Yukio Mishima

Kimitake Hiraoka, known by his pen name Yukio Mishima, was a Japanese novelist, playwright, short story writer, actor, martial artist and model considered one of the most important postwar stylists of the Japanese language, nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature five times in the 1960s. His works include the novels Confessions of a Mask and The Temple of the Golden Pavilion and the autobiographical essay Sun and Steel, characterized by a luxurious vocabulary, a fusion of traditional Japanese and modern Western literary styles, and an obsessive fascination with beauty, eroticism and death. In 1970 Mishima led a private militia in an unsuccessful attempt to inspire a coup d'etat at a Tokyo military base, an episode that ended in his ritual suicide by seppuku.