Yukio Mishima books are the hardest recommendation in Japanese literature, and not because the writing is difficult.
The Yukio Mishima books run to over thirty novels, dozens of plays and hundreds of short stories, all in twenty-five years. He was nominated three times for the Nobel Prize. By number of translated titles he is ahead of Kawabata and Oe, Japan’s only two literary Nobel laureates, combined, and his collected works in Japanese run to forty-two volumes. The classical canon he crowns is mapped on my Japanese classics page. The full canon is ranked on my best Japanese novels list.
He also built a private militia, attempted a coup against the Japanese government in 1970, and killed himself when it failed. No account of the Yukio Mishima books that leaves that out is telling you the truth about them.
You cannot read the late work without knowing that, and this page explains it rather than working around it, because the alternative is discussing a four-volume novel without mentioning that its author died the morning he finished it.
The life, and why it belongs on this page
Kimitake Hiraoka was born in Tokyo in 1925 and took the pen name Yukio Mishima as a teenager, partly to hide his writing from his father. He was a sickly child, kept indoors and raised largely by an aristocratic grandmother given to violent moods, and he wrote poetry before he was ten. He graduated from the Peers’ School in 1944 with a citation from the Emperor as its highest-ranking student, which is a detail worth holding on to given everything that followed. Eventually, he took a law degree at Tokyo Imperial University in 1947, worked briefly in the finance ministry, and quit within a year to write.
The transformation is the thing to understand. He was a sickly, bookish child raised largely by a possessive grandmother. In his thirties he began bodybuilding, took up kendo and reached fifth dan, studied karate, and rebuilt himself physically with an intensity that reads as a project rather than a hobby. He called it bunbu ryodo, the old samurai ideal of the scholar and the warrior in one person.
He acted in films, modeled, and in 1966 wrote, directed and starred in a short film called Patriotism, in which he plays an army officer who commits ritual suicide. That was four years before he did it.
He lost the 1968 Nobel Prize to Yasunari Kawabata, who had been his mentor, and was reportedly devastated by it. He then praised Kawabata publicly and without reservation, which is either good manners or the discipline of a man who had built an entire persona out of not showing what things cost him.
In the late sixties he founded the Tatenokai, the Shield Society, a private militia of young men, mostly students, trained with the cooperation of the Self-Defense Forces. He wanted the emperor restored to divine status and the postwar constitution repealed. On 25 November 1970 he and four members entered a Self-Defense Force headquarters in Tokyo, took the commandant hostage, and Mishima addressed the assembled soldiers from a balcony calling on them to rise. They jeered him. He went back inside and committed seppuku.
That morning, the final volume of The Sea of Fertility had been delivered to his publisher.
How much of this you need in order to read the Yukio Mishima books. Very little for the early work. Almost all of it for the late work. Confessions of a Mask and The Temple of the Golden Pavilion stand on their own entirely. Runaway Horses is a novel about a young ultranationalist who plans a coup and then kills himself, written by a man who would do both within three years, and pretending that is incidental is not criticism, it is squeamishness.
None of which is an endorsement. He was a reactionary who wanted a form of Japan that had never quite existed, and the coup was both futile and, by most accounts, understood by him to be futile before he attempted it. The books are extraordinary and the politics are what they are, and a reader is entitled to both facts.
Where to start
Confessions of a Mask if you want the writer. It is his breakthrough, semi-autobiographical, about a boy who realizes he is attracted to men in a society with no room for it and constructs an elaborate performance of normality to survive. Everything he wrote afterwards is downstream of the idea in the title.
The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea if you want the shortest way in. Under two hundred pages, brutally controlled, and it contains all his obsessions in miniature: the sea, the body, glory, and the conviction that a beautiful thing should be destroyed rather than allowed to become ordinary.
The Temple of the Golden Pavilion if you want the acknowledged masterpiece outside the tetralogy. A stuttering acolyte becomes obsessed with the beauty of the temple he serves and burns it down, based on a real arson in 1950.
Do not start your Yukio Mishima books with The Sea of Fertility. It is his best work and the wrong entry point, and the third volume defeats a lot of readers who came in cold.
The Sea of Fertility
Four volumes, 1969-1971 · and this is the part nobody warns you about
His final work and, by broad agreement, the best of all Yukio Mishima books. He began it in 1964 and finished it on the last morning of his life.
It is the longest of the Yukio Mishima books by a distance. Four novels following one man, Shigekuni Honda, from 1912 to 1975, as he encounters what he believes are successive reincarnations of a friend who died young. Honda appears as a student, then a judge, then a philosopher, then an old man, and each time he tries to protect the reincarnation and each time he fails. The whole thing is a single arc about the disappearance of an older Japan, and it ends by suggesting that none of it happened at all.
The title is the key to the whole thing. The Sea of Fertility is the name of a lunar mare, one of the dark plains on the surface of the moon. It looks like a sea and contains no water. A vast fertile-sounding nothing, named by people looking from a great distance who could not see what was actually there.
The reading order is fixed and non-negotiable: Spring Snow, Runaway Horses, The Temple of Dawn, The Decay of the Angel. They are one novel in four parts.
The translation problem
Four volumes. Three different translation teams. Nobody tells you.
- Spring Snow (1969, English 1972) and Runaway Horses (1969, English 1973) were both translated by Michael Gallagher, whose Spring Snow was a National Book Award finalist.
- The Temple of Dawn (1970, English 1973) went to E. Dale Saunders and Cecilia Segawa Seigle.
- The Decay of the Angel (1971, English 1974) went to Edward Seidensticker.
Knopf handed a single continuous novel to the three most significant translators of Japanese literature working at the time, one team per volume, and the voice changes underneath you as you read. It is not a disaster and it is genuinely disorienting, particularly across the break between Runaway Horses and The Temple of Dawn, which is also where the book itself changes shape.
