In the autumn of 1968, Yukio Mishima appeared at the door of his fellow novelist Yasunari Kawabata’s home, his hand tightly clenched around a congratulatory bottle of sake. Kawabata had just become the first Japanese writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature and Mishima knew that Japan’s ‘turn’ would likely not come again during his lifetime. Some attributed to this moment of profound disappointment Mishima’s decision two years later to take his own life, which he did in spectacular fashion: performing ritual suicide after trying to incite soldiers at a Self-Defence Forces barracks in Tokyo to rise up against all that he had come to detest about postwar Japan.

Whether or not Mishima was the better writer, his life and literary output was undoubtedly more varied, exhilarating and controversial than that of Kawabata. He shared with him a nostalgia for a vanishing traditional Japan, but he also embraced the modern world’s new technologies – notably cinema – alongside much of its literature, its forms of sexual expression and its love of violent extremes. Regarded for many years as a writer of literary fiction and plays, recent translations of Mishima’s more popular works and short stories have revealed him as a far more rounded figure, whose interests extended even to UFOs.

Born Kimitake Hiraoka a century ago this month, Mishima’s childhood was dominated by his paternal grandmother, Natsuko. Descended from high-ranking samurai of the late Tokugawa era and raised in the household of an imperial prince, Natsuko continued to enjoy a lavish lifestyle for a time after her marriage to Sadatarō Hiraoka. But then he went bankrupt, leaving his grandson to grow up in a rented home that had been largely emptied of the family’s precious heirlooms, sold off to pay Sadatarō’s debts.

Mishima paints this childhood scene for us in his semi-autobiographical Confessions of a Mask. He conjures a world in which he was largely ignored by his male relatives and brought up instead by his mother, Shizue, and especially his grandmother Natsuko, in whose room his crib was kept. Mishima’s sickliness as a child only made it easier for his grandmother to dominate him, keeping him away from friends and even from his younger sister and brother. She did, however, introduce him to kabuki, Nō theatre and the cinema. Meanwhile encounters with his father, Azusa, were rare and often unpleasant: he tried to discipline Mishima by violent means, including holding him inches from some train tracks as a train rocketed past – threatening to punish him if he flinched.

From the age of six, Mishima attended the elite Peers’ School in Tokyo. Alongside trips to the theatre, Mishima’s imagination began to be fuelled by what he read at school of Japanese and Greek myths and a range of modern European authors and philosophers. Mishima wrote poems for the school’s literary journal, completing no fewer than 500 western-style poems by the age of 16, with many more in Japanese styles. Even at this early age, Mishima’s fantasies were often violent, from samurai disembowelling themselves to Mishima himself being killed. He developed a concern, too, with the ugliness of ageing, after watching at close quarters his grandmother’s slow but steady decline.

Mishima’s big career break came while Japan was at war, when in 1941 one of his short stories, ‘Forest in Full Bloom’, was featured in the prestigious literary magazine Bungei Bunka. Still a schoolboy, he took ‘Yukio Mishima’ as a pen-name in order to keep his writing secret from his father – who had a distressing tendency to rip his son’s manuscripts apart whenever he found them. Mishima’s mother, by contrast, supplied him with paper, ink, tea and snacks, to keep her son going through the night.

In 1944, Mishima graduated from the Peers’ School – receiving a silver watch from Emperor Hirohito  – and narrowly avoided being drafted into the Imperial Japanese Army. The war affected him deeply. By day, he worked in an aircraft factory and by night he wrote at a furious pace, expecting that an American B-29 might get him at any moment. The real threat to Mishima’s fortunes, in the end, was not US firepower but American culture. When the war ended and the United States led the Allied Occupation of Japan, running from 1945 to 1952, an influx of American music, fashion, film and ideas left Mishima’s love of Japan’s classical and warrior past suddenly feeling reactionary rather than romantic. Mishima risked being an anachronism at the tender age of 20.

