Yukio Mishima’s Lifelong Death Wish

In April 1951, General Douglas MacArthur went to the US Congress to deliver some good news. Japan, he said, had “undergone the greatest reformation recorded in modern history”. From the “ashes left in war’s wake” had risen a nation “dedicated to the primacy of individual liberty and personal dignity”, with “a truly representative government committed to the advance of political morality, freedom of economic enterprise and social justice”. But you can’t please everyone. Unlike the supreme commander of the Allied powers during Japan’s postwar occupation, the writer Yukio Mishima, who would quickly become the country’s most translated novelist in Europe and more recently an idol of the US far right, saw only “hypocritical ‘harmony’” in which emotions were “dulled, and sharp angles worn smooth”. Or so he put it in “Voices of the Fallen Heroes”, a spooky 1966 short story in which ghosts at a séance ventriloquise his preoccupations with national and cultural decline after Emperor Hirohito rejected his divinity.