Noboru: Mishima’s Life Story

Mishima and Noboru share the intentions of their beliefs on paper, as well as the implication of the beliefs through the similar people they associate with. His attempts led Mishima to the military headquarters where he planned to rally the uniformed men to fight for old Japan, for the emperor, and not for the western society that had swept over Japan. What started out as a revival of Bushido, turned into a full revival of traditional Japanese tradition, free from western rule. It was Noboru’s mission to return Ryuji to his glorified days at sea through death, symbolically implying Mishima’s mission to return Japan to her glorified days through the death of western ideals. But like Noboru’s mother couldn’t prevent him from expressing his views through the gang, Mishima’s father couldn’t prevent him from writing. In 1968, Yukio Mishima formed a group of 100 male students into the Shield Society with the intent of reviving the practice of Bushido. In the first piece he wrote, Confessions of a Mask, Mishima discussed his homosexuality, and at the end of the piece he resolves that he will have to wear a “mask” so to avoid social scorn. Although Noboru’s gang evolved into a brutal group of unforgiving boys, they similarly were fighting to reject what society had become. In this way Mishima is in fact scorning the citizens of Japan who wear American “masks” so to fit in with society. Similarly both stories end in death but they do not end in tragedy because through Bushido Mishima was born into traditional Japanese legacy, and through his death Ryuji was born into the idealistic life at sea. In Noboru’s case he

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wrote about Ryuji’s transformation from being the idealistic sailor to wearing the “mask” of a land-dwelling father, the worst occupation a man could have. hima because his father, an anti-literary government official, would not permit him to write. Like Mishima, Noboru put his beliefs about Ryuji on paper in his diary.

It was in his writing that Mishima could express his views of the Japanese culture that was slowly adopting western practices.