The answer, as many older writers of this period showed, was suddenly to discover within oneself more progressive opinions. Mishima managed this in style by exchanging works of historical fiction for an exploration of his own inner depths. Confessions of a Mask, published in 1949, was an ‘I-novel’: a semi-autobiographical genre made famous by the great modern writer Sōseki Natsume back in the early 1900s. Mishima described it to his publisher as ‘an attempt to perform upon myself a [psychological] vivisection’. This was only half the story. Confessions was also a canny bit of self-branding. Revealing though it was of Mishima’s childhood and unfolding sexuality, the book was the product, too, of careful research into social trends, psychology and sexology. Mishima wagered that the experimental mood of the times rendered audiences ripe for a book exploring nihilism and homosexuality. Critics agreed, and after a slow start to sales, Confessions of a Mask turned Mishima into one of the postwar era’s biggest literary names.

Mishima’s rise and rise across the 1950s mirrored Japan’s remarkable return to economic prosperity. His love of fashion and the high life – from parties at home in Japan to the forming of literary friendships abroad, including Tennessee Williams – endeared him to Japan’s new mass media. But he remained a disciplined writer, often working through the night. He would start around 11pm, putting in a few hours on what he called his ‘entertainments’ – his more popular, mass-market fare – before settling down to his ‘literary’ writing. The latter included a new novel, Thirst For Love (1950), about a woman who loses her husband to typhoid in the poverty of the postwar years and falls first for her father-in-law and later for a young gardener. It sold more than 70,000 copies and enabled Mishima to buy his first house.

When he wasn’t writing, Mishima was a fixture on Tokyo’s gay scene, which had emerged during the Occupation with the influx of American soldiers, and which Mishima depicted in Forbidden Colours (1951). And yet despite a string of male and female lovers across the early 1950s, Mishima confessed to feeling lonely much of the time. He returned from a trip to the United States and Europe in 1951-2 with a desire to transform himself, beginning with his body. He took as his model ancient Greece: a place, he was convinced, where only the intellect and the body had mattered – free from the shackles of conscience, that ‘horrendous invention of Christianity’.

Mishima began sun-bathing to address the pale complexion that he had lived with since childhood. Later, he took up swimming and thrice-weekly weight-training. He even brought a touch of Greece to his writing, taking Daphnis and Chloe as his model for a Japanese romance called The Sound of Waves (1954), about a fisherman who falls in love with a pearl diver. Some critics worried that Mishima seemed to be dabbling in the sort of idealisation of a ‘pure Japan’ that had tipped over into fascism little more than a decade before. But the book broke postwar records, went through 70 editions in three months, and was turned into a film starring no less a figure than Toshiro Mifune. Mishima’s shrewd sense of Japan’s shifting literary market remained strong as ever. After Shintarō Ishihara’s novel Season of the Sun (1955) – full of angry young men having sex, getting drunk and engaging in bare-knuckle brawls – became a surprise hit, Mishima responded with The Temple of the Golden Pavilion (1956): a carefully-researched portrayal of the disturbed young monk who burned down Kyoto’s Golden Pavilion in 1950.

Reasoning that in order to be truly free one must first tie oneself to something – or someone – Mishima got married on 1 June 1958, to a woman named Yōko Sugiyama. They moved into a new house, designed by Mishima himself, and in 1959 a daughter, Noriko, was born. A son, Iichiro, followed three years later. But Mishima spent little time with his family. He worked, instead, on kabuki and western-style plays, read up on the history of Shinto, pursued his film career – starring as a gangster in Afraid to Die – and fought a lawsuit over his novel After the Banquet, after some of the politicians upon whose lives he had based his story took offence.

These years, of settled family life combined with mounting professional disappointments and setbacks, became a turning point for Mishima. Never previously much interested in politics, he became inspired by the tumult in Japan over the renewal of its Security Treaty with the United States in 1960. To its detractors, the Security Treaty put Japan in mortal peril by tying it to America’s Cold War – risking the use of Soviet nuclear weapons against Japanese targets. It was also a sign that the Occupation, which officially ended in 1952, was to all intents and purposes still ongoing: the United States maintained military bases on Japanese soil and effectively dictated the country’s foreign policy – forbidding the Japanese to have anything to do with Communist China. Against this backdrop, Mishima began work on a trilogy about a military coup that had taken place in Tokyo in 1936. He gradually became drawn to what he imagined was the mindset involved: one of intense, clarifying drama and a willingness to die for a cause – far removed, Mishima concluded, from the bland existences of most Japanese in the 1960s.

