Views on the meaning of Mishima's death

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. This article also explains a dialogue tape discovered in 2013, in which Mishima spoke to John Bester about his view of life and death, literature, and the constitution of Japan, nine months before his death.

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.^[1]

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.^[2][3] 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.^[4] 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.^[5]

More than 40 years have passed since the incident, and the initial reactions of dismissing it as an "act of madness" have largely disappeared.^[6] 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.^[6] 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."^[7]

Mishima left behind many criticisms and lectures criticizing the Constitution created by GHQ after the war, and the postwar democracy (戦後民主主義, Sengo minshu-shugi), 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.^[8][9][10] For this reason, many his friends, writers and researchers have interpreted the meaning of Mishima's death, as a "committing suicide to remonstrate (諌死, Kanshi)",^[11][12][13] or as a "Death of Indignation" (憤死, Funshi) 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.^[11][14][10]

Takao Sugiyama (杉山隆男), 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:^[15]

No matter how hard, steady and single-minded, like stacking pebbles up, each and every JSDF personnel works on the front lines of training and missions, the nature and limitations of the JSDF that created by the U.S. and still has the U.S. as its guardian and is obliged to listen to its will, as a political tool, which was not change even as the twenty years since the end of the war, have turned into sixty years and a new century has begun. (Omitted) What I had to realize for fifteen years and was forced to convince myself that it was true after all, Mishima saw with his sharp and penetrating gaze during his less than four years of experience in the JSDF. The things that must be the most Japanese are, at their core, impossible to become Japanese, due to the distortions of post-war Japan. Wasn't Mishima's despair emanating from that?

Takashi Inoue (井上隆史), 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.^[12] 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.^[12] And he has interpreted that however, at the time of November 1970, Japanese already may have lost the culture of ability to understand the spiritual meaning of his death, and this was may be a miscalculation of Mishima who was believing in there was still time to Japanese make a recovery.^[12]

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.^[4][16] And it is said that Mishima's final cry of "Long live the Emperor!" (天皇陛下万歳, Tennō heika banzai) was a cheer for the "Emperor of Sollen (ゾルレン(当為), Zoruren)" that was his ideal,^[17][18] and some researchers has interpreted it as representing the final voices of soldiers on the battlefield, spoken for them who died for the Emperor.^[4]

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.^[19][20] Donald Keene has interpreted that Mishima's Emperor worship was not simple fanaticism, but an expression of faith in an ideal that transcends reality.^[20] 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.^[21][20] Also Keene has mentioned that Mishima's love for Japanese traditions developed into the unchanging element in his aesthetics.^[21]

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,^[22][23] and some have speculated that he was avoiding old age, given that he depicted ugly old characters in his works, for example Shigekuni Honda (本多繁邦), 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.^[24][25][26]

According to Kikue Kojima (小島喜久江)^[a] 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."^[26] 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."^[27] 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.^[28]

According to Takeo Murakami (村上建夫), 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 "Yukio" (由紀夫) in kanji was too young for a pen name, and that when he grew old, he planned to change it to "Yukio" (雪翁) (okina (翁) means old man) inspired by "Saō" (沙翁) that is kanji reading Shakespeare (沙吉比亜)'s honorific.^[29] 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.^[29]

On the other hand, according to Sadako Toyoda (豊田貞子), 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."^[30][b][c] According to Kazuki Kasuya (粕谷一希), 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?",^[34] and he also said, "No matter how much self-sacrifice a writer makes, people around the world will still see it as self-expression."^[34]

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 Beautiful Death (美しい死, Utsukushii Shi) after he enlisted in the JSDF for the first time on his solo trial period.^[35][36][37]

The ideal of the ancient Greeks was to live and die beautifully, and the ideal of our Bushidō must have been found there as well. (Omitted)
Without the "Martial (武, Bu)" mindset, a person can consider himself weak as much as he likes, can self-vindication any cowardly or ungraceful behavior, and can give in to any demand. In exchange, his personal safety would be guaranteed in the end. But once one has resolved to become a martial artist, his personal safety is no longer guaranteed. Because cowardly or ungraceful behavior is no longer tolerated, even towards oneself, and when the stakes are high, the only options are to fight to the death or commit suicide. However, it is only then that a person can die beautifully and complete their life, which shows that human beings are truly made of irony.

