Bushido (武士道) - loyal to the king and patriotism in Mishima Yukio’s short stories

DOI: 10.18173/2354-1067.2022-0004

Abstract

Throughout his entire career, Mishima Yukio has always presented as a writer of martial spirit and beauty. Studying the his short stories, we can see a Mishima full of loyal to the king and patriotic with many criteria pushed to the limit. “Bushido” or “loyal to the king and patriotic” is that he not only inherited from his family background, from the situation of Japan protecting the imperial period, but also from favorite books named Hagakure. In his work, the ideal man in the bushido spirit is the full image of the modern Samurai: loyal to the king and patriotism, treating death as light as a feather and whether every moment of life or death, people also donate a rare beautifulness. However, it is because of the trend fascinated by death, his work has a sense of death fanaticism. This is probably the unfortunate limitation of a genius that people still praise as a strange “evil flower”.