Yukio Mishima. The name alone sparks visions of a tragic, chiseled man, burning with ideals, yet sinking into the abyss of his own contradictions.

He’s the type of person you can’t ignore. His works are a collision of violence, beauty, and despair—and so was his life.

Mishima wasn’t just some author—you didn’t read him, you felt him. His words drip with a kind of tragic masculinity, like an old war hero who just doesn’t know when to quit fighting.

But maybe that’s the point.

Maybe his battle was never with anyone else but himself.

Rebellion and Tradition

Mishima’s relationship with tradition wasn’t exactly a warm hug. It was more like a suffocating embrace.

He worshipped the old ways—those days when Japan was a proud empire, the Emperor was divine, and warriors died for honor.

He romanticized the past so much, it was like he was trying to breathe life into a corpse. While the world around him was shifting and evolving, Mishima was holding onto that corpse with white knuckles, refusing to let it go.

In a way, Mishima was the last samurai, the one who couldn’t accept that the world had moved on.

He watched Japan become a consumerist, Westernized society and thought, “What a pile of garbage.”

His answer? Build a body that looked like the embodiment of warrior glory, and shove it into the faces of the modern world.

He didn’t just write about it; he lived it. Mishima would spend hours at the gym, lifting weights like a man possessed, sculpting himself into a living work of art.

There was no room for weakness in his world. If you were going to be a warrior, you needed to look the part.

But like all men who look too hard at the past, he forgot something important: tradition doesn’t live in the muscles or the blood—it lives in the heart of the culture.

And the culture, as Mishima learned, wasn’t going back to the days of the Samurai.

Psychological Drama: Mishima’s Inner Hell

Mishima didn’t just capture the human psyche—he ripped it open and poured its contents onto the page. He didn’t write about people. No, he wrote about the battlefields inside them.

The raw truth of what it means to be alive in a world that gives you no guarantees.

Mishima’s mind was a haunted house—twisted, broken, and full of the kind of grotesque beauty that would make anyone pause and wonder if they should turn around and run.

His characters? They were merely the reflections of his own internal chaos.

His stories didn’t just navigate the ordinary. They plunged into the abyss, fighting against the tide of reality.

The people in his books, like Mishima himself, were never at peace. One moment, they were consumed by passion, clinging desperately to whatever they thought could save them, and the next moment, they were choking on confusion, drowning in the weight of their own contradictions.

There was no safety for them, no solid ground. It was all a constant war with themselves, a dance with their demons that neither side could ever win.

Take The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea, for instance.

Here’s a story about youth—brash, explosive, and unafraid to burn bright before it burns out. It’s about rebellion against society, against authority, against the expectations forced upon you.

The kind of rebellion that every teenager feels, but Mishima takes it to a whole new level.

The protagonist is a young boy named Noboru, who watches the world with the cold detachment of someone who has yet to feel the sting of adult disillusionment.

He’s consumed with the raw, untamed desire to make sense of a world that makes no sense. He’s looking for purity, for truth, and, like all young men before him, he’s blind to the fact that the purity he’s chasing is as elusive as a shadow.

Then there’s the sailor—Ryuji, a man whose life is soaked in the blood of war and violence, someone who believes in the idea of heroism, duty, and sacrifice.

To him, the world is simple. There’s honor in everything, even in death. To Noboru, Ryuji is both a hero and a victim—someone to worship and destroy.

And in the end, purity is shattered in the name of that very ideal. The boy kills the man he had once idolized, shattering the illusion of glory and leaving nothing but an aching emptiness in its wake.

This isn’t just some story about a sailor and a boy—it’s a gut punch to the heart.

It’s the emotional equivalent of being dragged through a field of broken glass. You’re cut open, exposed to your own raw, unfiltered emotions.

You can almost feel the sweat on Mishima’s brow as he wrote it, struggling with the same inner conflict, the same search for purity that his characters yearned for, but could never touch.

But don’t get it twisted. This is not a happy story. Mishima never wrote with the intention of giving you peace.

The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea is one of the most unsettling things you’ll ever read, not because of the violence, but because of the way it shows you that innocence is a fragile thing.

It shows you how quickly we destroy what we can’t fully understand. And the reason it hurts so much is because you know, deep down, Mishima was living out that same destruction. His own innocence was gone a long time ago.

Mishima’s characters—every one of them—are constantly reaching for something.

But it’s not just something outside themselves—it’s a reflection of the struggle inside their heads. It’s the need to reconcile a world that’s indifferent to their ideals.

Mishima wasn’t just writing about fictional people. He was writing about his own internal battlefield.

He couldn’t escape it—he couldn’t separate himself from it. The despair, the confusion, the violence—they were part of him.

And, as a result, they’re part of everything he wrote.

There’s a certain kind of violence that Mishima captures in his work that has nothing to do with physical bloodshed.

It’s the violence of the soul. The violence of a person who is so torn between their ideals and the world around them that they’d rather destroy everything than allow themselves to fall into compromise.

His characters ache.

They ache for something they can never have. They fight battles that aren’t even real, but they don’t know how to stop.

They’re addicted to the chaos, to the need for something to give them meaning.

Mishima’s psychological drama is brutal, visceral, and unforgiving.

There’s no escaping it, no way to look away. It’s in every line, every paragraph, every sentence he wrote.

His characters don’t just wrestle with the world—they wrestle with themselves.

They are split in half, torn between what they want to be and what the world is willing to let them be.

