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He started off life as Kimitake Hiroka. He died Yukio Mishima.

He was born on January 14, 1925. He committed ritual suicide by seppuku on November 25, 1970.

He lived forty-five years.

He was bullied a lot as a child for his artistic and literary leanings. The Japanese of that time were a notoriously macho culture. He was bullied by his father for the same reason. Dad believed in old school discipline. Like holding his young son out the window of a speeding train in order to…what? Toughen him up? Turn him into a psychopath or a gibbering schizophrenic? It’s hard to gauge such intentions. He used to search young Yukio’s room for traces of girliness and when he found any evidence the boy had been writing he tore it to shreds.

Mishima caught a break when a Japanese Army doctor misdiagnosed a cold he had during a routine check-up as tuberculosis. Otherwise, he might have died as another one of the extras on Iwo Jima.

His first novel, published when he was only twenty-four, was Confessions of a Mask. It was about a young homosexual man who had to keep his inclinations hidden to fit into society. It made Mishima a big success in 1949. Critics consider it semi-autobiographical. Due to the novel's acclaim, Mishima was able to quit his miserable, if financially promising, job in the Finance Ministry and devote himself to writing.

He was an avid bodybuilder. A beautiful mind in a beautiful body, that was Mishima’s motto. He didn't believe in letting himself go to hell-in-a-handbasket physically like, say William Faulkner or Truman Capote. He was a devotee of kendo, traditional Japanese swordsmanship. He was nominated three times for the Nobel Prize for Literature. But came up a bridesmaid on all three occasions. What were perceived as his right-wing politics didn’t help his chances any, that’s for sure. He was a model and a movie-actor.

He was once set to marry the woman who would eventually marry the man who would eventually become the Emperor of Japan. Michiko Shoda is Empress of Japan. She’s still empressing today at 81. Her husband is still emperoring. 

Instead Mishima married another woman and had two children, a daughter and a son. None of them liked the rumors that emerged after Mishima’s splashy death by seppuki that he was not-so-secretly gay.

There’s a notoriously homoerotic photo of Mishima in loincloth and pierced by arrows suffering beautifully ala Saint Sebastian.

Mishima formed and trained a secret paramilitary-spiritual society of young men who practiced the martial arts and swore allegiance to the Emperor. Except it wasn’t so much the Emperor they honored, but the divinity that traditionally resided within him. Mishima was committed to the bushido code and considered himself a modern-day samurai. It was Hirohito’s renouncing of his traditional divine role that Mishima found so troubling and the true defeat of Japan after World War 2. It meant that Japanese culture had lost its soul—a loss more devastating than the loss of any one war—and that the warriors who died in the war had ultimately died in vain.

It was Mishima’s intention to protest this vulgarizing trend in Japanese culture that led to his storming a civil defense headquarters on November 25, 1970. Ostensibly Mishima was attempting to incite a coup. It was a spectacular failure. He looked like a fool to everyone but his small circle of like-minded followers. It’s suspected that Mishima knew full-well just how quixotic and vainglorious his plan was and only used it to make his suicide all the more symbolic. He’d been planning his final act for a whole year and had already put his affairs in order.

Traditionally seppuku involved disemboweling oneself with a short blade, plunging it into the abdomen and drawing it upwards. The coup de grace comes by way of decapitation. Apparently the man Mishima chose to behead him as part of the ritual wasn’t as up to the job as one might have hoped. After several failed attempts to hack Mishima’s head off Mishima’s shoulders, a second man had to take over.

This is not the way you picture a great author going out and it’s had a dampening effect on Mishima’s legacy. But it's probably better than having your liver explode from alcoholism the way Kerouac went out. Indeed, despite his many missteps and perceived embarrassments, a prize has been established in Japan to honor literary excellence in Mishima's honor. It’s called, no big surprise, The Mishima Prize.

His work drips with eroticism, kinkiness, and death- obsession which is precisely why I like it—and him—so much.

For this reason too: He was a guy who lived life at a higher frequency than most people ever dared…or even dreamed. He lived life as if his life were a work of art that he was consciously creating.

If you turn your life into a line of poetry, Mishima wrote, written with a splash of blood, then perfect purity is possible.

His was a truly beautiful life.