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."^[39][40][37] 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.^[41]

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.^[42]

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.^[43][44][45] 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."^[46][47][43] 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.^[48][44]

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,^[49][24][50] 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,^[51] 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 Love's Penance (愛の処刑, Ai no shokei).^[52][53]

According to Hiromichi Nakayasu (中康弘通), a seppuku researcher who had spoken about seppuku with Mishima before he wrote Patriotism, has explained that the desire to commit seppuku is unique to the Japanese, and that it stems much more from narcissism than from masochism, and that people who are interested in seppuku, regardless of gender, "have their spiritual tradition of seppuku, that is, the ritual solemnity and the tragic beauty of sublime self-sacrifice, imprinted on their adolescent minds, and have grasped the significance of seppuku as a medium that connects the two poles of love and death, like a conditioned reflex."^[54] He also has explained "although, even among such people, while some choose seppuku as a way to commit suicide, no one commits suicide because they want to commit seppuku".^[54]

Incidentally, at one time, there were speculations and rumors that it was a "homosexual double suicide" (lovers suicide) between Mishima and Morita, regarding those speculations, John Nathan has interpreted that while Mishima must have felt sexually attraction to Morita, but Morita did not have any such complicated feelings and was simply thinking about dying as a patriotic soldier.^[55][d] Kunio Suzuki (鈴木邦男) of Issuikai, who was on friendly terms with Morita and other Tatenokai members and knew Morita's character well, also has said that if Mishima had forced a homosexual relationship on Morita or any of his fellow members, the Tatenokai would have fallen apart.^[60]

Additionally, many researchers have mentioned that one of the factors that led to Mishima's suicide was the influence of Zenmei Hasuda, Mishima's literary mentor from his boyhood and one of his spiritual pillars, who committed suicide with a pistol after Japan's defeat in the war, wishing to preserve the national polity.^[61][62][63] Hasuda was so enraged that his superior, a colonel, at a ceremony to farewell the military flag, blamed the Emperor for the defeat, slandered the future of the Imperial Army, and spoke of the destruction of the Japanese spirit that he shot the colonel to death and then committed suicide himself.^[64][65] Upon learning of Hasuda's tragic death following year, Mishima composed a poem of condolence for him as follows:^[64][65][62]

古代の雲を愛でし　君はその身に古代を現じて雲隠れ玉ひしに　われ近代に遺されて空しく　靉靆の雲を慕ひ　その身は漠々たる　塵土に埋れんとす

(Kodai no kumo wo medeshi　Kimi wa sono mini kodai wo genjite kumogakure tamaishini　Ware kindai ni nokosarete munashiku　Aitai no kumo wo shitai　Sono mi wa bakubaku taru　Jindo ni umorentosu)

You, who loved the clouds of ancient times, / have revealed that ancient time to yourself, and passed away yourself in the clouds like a jewel, / while I, left behind in modern times, / yearn in vain for the gloomy clouds / and my body is about to be buried in the vast dusty earth of temporal world.
— Yukio Mishima, Untitled (A poem dedicated to the late Zenmei Hasuda)^[66][64][62]

Yukito Yamauchi (山内由紀人), a Mishima researcher, has mentioned that the latter half of the poem shows Mishima's feelings of spineless for himself at having accepted the military doctor's misdiagnosis and not being able to following on from Hasuda gone to the front line, and his feelings of guilt at having betrayed his mentor Zenmei Hasuda's expectations of him.^[67] Yamauchi has considered that Mishima's feelings of guilt developed into an issue of sincerity in living life, and that his anguish at having survived after the war and his guilt at having betrayed Hasuda's expectations eventually became remorse, proceeding into "nostalgia"^[68] for his teenage years and a "heimkehr"^[69] (return home) for romanticism, and he has interpreted that the meaning of "Promise" in Mishima's essay Promise that I haven't been Fulfilled: 25 years in me (果たし得てゐない約束―私の中の二十五年, Hatashi ete inai Yakusoku: Watashi no naka no 25 nen), written four months before his suicide, refers to an "implicit agreement" with Hasuda, who was saying, "I think one should die young in this age... And, I know that to die is today's culture of mine." in his essay Poetry of Youth: A Study of Prince Ōtsu.^[67]

