One of Mishima’s acolytes cut off Mishima’s head, and then was himself beheaded by another conspirator. The general, still gagged and bound to a chair, watched in horror. Then he knelt, drawing a short sword, and stabbed himself in the gut, slashing downward and to the left. Finally, he climbed back inside the window of the general’s office. Mishima began: “Japanese people today think only of money! And politicians don’t care about Japan: they’re just greedy for power!” He had planned to speak for half an hour, but gave up after just seven minutes (“True men and samurai … Will no one join me? … Rise and die! Rise and die! … ”). Three helicopters clattered away in dizzy arcs overhead between the rotors and the yelling, the audience could hear almost nothing Mishima said: he had miscalculated the acoustics of his stage. Mishima was heckled and jeered, with the soldiers shouting at him to quit acting like an idiot, to shut up, to get down from his impromptu stage. Mishima called on the men to rise up and overthrow the constitution that the Americans had put in place after 1945, the peace constitution that “renounced war forever” and made the emperor a symbolic ruler, a ruler without any real powers. He threatened to kill the general unless the soldiers were assembled to hear him speak. Mishima then stepped out of the general’s window onto a parapet to address the base’s soldiers, thirty feet below. On November 25, 1970, the writer Yukio Mishima took a four-star general hostage here. The atlas’s empty space was Japan’s Defense Ministry. I crossed the wide stretch of Yasukuni dōri and found a district map engraved on a metal signboard. What it was, I didn’t know, and my map was blank, showing only a few scattered rectangles and unnamed roads that looped into each other and out again. A place for performances, for high theater, for cinema. A circle that drew the sky down and threw the earth upward. I came to a halt on Yasukuni dōri and rocked backward, as if I had almost tripped at the edge of an abyss.Ī natural amphitheater. In Ichigaya, I passed concrete office block after drab office block-Sumitomo Insurance, Snow Brand Milk, the Salvation Army, the Vogue Building-when suddenly the landscape cracked open. Remnants of the great estates owned by temples and the nobility: now university enclaves and “soaplands”-red-light districts-and apartment blocks for salarymen. These are the northern wards, in what was the old High City. If Tokyo were a clock, then the hours between ten and midnight-the arc running from Shinjuku through Ikebukuro to Tabata-and I were strangers. Yukio Mishima delivers a speech shortly before his death.

Beautiful star by yukio mishima