Realising that younger novelists like Kenzaburō Ōe were starting to steal his limelight, Mishima began to search for a theme on which a last and life-defining work could be based. Though not a religious man, Mishima found in Buddhist concepts of illusion and reincarnation the grand canvas that he was seeking. In the course of his research he read up on Buddhism and visited India, including the Ajanta Caves: rock-cut monuments dating back, in some cases, to the second century BC. In 1965, he published Spring Snow, the first volume in what became a tetralogy: The Sea of Fertility, set against a span of 60 years of modern Japanese history and regarded as Mishima’s masterpiece.

While writing these final books, Mishima formed and began to help train his own private militia, the ‘Shield Society’. He hoped to make it the vehicle of his own violent and dramatic demise, intended as a statement against what he by now regarded as the ‘fraud’ of postwar Japan. This was epitomised, in his view, by a new American-authored Constitution which downgraded the Emperor to a mere ‘symbol’ of the state. A date was set, 25 November 1970, and it was agreed that samurai swords would be the weapons of choice. The decision was made to try to incite a coup at the Tokyo barracks of the Self-Defence Forces (SDF) – even though Mishima knew that the SDF would almost certainly want nothing to do with such an act, given its desire to distance itself from memories of the old and much-vilified Imperial Japanese Army.

Anyone keeping a close eye on Mishima, day to day, would have seen that his life was drawing to an end. He began to cancel book contracts and to meet as many of his old friends as he could. He did the same with his extended family. Meanwhile, the Shield Society rehearsed their plans in a hotel room before, on the morning of Mishima’s grand finale, he left the manuscript of volume four of The Sea of Fertility on his desk alongside a note that read: ‘Human life is limited but I would like to live forever.’

Dressed in a military uniform and accompanied by four members of his militia, Mishima entered the SDF barracks, grabbed the commandant – with whom he had made a prior appointment – and tied him to a chair. He then strode out onto the commandant’s balcony and, with great theatre, began to pour vitriol on Japan’s shameful recent history:

Postwar Japanese have opportunistically welcomed economic prosperity, forgetting the principles of the nation, losing their native spirit, pursuing the trivial without correcting the essential… leading themselves into spiritual emptiness. We have stood by like helpless bystanders, biting our teeth hard, passively witnessing the sell-off of our national politics over the last 100 years, deceiving ourselves about the humiliation of defeat in the war rather than confronting it. The Japanese themselves have assaulted their own history and tradition.

Mishima then called on the bemused soldiery below to do something about all this. ‘Is there no-one’, he asked, ‘who will hurl his body against the Constitution?’ Mishima’s impassioned speech was met with little more than silence and derision – a response that he must surely have anticipated. He returned inside the commandant’s office, knelt down and cut his stomach open with a sword. A man from his militia then beheaded him, completing the ritual, sacrificial act.

Mishima’s death was met, in Japan, with a mixture of sadness and bemusement. Japan, most people hoped, had moved beyond the era of coups and violent deaths. However great a writer Mishima had been, the manner of his death was deeply regrettable for the risk it ran of returning the country to an era that people wanted to forget. At the same time, even those like Ōe, who were vocal in their criticism of Mishima, understood the sense of loss that he felt and to which he had tried to respond in his life and work. Defeat in war had stripped Japan of something at once precious and yet difficult to name.

Though Mishima was partially eclipsed in later years by authors like Haruki Murakami, particularly outside Japan, in his centenary year he speaks to a basic unease that many Japanese would still recognise. Japanese leaders are struggling to stabilise the economy and to give an account of what their country stands for beyond the peace and prosperity that was once taken for granted but which is now threatened by China’s rise and Japan’s rapidly ageing and shrinking population. Mishima’s dream of a nation imbued with purpose and passion, seeded by childhood trips to watch kabuki plays with his grandmother, feels as compelling – and perhaps as disturbing – as ever.