Yamauchi also has mentioned that in Dialogue: Theory about the Japanese (a dialogue with Fusao Hayashi), Mishima saying, "The only formality of criticism to the highest authority in the Japanese is death,"^[70] and "there is only death as a formality of criticism" for "criticize the absolute,"^[70] and has looked at that Mishima's death was a "romantic return at the risk of his life," considering that the death of Hasuda, whom Mishima respected, was also a form of criticism.^[67]

"I wonder what day and what era I was born for.... In my heart, I sometimes feel a still unhealed wandering soul, fluttering white wings. At the same time, a bitter irony bites at my heart." (Yukio Mishima Escape from "Us"^[68]). Mishima was in a lonely "nostalgia". He also knew that the place where he would go "heimkehr" could only be return to by his death. And this was already prophetically spoken in his debut work The Forest in Full Bloom (花ざかりの森, Hanazakari no Mori).

That room was once his "place". He left there and gradually decayed. He must return there. But he cannot return there.

Still and all, Mishima had to return. For the sake of his 45 years of "proof of existence". If he could return to the home of his romantic soul through death, his thoughts sould be embodied. This was able to be the final, and only, criticism to the absolute, for Mishima. And, the death as a criticism became the death as a culture at the same time.

Chiseko Tanaka (田中千世子), a film director, has speculated that Mishima at the end of his life, may have been trying to return to the person he was in his 20s, in which he called out to the spirit of the late Zenmei Hasuda, saying, "You, who loved the clouds of ancient times," and lamented, "and my body is about to be buried in the vast dusty earth of temporal world."^[71] Keiji Shimauchi (島内景二), a doctor of classical literature, has analyzed that the origins of Mishima's literature has being in the spiritual world of Japan Romantic School (日本浪曼派, Nihon Rōman-ha), which was believed in by Zenmei Hasuda, who embodied the ancient spirit, and that Mishima's ardent wish was to revive that ancient spirit in the modern era, which Mishima believed would lead to a renaissance of Japanese culture into contemporary Japan.^[72]

Also, during the Pacific War, Mishima barely passed the conscription examination, but on the day of his enlistment, he was misdiagnosed with tuberculosis during a physical examination due to a high fever caused by bronchitis, and was sent home the same day.^[73][74][e] In Confessions of a Mask, Mishima confessed his ambivalent feelings about that time, as he prepared himself to die in the war, but went along with the doctor's questions and gave an exaggerated report of his condition, and asking himself questions over and over again about on the attitude of passivity due to his physical frailty.^[76][74][77] Many researchers have interpreted that the sense of guilt and complex he felt at that time lingered after the war, were an indirect cause of his behavior in his later years.^[78][79][80] According to Katsuo Kikuchi, a JSDF officer who became close friends with Mishima, when the topic turned to wartime, Mishima told him, "I was weak both physically and mentally," and confessed that "I felt inferiority complex" about had not being able to have the courage to volunteer for the battlefield.^[79][80]

Although Mishima admired the Kamikaze,^[81][82] his timidity, brought on by his physical frailty, run counter to his sense of longing, and it has seen as the feeling that he was being "rejected" from the "actions" became a lifelong theme for him.^[45] This can be seen in his own essays and works, and many researchers have mentioned that the post-war period marked a turning point for Mishima, when he came to feel that this was his survivor's guilt.^{[83][79][84][f]} Also, it has pointed out that Mishima was never able to escape the complex and feeling of alienation about not becoming a soldier during the war, in his lifetime.^[83][79][84]

