November 25, 2010, is the 40th anniversary of the death of Yukio Mishima (1925-70). By general agreement, he was the leading Japanese writer of his generation. Mishima was also a playwright, and an incredibly versatile one. I am told that he mastered the complex language of classical Kabuki so completely that he could write for that stage. Mishima was a sportsman and a movie actor; he reveled in martial arts, and he saw many of his novels turned into movies. All in all, Mishima perhaps had earned the praise bestowed on him by The New York Times in the summer of 1970, just months before his suicide. The NYT Sunday magazine ran Mishima on the cover, and called him "The Renaissance Man of Japan."

I was not working for the Times then. However, Phil Shabecoff, who wrote the story, hearing that I was going down to Shimoda that August, handed me a copy of the magazine and asked me to convey the single copy to Mishima. I had already agreed to meet Mishima and his family down at Shimoda for a very short summer holiday, so nothing was easier.

Mishima took the magazine in his hand and glanced briefly at the cover picture of himself in white martial-arts gear, and said nothing except a brief thanks. I wondered at the time what could be on his mind. He was never that curt normally. I saw that he was not himself, or was preoccupied. What I did not know – and no one knew apart from Mishima and three student members of his rightwing nationalist society that he called the Tatenokai – was that Mishima was putting the finishing touches at the time to a plan for action in the autumn. This plan was so utterly fantastic and so entirely improbable that no one but a seasoned man of the theater could have thought it up, I thought afterward. No one but Mishima could have dared to carry out this phenomenally risky and deeply controversial (to this day) "spiritual coup d'etat," as right-wingers called it in the aftermath of the "Mishima Incident." In the event, Mishima was able to carry out his plan. At the time I was with him and his family in Shimoda – my girlfriend Akiko was with me, making this a family vacation – Mishima was just on the point of adding one more conspirator to his student group. This was Hiroyasu Koga, of whom more will be heard. "Furu-Koga" was the skilled swordsman in the party.

Here, briefly, was the plan. Mishima and his gang of four were to take control of an entire Japanese army base, located at Ichigaya in the heart of Tokyo (that same location was converted in the 1990s into the Defense Ministry). In other words, five men were to take command of however many hundreds on the base (I lack a headcount). These five men were not to carry firearms. (This was to be an affair of the sword – of steel.) To accomplish their goal – to assure control of the base at Ichigaya for about half an hour, during which time Mishima would make a patriotic speech, calling on the garrison to join with his Tatenokai in a march on the Diet – Mishima thought up a ruse. It was the only way to proceed. That ruse was to take hostage a senior officer at the base, and compel that officer by threats to summon the garrison to hear Mishima. If the soldiers did not respond, Mishima would perform hara-kiri, and so would Hissho Morita, 25, the student head of the Tatenokai (called the "Shield Society" in English, the idea being that this marginal paramilitary group would "protect" the Emperor, a piece of pure Mishima effrontery that engaged moral support from politicians within the ruling hierarchy of the LDP, notably long-lasting Prime Minister Eisaku Sato and rising "hawk" of the party Yasuhiro Nakasone, just about to be named the defense minister).

Mishima's plan was flexible as to the second part. Everything depended on how the soldiers reacted. Yes or no, to Mishima?

There is no space here to go into detail, but Mishima was taking a risk of monumental proportions; his plan could easily fail for any number of reasons. To take just the main ones:

1. He was proposing to go into action on that last morning of his against professional soldiers – while Mishima was depending on almost totally untrained students, mere lads, with close to zero training or discipline of any kind ever in their lives. Furthermore, they carried no firearms. Just one long sword, carried openly into the base by Mishima; one short sword, to be used in the hara-kiri, and to be hidden: and one short knife, with which to threaten the hostage – this crucial little blade was to be hidden in Mishima’s little attaché case, an innocent-looking box, on the way into the Ichigaya base, Mishima calculating that the guards at the gate, seeing Japan’s most famous man seated in the car, would just wave him through the guard post without a weapons check at all.

2. A second set of risks had to do with the choice of hostage. Two targets presented themselves in Mishima's view. Both were the subjects of very detailed planning, with split-second timing. One target, the first choice, was a Col. Miyata, who commanded the 32nd Infantry Regiment on the base. The other was a much, much more ambitious target, namely the officer in overall command of the base. He was a four-star general, no less, and his name was Kanetoshi Mashita. He was a seasoned soldier, a veteran of World War II. Going for the top general on the base could be too ambitious, Mishima reasoned, talking things over with his group that hot summer. He settled on Miyata. That was a name Mishima had in mind all through the autumn, and then crisis struck. Mishima sent Morita to check arrangements to meet with the colonel on Nov. 21, official records show; and Morita learned that day the crucial fact that the colonel would be away on Nov. 25. No one that I know is clear on why Mishima regarded the 25th as the day when he must strike. Some say that Mishima had set that date because that would be the day he handed over the last instalment of the long novel he had been working on for six years, The Sea of Fertility, the biggest work of his life. Be that as it may, Mishima was sticking to the 25th, and that meant he had to go for Mashita.

Instead of carrying out his action in a corner of the base, Mishima was going for the dignified chief of the entire, historic Ichigaya compound – a focus of Japanese modern history as the place where the War Crimes Tribunals took place after World War II. The original late 1920s building is still there, and was moved to one side in a 1990s reconstruction to make way for the new Defense Ministry. This last-minute change of plan might be compared to an opera director moving his cast all of a sudden from a minor rehearsal room to the full main stage of the theater, with no chance for full-scale rehearsal on that big stage. With novice singers! Everything then depended on surprise; that was about the only thing Mishima had going for him at this point.

