Was yukio mishima gay

Mishima's sexual orientation was an issue that bothered his widow, and she always denied his homosexuality after his death. In , the writer Jiro Fukushima published an account of his relationship with Mishima in , including fifteen letters between himself and the famed novelist. Despite living “openly” as a homosexual the brilliant Japanese author Yukio Mishima () had a “conventional marriage” to Yoko Sugiyama and had two children, a boy and a girl.

They married in June at a ceremony at International House in Roppongi, Tokyo. In , under the pen name Yukio Mishima, he published his second novel, Confessions of a Mask. It was a semi-autobiographical account of a homosexual boy fascinated by death and violence, who grows up to feel he must wear a metaphorical mask to fit into society. In this short text, which is considered autobiographical even though the name of the protagonist and narrator is never disclosed, Yukio Mishima depicts the slow acceptance of what makes him different and his inability to find his place in the framework offered by traditional Japanese society.

According to the Japanese singer, drag queen, and Miyazaki voice actor Akirhiro Miwa, who danced with Mishima at a gay club in the 60s and possibly had a longer term romantic relationship with the author, it was a comment Miwa made that started the Mishima on this particular path. Yukio was born January 14, , in Shinjuku, Tokyo, Japan. He spent most of his earlier years with his grandmother who maintained a very aristocratic lifestyle and shared that with Yukio.

She was also prone to violence and attempted to isolate Yukio from other boys his age. He was pushed, instead, to spend time with his female cousins and enjoy more traditionally feminine tasks with his grandmother. At the age of twelve, Yukio was returned to his immediate family. Though Yukio was allowed, and sometimes even pressured into enjoying traditionally female tasks with his grandmother, the opposite was true once he was living under the same roof as his father.

Yukio was forced away from anything his father deemed feminine. At one point, his father tore up a story Yukio had written, then held him up to the side of a speeding train in an attempt to scare some masculinity into him. The emotional whiplash caused by these two distinct upbringings would be hard for anyone, it had a clear effect on him throughout the rest of his life. Yukio Mishima grew up to become a successful writer, and, in fact, was tapped to receive a Nobel Prize in Literature multiple times.

His work explored themes like sexuality in a semi-autobiographical way, as he wrote his perspective as a gay man. Though it is mostly believed he was a gay man, many people try to deny this because of his marriage to Yoko Sugiyama and their two children. With this knowledge, there are two different lines of thought that can be followed.

The first, and most accepted being that he was a gay man who married a woman, as gay men sometimes do. It is a reality that some gay men marry women in an attempt to either hide their sexuality from people who may punish them for it or to try and fix themselves. The other possibility is that he was bisexual, was legitimately attracted to his wife, and by extension at least a little bit attracted to women.

This claim is much more difficult to prove, though it is possible that Yukio believed his sexuality could be changed because he was, in fact, attracted to women. That belief does have some merit. Of course, the most important evidence is self-identification, which is not available in this case. For the sake of this article, it can be said that the evidence does tip in favour of him being a gay man.

Considering his obsession with self-discipline and the contents of his semi-autobiographical book, Confessions of a Mask, this is the most probable possibility with the least assumptions being made.

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The debate will likely continue, as there is no way to know for sure. While there is much left from the man, most of it is contradictory. While his politics were firmly against Western beliefs creeping into Japanese society, he had a fondness for many Western things. His home was modeled in a Western style and his work was very popular with Western audiences, making him one of the most well-known Japanese writers in Western media.

From quote to quote, there is contradiction after contradiction, and it can be difficult to pin down much about him. One thing that can be known is that he had a lifelong obsession with the Samurai lifestyle, particularly focusing on the practice of seppuku. As he grew older, he used this knowledge to slowly build his own political group. Much of his rhetoric seemed quite toothless for a time.

While he advocated for a return to more traditional Japanese beliefs, most of what he did to get there was train in various martial arts, and slowly amass a group of like-minded students to join him. Because of how harmless he seemed, and how well loved his work was, many dismissed him and his following and let them go about their business.

But on November 25, , this dismissal was proven to be folly.

They then barricaded themselves in the office of the Commandant.