About Me
Yukio Mishima (三島 由紀夫, Mishima Yukio) was the public name of Kimitake Hiraoka (平岡 å…¬å¨, Hiraoka Kimitake?, January 14, 1925–November 25, 1970), a Japanese author and playwright.Mishima was born in the Yotsuya district of TÅkyÅ (now part of Shinjuku). His father was Azusa Hiraoka, a government official while his mother, Shizue, was the daughter of a school's principal in Tokyo. His paternal grandparents were Jotaro and Natsuko Hiraoka. He had a younger brother named Chiyuki and a sister named Mitsuko who died of typhus.Mishima's early childhood was dominated by the shadow of his grandmother, Natsu, who took the boy and separated him from his immediate family for several years. Natsu was the illegitimate granddaughter of Matsudaira Yoritaka, the daimyo of Shishido in Hitachi province, and had been raised in the household of Prince Arisugawa Taruhito; she maintained considerable aristocratic pretensions even after marrying Mishima's grandfather, a bureaucrat who had made his fortunes in the newly opened colonial frontier and who rose to become Governor-General of Karafuto. She was also prone to violence and morbid outbursts, which are occasionally alluded to in Mishima's works. It is to Natsu that some biographers have traced Mishima's fascination with death. Natsu famously did not allow Mishima to venture into the sunlight, to engage in any kind of sport, or to play with other boys; he spent much of his time alone or with female cousins and their dolls.Mishima returned to his immediate family at 12. His father, a brutal man with a taste for military discipline, employed such tactics as holding the young boy up to the side of a speeding train; he also raided Mishima's room for evidence of an "effeminate" interest in literature and often ripped up the boy's manuscripts.