Mitsuru Yoshida, a writer who was of the same wartime generation as Mishima and was a friend of him, has stated that the basics of the issues that Mishima attempted to tackle throughout his life was germinated from the fact that "he had be late for death at the war," and has expressed the view that "by choosing death, Mishima hoped to be given the same place as his comrades who died in the war."^[88][89] Then after mentioned about the spirituality and calmness of introspection shared by Mishima, who was 20 years old at the end of the war, and Iwao Usubuchi (臼淵磐), who was killed at the age of 21 while participating in a Special Attack Units on the battleship Yamato, and Tadao Hayashi (林尹夫), who died in combat with a US naval aircraft in the skies off the coast of Shikoku, Yoshida has mentioned:^[88][89]

Some of his predecessors and comrades in the Japan Romantic School (日本浪曼派, Nihon Rōman-ha) must have left Mishima with words of entrusting national future to him. For a young man in the midst of war, being entrusted with national future did not mean something as leisurely as post-war reconstruction, but purely meant that he too would fulfill his duty and sacrifice himself for his country. (Omitted)
We, the wartime generation, are a generation that, at the peak of our youth, were only allowed to pursue the challenge of "how to live" by confronting the difficult question of "how to die." And we are a generation that took on this tribulation with foolish honesty. In Tadao Hayashi's words, "Even if I get beaten and kicked, I will not let go of the kingdom of the spirit. That is the only discipling I have now, and, in there existents what will teach me to way of live a life that can be consistent the past and the future," saying so, we are the generation of foolish honesty who try to whip ourselves. We are the generation that has no knowledge of how to protect ourselves, like the persons simply portrayed themselves as one-sided victims of the war, severing ties with it, and hastily returning to where one belongs, when the war ended. Mishima himself was a man of integrity and seriousness, who could not tolerate compromise.

Hiromichi Nakayasu, a seppuku researcher who was born in the same year as Mishima in 1925, has touched that the Manchurian Incident began the year he started elementary school, and that for a generation that grew up in an era when war was commonplace, death was inevitable and the question of "how I should die" was the main issue.^[83] He himself felt that after the war, he survived and felt guilty for being late in dying, and this feeling deepened with each news of the deaths of his friends in battle, they seeming like immortal elites in his mind, and that from that experience, he inferred also carried the scars of Mishima's youth in his heart for a long time.^[83] And Nakayasu has considered that just like himself sought aesthetics in the classics and the reverence for the Emperor of times of turmoil medieval era, and devoted himself to the study of seppuku, Mishima, while expanding Japan's presence in the world and devoting himself to Japanese literature, also sought Japan within himself, the way of dying as a Japanese, became a theme of his way of life.^[83] And he has explained that seppuku is – "a ceremony when Japanese people risk their lives to do something," and "the ultimate ceremony for the defeated to compensate for humiliation before they die," – and he also has interpreted that Mishima's seppuku was also an expression of loyalty to the ideal Emperor as Mishima held in his heart, and cleansing of the his sins that would continue to live on in the post-war world where sanctity was not seen longer.^[83]

Miyoji Ueda (上田三四二) a poet and doctor, has stated that when he saw a newspaper photograph of Mishima's head and Masakatsu Morita's head placed next to each other, his impression was that "I think Mr. Mishima Yukio died like Narcissus," and that Mishima, who had longed for an early death but was unable to die at the age of 20, because of his unsuitable body fit to die, found himself identifying with "that young companion," and that he had the impression that "Mr. was rewinding the time that he had lived and entrusting the completion of his own early death to the young man beside him."^[90][91]

The uniform erases individuality and makes me and you, me and all of you the same. What Mishima dreamed of on the line of silent bodies, unlike the mind, was a line of mirrors, identical to himself, and the uniform, especially the warrior's uniform, made this wish possible. A warrior is one who has swallowed death in his stomach, and the uniform is the purifying garment of death, so the line of bodies becomes the alter-ego of Mishima who yearns for tragic destruction, and they share their sufferings. The young warriors are the illusions and mirrors of Mishima, who leads the unit, his own shadow reflected in the "rejuvenating water" (変若水, ochimizu), and clones created like a mold from the same somatic cells. The young man with the boyish face who shared his fate was placed next to him, and was the most beautiful and polished mirror.

