He was born in 1925, and sort of snatched away from his family by his weirdly overbearing/violent/high society grandma for awhile -- and it sounds like his dad was pretty abusive too. He barely dodged the draft and sort of came into his own in the post-war lit scene.
"Mishima actually denounced Emperor Hirohito for renouncing his claim of divinity after World War II, arguing that millions of Japanese had died in the war for their "living god" Emperor, and that the Showa Emperor's renouncing his divinity meant that all those deaths were in vain." (Wikipedia)He may have been gay or (bisexual), but it also sounds like his widow tried to shut a lot of those rumors down, so: who knows? It seems he was very strongly fixated on death, and kind of...both the eroticism of and idealization of it -- he apparently circled around suicide a LOT before committing it himself; in 1970 he tried to inspire a coup and then committed seppuku when it failed, an eerie parallel to the movie which he wrote and starred in?! Yep! It's all pretty wild.
Some stuff about this movie!
- The music (the only sound in the film -- no dialogue) is actually kind of random, since they synced it to the end of the film and then just matched up the length. From the Mishima's comments in the liner notes: "I made no attempt to plot the soundtrack, preferring to leave it entirely to chance. The intended effect was that of an avant-garde 'happening.' " I just thought that was cool.
- They shot it in like two days?!
- Some people fainted when they saw it because this was some intense shit for the 60s okay
This movie's very visually striking; are you ready for like a million pictures?!
