roses." According to , who was the editor-in-chief of the monthly magazine Chūō Kōron, Mishima said to him, "Can you imagine me becoming an old man like Kafū Nagai?", and he also said, "No matter how much self-sacrifice a writer makes, people around the world will still see it as self-expression."
Longing for heroic martyrdom It is easy to see from many of his essays and works that "dying beautifully" was Mishima's ideal, and he also mentioned that in an essay after he enlisted in the JSDF for the first time on his solo trial period.
Furthermore, at the beginning of 1967, just before turning 42, Mishima wrote an essay saying, "Saigō Takamori died a hero at the age of 50, and when I went to Kumamoto recently to research the Shinpūren rebellion, I was moved to discover that Kaya Harukata, one of the leaders of that rebellion which at first glance is often seen as the violent act of a young man and who met a heroic end, died the same age as me now. If I do it now, I will be in time to reach the final age at which worthy as a hero." collected in It is considered essential for Mishima, heroes were the object whose existence was impossible in the modern postwar era in which he lived, and at the same time, they were the object whose reinstatement he himself should attempt.
Ivan Morris has looked that the people in Japanese history that Mishima most admired were "Tragic heroes" such as Kusunoki Masashige, Ōshio Heihachirō, and the Samurais of the Shinpūren rebellion, who dared to fight in battles they could not win and who, despite their courage and determination, were ultimately defeated, and he has interpreted that Mishima considered himself to belong to the old Japanese tradition of the "Tragic hero," and hoped to become one as well.
In his Confessions of a Mask, Mishima self-analyzes and confesses that from an early age he was attracted to beautiful and strong young men who was "risking their lives" at hard labor, picture books about murdered princes, and tragic soldiers, and that he had a strong desire to become one of those people. In the essay Sun and Steel, written around the time when Mishima had gained physical confidence and was undergoing rigorous training as part of a group during his trial enlistment in the JSDF, he also wrote about his sense of "risking my life" for "something tragic" and he wrote that what he missed out as a young man during the war, lacking physical ability, was the "tragedy of collective.", From this perspective, quite a few researchers have seen Mishima's suicide, which actually resulted in his tragic death after "risking his life" for a just cause, as being connected to and a recursion of a fatalistic desire from his childhood.
Desire to commit seppuku Just as Mishima wrote in Confessions of a Mask that he was deeply attracted to the masochistic martyr's death in Guido Reni's painting Saint Sebastian, which he first saw at the age of 13,, , his tendency to find beauty in a spectacular and horrific way to die can also be seen from his fondness for Hiroshi Hirata's historical gekiga, and it has often mentioned that his sensual taste for and obsession with seppuku can be seen in his work Patriotism, a film Patriotism he starred in, and his homosexual-themed short story .Mutsuo Takahashi Aspiration to gain presence. (of that in pp.171–178)