Regarding the date of November 25, some researchers have speculated that there may be a connection between Hirohito became regent on November 25, 1921, due to Emperor Taisho's serious illness,^[92][93] and 25 years later, Emperor Shōwa, Hirohito made the "Declaration of Humanity" in 1946, the year be turning his ege (満年齢, man nenrei) to 45.^[92][93] From those, some researchers have speculated that the meaning of Mishima, who would have been the same age of man nenrei 45 in 1970, committing suicide on November 25, was to the resurrection the "God" by dying as a scapegoat of Emperor Shōwa who had been became a human.^[92][93]

Researchers who advocate this theory have taken into account the fact of Mishima had been sympathizing with Asaichi Isobe, a leader of the February 26 Incident, who was executed while being outraged that Emperor Shōwa did not recognize their high integrity and being decided to become himself as a god, and Mishima had written Voices of the Fallen Heroes, in which included a criticism of the Emperor Shōwa, they have mentioned that Mishima sent a warning to postwar society by taking his own life in his incident at the same time, his act was also a way of "becoming a god" in the place of Emperor Shōwa.^[92][94]

Kenichi Matsumoto (松本健一), who influenced this theory, based his argument on the episode in which literary critic Kōichi Isoda (磯田光一) heard Mishima say, "Truthfully, I want to kill the Emperor Shōwa at the Imperial Palace. Before I commit seppuku," about a month before the incident, and Masahiko Shimada, with whom Isobe talked to about it, said, "I think maybe Yukio Mishima wanted to become Emperor. In other words, he wanted to identify himself with the Emperor.",^[95][96][g] that since this was actually impossible to kill, Mishima killed Hirohito in his world of idea, and in real, died himself in Hirohito's place, thus eliminating the Emperor as a post-war's human being, and then gone into the afterlife while holding in his mind the image of his own idealized "Beautiful Emperor."^[101][93]

And, November 25, 1970 (Shōwa 45) of the solar calendar date corresponds to October 27 of the old calendar (lunisolar calendar) (旧暦, kyureki), and the date of October 27 is same date as the execution date of Yoshida Shōin, whom Mishima respected, from that, many writers and researchers have speculated that Mishima chose this date for his suicide day.^{[102][103][104]} These writers and researchers have expounded that Yoshida Shōin's death day, October 27, 1859 (Ansei 6) of the lunisolar calendar corresponds to November 21, 1859, of the solar calendar, but Mishima's suicide day, November 25, 1970 (Shōwa 45) corresponds to October 27, 1970, of the lunisolar calendar.^{[102][103][104][h]}

Besides, Naoki Komuro (小室直樹), a sociologist and Mishima researcher, has touched that there is a passage in Mishima's novel Runaway Horses in which Shigekuni Honda considers the possibility that Isao Iinuma was born during the period of bardo following Kiyoaki Matsugae's death.^[106] And he has speculated that since Mishima's birthday, January 14, was 49 days (7 x 7) after November 25, Mishima might had set the period of bardo in 49 days of which most easiest to be reincarnated into his next life.^[106] Hiroshi Funasaka (舩坂弘), who presented the Japanese sword "Seki Magoroku" to Mishima, also has put forward the same theory.^[107]

And, November 25 was the date that Mishima had begun to writing Confessions of a Mask in 1948, and at time of the publication, he had announced this novel meant a "Surgery for Restore Life", "Suicide that Reversed". Mishima also had noted as follows:^{[108][109][110]}

This novel is a will for leave in the Realm of Deaths where I used to live. If you take a movie of a suicide jumped, and rotate the film in reverse, the suicide person jumps up from the valley bottom to the top of the cliff at a furious speed and he revives. What I have attempted in writing this novel is to such a Surgery for Restore Life.

