Yasunari Kawabata had Parkinson's disease), a possible illicit love affair, or the shock caused by the suicide of his friend Yukio Mishima in 1970. Unlike Mishima, Kawabata left no note, and since (again unlike Mishima) he had not discussed significantly in his writings the topic of taking his own life, his motives remain unclear. However, his Japanese biographer, Takeo Okuno, has related how he had nightmares about Mishima for two or three hundred nights in a row, and was incessantly haunted by the specter of Mishima. In a persistently depressed state of mind, he would tell friends during his last years that
Seppuku surrender at the end of World War II. This behavior had been widely praised by propaganda, which made a soldier captured in the Shanghai Incident (1932) return to the site of his capture to perform seppuku. In 1970, author Yukio Mishima and one of his followers performed public seppuku at the Japan Self-Defense Forces headquarters after an unsuccessful attempt to incite the armed forces to stage a coup d'état. Mishima performed seppuku in the office of General Kanetoshi Mashita. His second, a 25-year-old man named Masakatsu Morita, tried three times to ritually behead Mishima but failed; his head was finally