Yukio Mishima — Profile, Rankings & Fame Trend

Summary

Updated 2026-06-08

A novelist nominated five times for the Nobel Prize, then the leader of a failed coup. On 25 November 1970, Mishima walked into a Tokyo military base with four followers, took a hostage, demanded the army restore the emperor's divinity — and when no one rose, performed seppuku as planned.

Biography

About

Born Kimitake Hiraoka on 14 January 1925, he wrote under the pen name Yukio Mishima and became one of postwar Japan's most important stylists — luxurious vocabulary, decadent metaphors, a fusion of traditional Japanese and modern Western forms. Novels like Confessions of a Mask and The Temple of the Golden Pavilion brought him international attention; by the 1960s he was nominated for the Nobel five times, including in 1968 when it went to his countryman Yasunari Kawabata. But from his mid-30s his far-right ideology sharpened: he opposed Western materialism, postwar democracy, and what he saw…

Voice

In their own words

Sourced, dated quotes from Yukio Mishima

Yukio Mishima

said1968

Just let matters slide. How much better to accept each sweet drop of the honey that was Time, than to stoop to the vulgarity latent in every decision.

— Spring Snow (1968), as translated by Michael Gallagher (1972).

Yukio Mishima

said1966

According to Eshin's "Essentials of Salvation," the Ten Pleasures are but a drop in the ocean when compared to the joys of the Pure Land.

— "The Priest of Shiga Temple and His Love" in Death in Midsummer, and Other Stories (1966), p. 59.

Yukio Mishima

said1965

I've never done much, but I've lived my whole life thinking of myself as the only real man.

— Ryuji, the sailor in The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea (1965), p. 38.

Yukio Mishima

said1959

What transforms this world is — knowledge. Do you see what I mean? Nothing else can change anything in this world.

— The Temple of the Golden Pavilion (1959).

Yukio Mishima

said1959

There is something that even now strikes me as strange. Originally I was not possessed by gloomy thoughts. My concern, what confronted me with my real problem, was beauty alone.

— The Temple of the Golden Pavilion (1959).

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