SOURCE: Hutton, Alice H. “Decay of Mishima's Japan: His Final Word.” International Fiction Review 20, no. 2 (1993): 99-102.

In the following essay, Hutton discusses Mishima's antipathy toward Western influence in Japan.

Japan's Yukio Mishima gave a clue as to his reasons for his seppuku (samurai ritual suicide) five years before his death, when in 1965 he announced his plan for a tetralogy of novels tracing Japan's history in the twentieth century, after which he would have nothing left to say. That series of novels, The Sea of Fertility, indicts the West with its democratizing, commercializing influence for the erosion of traditional Japanese culture and morality. Mishima alerted Japan to his intent in his stage play Madame de Sade, appearing the year he started his tetralogy. Just as the democratizing French Revolution, the background of the stage play, hastens the erosion of traditional society and culture in the European West, so too...