There is no unified translation and there has never been one.
An honest note on volume three
Readers get stuck in The Temple of Dawn. It is the volume where Mishima works through Buddhist theories of reincarnation at length and the narrative slows to almost nothing, and a great many people abandon the tetralogy there.
Push through it. The Decay of the Angel is the payoff for all four books and is regularly described by people who finish as one of the best things they have read. Quitting at volume three means reading three quarters of a novel that only means anything once it is complete.
The other essential novels
Confessions of a Mask (1949, translated by Meredith Weatherby, English 1958). The book that made him at twenty-four. A young man narrates his own construction of a false self, and the prose is already fully formed.
The Sound of Waves (1954, Meredith Weatherby, English 1956). The outlier among Yukio Mishima books, and it belongs here precisely because it is unlike all the rest of them. A simple, warm love story between a fisherman and a diver’s daughter on a small island. No cruelty, no decay, no obsession with the body as a project. It is the Mishima you could give to anyone, and the one most unlike the rest.
The Temple of the Golden Pavilion (1956, Ivan Morris, English 1959). Based on the 1950 burning of the Kinkaku-ji by a young acolyte. Mishima takes the real case and builds from it a novel about a stutterer who cannot bear that something is perfect while he is not, and the argument it makes about beauty and destruction is the clearest statement of his central idea anywhere in the work.
The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea (1963, John Nathan, English 1965). A widow’s thirteen-year-old son watches her affair with a merchant sailor through a hole in the wall, worships the man as long as he stays a sailor, and turns on him the moment he chooses to stay ashore. Two hundred pages and no wasted movement.
After the Banquet (1960, translated by Donald Keene, English 1963) did something no other novel on this page managed: it changed Japanese law. The politician Hachiro Arita recognized himself in it and sued. The Tokyo District Court found for Arita in 1964, and the ruling was the first judicial recognition of a right to privacy in Japan. The New Yorker, reviewing the translation, called it the biggest and most profound thing he had done. Forbidden Colors (1951 and 1953 in two parts, translated by Alfred H. Marks, English 1968) is his long novel about a beautiful young man, incapable of desiring women, taken up by an aging writer and turned into an instrument of revenge against them. He was twenty-six when he wrote it, and like Confessions of a Mask it is generally read as substantially autobiographical. Thirst for Love (1950, translated by Alfred H. Marks, English 1969) is his third novel and the first with a woman at the center. Donald Keene, who wrote the introduction, called it a youthful work and one of Mishima’s best, which is a fair summary of both halves of it.
The recent recoveries
A steady stream of Yukio Mishima books has appeared in English for the first time in the last decade, largely from Penguin Classics and Vintage.
Life for Sale (1968, translated by Stephen Dodd, Penguin 2019) is the surprise: a pulp thriller about a man who advertises his own life for sale after a failed attempt on it, and it is genuinely funny. Dodd argues the trashiness is the method rather than a lapse, and that Mishima uses it to get at the collapse of human relations in postwar Japan. The Frolic of the Beasts (1961, translated by Andrew Clare, English 2018) is a short, cold triangle. Star (1961, translated by Sam Bett, English 2019) is a novella about a film actor besieged by fans and desperate for a private life, written while Mishima was himself acting in films. Beautiful Star (1962, also Stephen Dodd, Penguin 2022) is science fiction about a family who become convinced they are aliens, and it contains long philosophical arguments between them about whether human life is worth preserving.
These are minor and several are very good, and they exist because Mishima’s estate and his publishers have spent ten years working through a catalog that was only ever partly translated.
The nonfiction and the plays
Sun and Steel (1968) is the essential one and the most uncomfortable of the Yukio Mishima books. A book-length essay about bodybuilding, words, muscle and death, in which he sets out the philosophy that led to 1970 in plain terms. Read it after the fiction, not before, and read it knowing what it is.
Five Modern Noh Plays and Madame de Sade are the drama worth having in English. He wrote for the stage constantly and was, by many accounts, a better playwright than novelist in the eyes of Japanese critics of his generation.
The translators
Worth knowing, because the English Yukio Mishima books are the work of a committee that never met.
Michael Gallagher did the first two volumes of the tetralogy. He was a Jesuit scholastic before he was a translator, which is a strange and interesting fit for Mishima and a perfect one for Shusaku Endo, whose novel about Catholic doctors he also translated. John Nathan was twenty-three when Knopf hired him to take over Mishima from Donald Keene, and then translated Kenzaburo Oe instead, which by most accounts ended the relationship. Edward Seidensticker and Ivan Morris are the two great translators of the Japanese classical and modern canon respectively, and both have Mishima in their catalog.
That is four of the most significant translators of Japanese into English, all working on one author, none of them coordinating.
The full English list at a glance
The Sea of Fertility: Spring Snow · Runaway Horses · The Temple of Dawn · The Decay of the Angel
Major novels: Confessions of a Mask · The Sound of Waves · The Temple of the Golden Pavilion · The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea · Forbidden Colors · Thirst for Love · After the Banquet
Recent recoveries: Life for Sale · The Frolic of the Beasts · Star · Beautiful Star
Nonfiction and drama: Sun and Steel · Five Modern Noh Plays · Madame de Sade
If you want to see where he sits alongside his contemporaries and rivals, several of whom appear in these pages by name, I have written about that over at the best Japanese novels.
The Temple of the Golden Pavilion has its own page, on the 1950 arson, the monk who set the fire, and the gilded building that replaced it.
This page deals with suicide as historical fact. If the subject is weighing on you, please reach out to someone. In the US you can call or text 988, and the International Association for Suicide Prevention keeps a directory of crisis centers worldwide.
