Yukio Mishima Another traditional element of the suicide ritual was the composition of so-called death poems before their entry into the headquarters. Mishima planned his suicide meticulously for at least a year and no one outside the group of hand-picked "Tatenokai" members had any indication of what he was planning. His biographer, translator John Nathan, suggests that the coup attempt was only a pretext for the ritual suicide of which Mishima had long dreamed. Mishima made sure his affairs were in order and left money for the legal defense of the three surviving "Tatenokai" members. Mishima's grave is located at the Tama
Yukio Mishima to mixed critical response. Mishima was considered for the Nobel Prize for Literature three times and was a favorite of many foreign publications. However, in 1968 his early mentor Kawabata won the Nobel Prize and Mishima realized that the chances of it being given to another Japanese author in the near future were slim. In a work published in 1970, Mishima wrote that the writers he paid most attention to in modern western literature were Georges Bataille, Pierre Klossowski, and Witold Gombrowicz. Mishima was also an actor, and had a starring role in Yasuzo Masumura's 1960 film, "Afraid to Die".