Yukio Mishima

(1925 - 1970)

Yukio Mishima resigned from his first job out of college in the finance ministry in 1948 to devote himself to writing, one year later publishing his first full-length novel, Confessions of a Mask. Having earlier founded a group dedicated to the restoration of power to the emperor, he led four comrades in a takeover of an army headquarters in Tokyo in 1970 and on the premises committed seppuku, the ritual form of suicide by sword employed by samurai.