And just like Mishima, they find that the answer doesn’t lie in ideals or strength or purity.

The answer lies in the acceptance that there is no answer. That’s the kind of truth Mishima spent his life chasing.

It’s all a metaphor for Mishima’s own internal struggle. The quest for meaning, the attempt to find a way to balance fantasy with reality, to live a life of honor in a world that rewards compromise.

And in the end, that’s what killed him. Mishima didn’t just write about psychological conflict—he lived it.

He was a man on the edge, constantly balancing between who he wanted to be and who he was forced to become.

And maybe that’s the real tragedy.

Mishima had all the answers, but he couldn’t live with them.

So, he gave up the fight, throwing himself into a violent, bloody end that made his life seem like just another one of his own stories—beautiful, tragic, and ultimately meaningless in a meaningful way.

But at least he died on his own terms, in the way that only Mishima could.

The difference between him and his characters, though, is that he didn’t get to see the consequences of his own ideals.

He left us with the wreckage, forcing us to ask the same questions he asked.

And maybe that’s the only answer we’ll ever get: that the struggle never ends, and in the end, none of us come out unscathed.

Beauty and Violence: Mishima’s Dark Aesthetic

Mishima’s love affair with beauty was intense—and violent. It wasn’t a soft kind of beauty, the kind you find in sunsets and flowers.

No, Mishima’s beauty was sharp, brutal, and fleeting. It was the kind of beauty that could only be found in death.

And make no mistake: he adored death. He believed beauty wasn’t pure until it had been earned. Honor. Sacrifice. Violence.

These were the vehicles through which true beauty was realized.

In Patriotism, two lovers die together to preserve their honor—a moment so beautiful in its horror, you almost don’t know whether to cry or cheer.

Mishima saw beauty not as something you admire from a distance, but something you create through destruction.

In his mind, beauty didn’t exist in the safe corners of life—it thrived on the edges of chaos.

But, of course, it wasn’t all some romantic idea of noble death.

Mishima was painfully aware of the collapse of the old order. His own beauty was doomed, as the world wasn’t interested in the past anymore.

It was moving on, growing, changing. He couldn’t stop it, no matter how hard he tried.

And in his failure to reclaim the past, Mishima found the only true release: death.

Explaining Mishima’s Madness to a Kid (Or Your Drunk Uncle)

Listen, kid. Mishima’s a guy who couldn’t let go of the past. He looked at Japan, at the world, and thought, “What the hell happened?”

So, he decided to get strong, look perfect, and make the past live again in his own body.

But, here’s the kicker: he couldn’t do it. The world had already moved on, and no amount of muscle or fancy words could bring the old days back.

He thought if he could make everything perfect on the outside—his body, his writing, his ideas—he could fix the mess on the inside.

But no one can fix that. Not with weights, not with words.

He went nuts trying to hold onto a dream that was never coming back.

Another table for the nerds…

Table 1: Mishima’s Major Works and the Darkness They Expose

Work	Core Theme	Psychological Drama
The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea	Loss of innocence, nihilism, rebellion	Conflict between idealism and the brutal world
Patriotism	Death, honor, sacrifice	The clash of duty with personal desires
Sun and Steel	Strength, self-discipline, nationalism	Body vs. mind, strength as salvation
Forbidden Colors	Sexuality, desire, identity	Struggling with self-identity and societal roles

Society vs. Mishima

Mishima wasn’t everyone’s cup of tea. He had a love for fascism and nationalism that turned a lot of people off.

Think about Camus, Sartre, or de Beauvoir—those existentialists weren’t about fighting for an emperor; they were fighting for personal freedom, for authenticity in a world full of bullshit.

Mishima? He didn’t want freedom; he wanted a return to some old-world ideal, a fantasy where life was pure and honorable and death was something to be proud of.

And then there’s the whole “Right-Wing Nationalism” thing. He tried to start a coup to bring back the old Emperor and restore Japan’s military glory.

People like Sartre and Camus? They’d probably slap him across the face and say, “You’re just running from the reality that life doesn’t give a damn about your ideas of beauty.”

Second table for the nerds….

Table 2: The Critics Who May Think Mishima Was a Jerk

Thinker	What They Believed	Why They’d Hate Mishima
Albert Camus	Absurdism, Freedom	Anti-nationalism, pro-individual freedom
Simone de Beauvoir	Feminism, Existentialism	Opposes Mishima’s view on gender and societal roles
Jean-Paul Sartre	Existentialism, Authenticity	Rejected authority, embraced individual freedom
Herbert Marcuse	Critical Theory, Social Change	Anti-authoritarianism, critiques nationalism

This is already too long, but for some reason you keep reading…

Here’s the deal, fellas.

You can’t judge people, especially when their beliefs come from a place of nobility, even if it’s a twisted one.

Hell, none of us are perfect.

We’re all just stumbling through life, trying to make sense of the mess we’ve been catapulted into.

Eventually, life will put you in a spot where you’ll start seeing things from someone else’s perspective.

And most of the time, that pain they’re carrying? It’s damn real.

Mishima died the way he lived—with an ideal that couldn’t survive the reality of the world around him.

The emptiness inside him tore him apart, and in the end, he decided to drag everything down with him.

Was he right? Who the hell knows. Maybe there’s nothing to live for.

Maybe we’re all just playing make-believe, acting like we know what matters when we’re all just going through the motions.

I guess we all learn soon enough.