Born Kimitake Hiraoka, Yukio Mishima was born into an upper-class family and raised primarily by his possessive grandmother who was a descendent by marriage of the Tokugawas, the ruling family of feudal, samurai-governed Japan from the seventeenth century to 1868. Though Mishima and his grandmother lived in the same house as his parents, she raised him in relative isolation in her private ground floor chambers where she often lay ill with her grandson tending her. Mishima published his first long work, Hanazakari no Mori (The Forest in Full Bloom) in 1944 when he was only nineteen years old.

Mishima's pseudonym was chosen by Fumio Shimizu, an editor of the literary magazine that the The Forest in Full Bloom first appeared in, and teacher at the prestigious Gakushuin (Peers School) in Tokyo where Mishima excelled in writing and literary studies. The pseudonym was chosen for its romantic evocations: "Mishima...