![]() ![]() By identifying with his tragic heroes, Mishima, through his words and deeds, transformed the suicide of the samurai into a noble action. He considered true beauty as an erotic and sensual expression of death. Thus, for Mishima, suicide was both an aesthetic and a heroic action. He posed as Saint Sebastian, the Christian martyr whose body was pierced by arrows, and played the role of an army officer who committed seppuku, in the 1965-film Patriotism. The cult of the male body, glorified and reinforced by the samurai sword, was a dominant symbol in Mishima’s art. The presence of death can be traced alongside the idea of beauty in Mishima’s writings. ![]() ![]() Unlike many writers and poets who took their lives without writing about it, Mishima had started meditating on the Japanese suicide ritual as early as the 1950s. His dramatically staged suicide was preceded by a speech in which he addressed Japanese soldiers at the army headquarters in Tokyo. By the time he killed himself by seppuku (harakiri) at the age of 45 on November 25, 1970, Yukio Mishima had been recognised at home and abroad as Japan’s greatest post-war writer. ![]()
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