Takashi Inoue (井上隆史), a literary critic and Mishima researcher, mentioning that Mishima had written Confessions of a Mask to live in postwar Japan and to get away from his "Realm of Deaths", and has interpreted that by committing suicide on the same date of November 25 that he had begun to write Confessions of a Mask, Mishima intended to dismantle all of his postwar creative activities and return to the "Realm of Deaths" where he used to live.^[109][110]

Takaaki Yoshimoto has called the reactions of left-wing radicals such as "We were surpassed by Mishima. We, the left must not be outdone and must raise men who have no regard for life", of right-wing students who say, "Let's follow close on the heels of Yukio Mishima", and of cosmopolitans who say "We should value our lives", the "Three Idiots," and after prefaced his statement by saying that these types of reactions are not that significant in any case, he has mentioned that "The true reaction is measured by the dynamic sum of Mishima's self-destruction, in which he threw the full weight of his outstanding literary achievements at himself in an instant, with his whole body," as follows:^[112][113]

The true reaction is measured by the dynamic sum of Mishima's self-destruction, in which he threw the full weight of his outstanding literary achievements at himself in an instant, with his whole body. And I have a feeling that this will inevitably manifest itself in a number of years with a weight that cannot belittle. Mishima's death was not a literary death or a psychopathological death, but a political act death, however the meaning of his "death" will ultimately be something that can only be properly measured by the authenticity of his literary achievements.

Shun Akiyama has positioned Mishima as "a writer who grows after his death",^{[114][115][116]} and has mentioned the reasons, "His presence and works always continue to be reborn last far longer, after his death, bearing newer contemporary issues," and that he is a writer whose "absence radiates brilliance," making one wonder "what Yukio Mishima would have thought, what would he have said, had he been alive," whenever an event like a turning point in the times occurs.^[114] He has gone on to say that Mishima's words have the characteristic of "making the voices of others who say similar things seem mediocre," and that this was "one manifestation of his natural talent," just as "a beautiful lady makes all other women who happen to be there seem mediocre."^[114]

After his death, a hole was left not only in literature, and in the broader realm of the Japanese spirit, by the amount of devote on his shoulders. No one can fill that hole. Writers like this are rare in Japan.
His presence is being more and more recalled by many people, since his death.
His absence stimulates and seduces so many minds, stirring the springs of thoughts, to reach the point where the absence itself exerts a unique allure. Writers like this, or a phenomenon in the spiritual world, are rare.

Masahiko Shimada has considered that the reason Mishima wrote treatises such as On the Defense of Culture (文化防衛論, Bunka bōei-ron) and created such "cathedrals of words to support ideology" in his pure literary novels while at the same time creating "a position as the emperor of subculture" was because, in the heyday of the left-wing opposition to the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty, he could not have gained full support by directly presenting right-wing ideology, so he had to gain support democratically in that way, and he has surmised that Mishima himself was trying to embody the "metaphor of the postwar Emperor Shōwa himself," who came to occupy the position of "guardian deity of postwar democracy."^[117] Also Shimada, interpreting that the method of Mishima was not like line of the literary figure who got directly involved in politics like Shintaro Ishihara, and it was "a method that expands the influence of something like a Mishima Party alone," and has stated that it was the politics in the sense that in Mishima's consciousness it "may had been organically and without contradiction linked to his ideology".^[117]

Shimada also has touched on the fact that today's literature has become far removed from "political ambitions to change Japan or change Japanese politics," and has offered the following views:^[117][6]

If we try to reinterpret what Mishima did from the perspective of our current scholastic experience, we can see that while he was deeply committed to literature, which was originally said to be a genre that had been defeated by politics, he may still believed somewhere that a literary revolution would lead to a social revolution, a kind of turnaround commitment from the literary side to politics, a goodbye home run. Of course, this is extremely difficult. He may not have had the idealism held by the leaders of the Freedom and People's Rights Movement, the leaders of Taishō Democracy, and the writers committed to the Communist movement, but it may be possible to recognize in Mishima, one transformation of the way writers of the past engaged with politics, with a bitter recognition of reality.

John Nathan has said, "I remain persuaded that Mishima's suicide by hara-kiri was driven by a longing for death that he had been in touch with, and intermittently terrified by, since his childhood; and that the 'patriotism' he formulated during the last ten years of his life offered him a route to achieving the martyr's death that was his obsession," however, he also has reflected on the lack he made in the first edition of his book Mishima: A biography, in which he had interpreted Mishima's death solely as a personal pathology.^{[118][119][120]} And in the revised new edition he has argued his views that Mishima's death was connected to a personal longing for the erotic fantasies of heroic martyr's death that he had hold throughout his life, at the same time, has also stated that it was "an unbearably lucid and apposite expression of a national affliction: the agony of cultural disinheritance."^{[118][119][120]}

Nathan has considered Mishima's life to be a paradigm of the "cultural ambivalence" that has plagued Japan ever since it was forced to open the country with the arrival of the Kurofune in Edo period, and Nathan has explained that the "cultural ambivalence" is namely, the "national struggle" to find an authentic "self" by reconciling two disparate and often irreconcilable cultures, that one "native, inherent, grounded in tradition" of Japan, the other "foreign and intractable" Western culture.^[118][119] And he has mentioned that this quest for synthesis has resulted in "an ongoing, exhausting, and sometimes paralyzing vacillation" between two different cultures, in Yeats's phrase, "antinomies of day and night."^[118][119] He also has indicated that Mishima's language was elegant and gorgeously expressive instrument notwithstanding its overripeness, was quintessentially Japanese.^[118][120]

As a young man during the Pacific war, Mishima tasted briefly the comforting certainty of identification with a transcendent ideal embodied by the divine Emperor. In 1945, following the defeat, he was expelled with rest of his generation into the hollowness of a postwar world that had been emptied of tradition and severed from historical continuity. During the 1950s, Mishima's response to his existential uneasiness was to acquire a gaudy wardrobe of European and American styles and sensibilities and to wear them flamboyantly; but, beneath the masquerade, he suffered increasingly from a growing feeling of emptiness.
Mishima was not alone in his suffering. The terrorism on both the Right and the Left that characterized the 1960s following the renewal of the US-Japan Mutual Security Treaty were evidence of a growing national uneasiness and imbalance in the aftermath of the MacArthur constitution. And if American democracy was proving to be a not entirely satisfactory substitute for wartime values, neither was the frantic pursuit of GNP that was being promulgated as the new national mission. (Omitted)
(Japanese "salary man") beginning to wonder why life was affording him so little gratification despite his hard work and new prosperity. Something was missing: the emerging consumer class was finding that the acquisition of wealth and property was not a goal worth living for after all. (Omitted)
Considered at a distance, Mishima's suicide now appears as one of two historical moments that occurred close together on the way out of the unstable 1960s that help locate the polarities that defined this period in postwar history. In March 1970, Japan commemorated its arrival on the global scene as a major world economy by staging Expo '70. (Omitted) If Expo '70 represented the confidence and optimism of the time, Mishima's suicide eight months later invoked the troubling sense of rootlessness at the opposite pole.

Ivan Morris has explained that the persons Mishima admired and was attracted to, such as Ōshio Heihachirō and the young Kamikaze pilots, were not successful persons who had accomplished great things in the real society, but were "courageous losers," and that the tendency to be attracted to such persons was not a personal tendency unique to Mishima, but an emotion deeply rooted in the national character of the Japanese people, and that since ancient times, the Japanese have recognized a unique nobility in acts of pure self-sacrifice and the high-souled figures of downfallen people who fall because of their sincerity.^[121] He then has mentioned Mishima's death as an act that closely attached the scenario of the traditional Japanese view of heroism, and that no matter how Mishima's motives are interpreted, his decision showed courage in both mind and body, and certainly be in the lineage of heroic figures in Japanese history.^[121][122] And He has stated that only future generations can decide whether Mishima will be generally perceived as a hero, and that this is linked to the problem of to what extent Japan will maintain and to what extent it will cut off its ties with the past in the future.^[121]

Masayasu Hosaka (保阪正康), a critic, and researcher of Shōwa history, has looked the similarities between Kōzaburō Tachibana and Mishima as its perspective in Shōwa history, stating that the two men have far more in common than Mishima has with Ikki Kita, the leader of the February 26 Incident, or the young officers like Asaichi Isobe.^[123] Regarding the similarities between two, Hosaka has considered, that both Tachibana and Mishima came to the conviction that the era in which they lived was a "mimicry" (also a space from which the Japanese soul falls out) and that they believed that capitalism and its flip side, communism, were against the true nature of the Japanese, and that this realization of "mimicry" gradually grew into feelings close to resentment, which then turned into a desire to act.^[123]

Miyoko Tanaka (田中美代子), a literary critic and Mishima researcher, referring to that in his posthumous essay, Madness in Middle Age (壮年の狂気, Sōnen no kyōki), in which Mishima touching on the "Sanyū Incident," had counter-questioned, "Are ordinary politicians, businessmen, and intellectuals of today really that sane, and so far removed from childish play?", and had added, "Raising the issue of madness lies in exposing the madness of people who think they are sane,"^[124][125] Tanaka has stated, "For real, the Okinawa problem that had pointed out in his Geki has yet to be resolved, and the current constitution is a Gordian Knot, so to speak. The Mishima Incident was a symbolic act in which Mishima, in light of the domestic and international situation, had judged that constitutional reform was impossible, and thus while himself embodying "culture," he had stabbed at "politics."^[125]

Kōichi Isoda (磯田光一), a literary critic and Mishima researcher, has stated that within Mishima there was "a rebellion against the cultural situation that was continuing to fade away in the stable post-war society, and a challenge to the contradictions in the dicey post-war state," which became "one of the driving forces behind going down a path that went against the values of the time."^[126] And Isoda has looked that even if Mishima's life as a novelist was a "masked drama" in the name of "Yukio Mishima," "the uncompromising footsteps that was equipped on that mask" and that, even if many problems remain about the evaluation of the political ideology that Mishima advocated, his actions "were one sincere attempt to prove the spiritual value of human beings, along with his rich artistic achievements," and that "Mishima, who was conscious of his own actions as an antithesis to the times, left the evaluation of them to those left behind."^[126]

In the fall of 2013, 43 years after Mishima's death, a copy of an unreleased tape recording of a dialogue between Mishima and John Bester on February 19, 1970, nine months before the Mishima Incident, was discovered from among the amassment of discarded tapes that were "Banned from broadcast" and kept by the TBS Television Archives Promotion Department in Akasaka, Tokyo.^[127][128] The copy was made public for the first time in January 2017.^[127][128]

In this unpublished dialogue, Mishima had talked about his own views on life and death, literature, and the Constitution, saying, "I think that the time of death became completely fixed within me was after my body (muscle) was formed... I feel as if the position of death entered my body from outside," "The Peace Constitution. That is the source of hypocrisy," "The Constitution is telling the Japanese people to die."^[127][129] He also had likened himself to a "clown" in regards to his actions,^[127] making the following statement as if to leave understanding to future generations.^[130][131]

Mishima: What I do appears in photographs. Or is introduced in a weekly magazine. At that stage, everyone knows about it. They think, "Oh, that guy is doing this kind of thing, what an idiot." But no matter how much someone explains to the persons that "the idiot action" means, those who think I'm an idiot will continue to think I'm an idiot. (Omitted) So, although I'm no Stendhal, but like him, I just want to the "happy few" to understand. I'm confident that my actions are harder to understand than my novels. (Omitted) If anyone wants to understand them, read Sun and Steel. If you read that, I think you'll understand. I won't say anything more than that.
Or, maybe 50 or 100 years after I die, there may be person who say, "Oh, I get it." That's fine. Being alive, all humans are clowns in some sense. This is inevitable. Even Prime Minister Satō is a kind of clown. It's impossible for a living person not to be a clown.

Bester: Being a clown means that, in a sense, we cannot survive without performing plays.

Mishima: The reason we cannot live without performing plays is probably because God treats us like puppets. We are forced to play a certain role, a "puppet play" in life. This is also written in Hagakure. It wrote that humans are like well-made Karakuri puppets.

• Reactions to the Mishima Incident
• Prelude to the Mishima Incident