3. A third set of risks thereby came to pass. How could Mishima and his gang of four be sure to keep control of Mashita's main office, with all its communications? The first thing the army staff might do – and in fact did do – was to call in the police, treating Mishima as a civilian intruder and nothing more. Pandora's Box sprang open. The army had communicated with the Tokyo police, and the cops alerted the media. Before Mishima could get started on his speech, the choppers were on their way, media ones from all the networks plus copters from the police. At that point the main radio stations had all interrupted their set programs with the news flashes that Mishima had broken into the Ichigaya base and was threatening to kill himself if he was not permitted to speak. Mashita's officers tried to break into their CO's office and were driven back by Mishima waggling his long sword, injuring several men. They had to cut a deal with him allowing him time for that speech.

Mishima, in other words, just scraped through the first part of his program, leading up to his speech. He was ill-received. The soldiers gathered below the big second-floor porch outside Mashita's office, from which Mishima spoke, looking down on them from above, howled and yowled in protest. Mishima, his words drowned out by prop wash from the helicopters, totally lacking such a thing as a megaphone, hardly got his message across, culminating with a final charge: that the Japanese armed forces were "nothing more than U.S. mercenaries." Any country, he was saying, had a right to possess armed forces. Japan's 1947 Peace Constitution forbade the nation from standing on its own two feet. These were terribly well-known points to conservatives in Japan, hardly worth committing hara-kiri about. So Mashita's officers must have reasoned. They let Mishima back into their CO's office – where Chibi-Koga continued to hold that small dagger to Mashita's throat – little suspecting what Mishima had in mind. In the event, Mishima botched his hara-kiri, and flapped around in agony in gallons of his blood, waiting for the merciful moment when the qualified swordsman in the group would step forward, take the sword in his hand and cut off Mishima's head.

That qualified swordsman was the student who was last to join Mishima's core group, namely Hiroyasu Koga ("Furu-Koga" as he was known to the others, to distinguish him from Masayoshi Koga, otherwise "Chibi-Koga"). Furu-Koga, seeing that Morita was failing to decapitate Mishima, seized the sword from Morita's hand, and chopped away until Mishima was headless.

The whole process was then repeated, with Mashita begging the students to go no further, and Furu-Koga in fact beheading Morita, with one clean stroke of the blood-stained blade.

What I have attempted to do here is to convey the colossal risks that Mishima took, culminating in not knowing himself, really, how to conduct a classical hara-kiri. Over the decades – aware that this was a gap in a 1974 biography I wrote for publication in New York by Farrar Straus & Giroux – I consulted two of his teachers, one at the Imperial Palace guards' dojo, where Mishima trained in kendo every week, and a second sensei, who taught at a police station in central Tokyo. One of these teachers told me, very much in confidence (so I cannot use his name) that: "Mishima's wrists were stiff, he could not hold the shinai (a bamboo sword used in kendo)." The other sensei, the man who taught at a police station in Tokyo, mentioned that Mishima came to consult him – as late as the later summer or autumn of 1970, if I have got the date right – on how to commit hara-kiri, saying that he needed to know for something he, Mishima, was writing! From conversing with Mishima, this expert learned that he was unversed in carrying out hara-kiri. A total amateur – Mishima – had embarked on his last day, without any preparation or training to speak of. Hara-kiri, it turns out, is an extremely technical skill, not for amateurs, but for the samurai of old, with dozens of years of training behind them. Yet Mishima prevailed in his intentions. What drove him forward so, taking such risks of technical failure on many levels? What was the clash-point, as it were, that roused him to action?

I have spent (a small part of) the last 40 years worrying away, like a terrier with a bone, at this one. Mishima had something firmly in mind all right, and it was a big consideration to him. Something gave him the vast immoral courage he showed on his last day. It was the matter of the Showa Emperor.

Mishima grieved over the Emperor's record of governance, as one might call it. We know this from Mishima's writing – from his entire mature oeuvre of the 1960s. For example, his passionate work Eirei no Koe (The Voices of the Heroic Dead). This is an unclassifiable work, the scholars say, part oration. It is a cry from the pit. Mishima disclosed that this work, harking on the sacrifices made by the kamikaze pilots of 1944-45, took him "three days and nights, without pause." It was written in the 1960s, when Mishima was trying to come to terms with recent Japanese history.

His conclusion? The Showa Emperor should not have made a declaration in a noted radio address delivered on New Year's Day 1946 to the effect that he was "not divine," not a god. This declaration was made at the behest of the U.S., and that stuck in Mishima's throat. Not that he was anti-American, or anything like it. No more international writer there ever was in Japan, with so many of his works translated. At his home, on his last morning, he left two sealed letters. One was to Ivan Morris, professor of Japanese literature at Columbia University. The other was to Donald Keene, Morris' colleague at Columbia, equally renowned, of great stature. Mishima wrote long letters in Japanese to both men. The gist was that they would have understood why he did what he did, should his death come to pass. I am not aware that he wrote such letters to any Japanese person, unless it would be Takao Tokuoka, a Mainichi reporter with whom, much as with myself, Mishima kept in touch until the end. That letter to Tokuoka – a member of the Press Club – was mainly to have the Mainichi man standing by, close to Ichigaya, so that there was a reliable reporter on the spot – he alerted a third reporter, with a similar objective in mind, the late Munekatsu Date of NHK. Mishima did not trust the Japanese media to get his story down right. He wanted to be seen as a patriot. That has not been a feature of mainstream coverage of Mishima down the years.

Mishima's suicide was a case of a "suicide of remonstrance" in his eyes, I believe. He remonstrated with his sovereign for kowtowing to the Americans in 1945-6. Was this none of his business? The thing about Mishima is that he always had something to say. He was articulate as hell. Sometimes he made no sense, then he would recoup in a flash. He was a very clever man, bright as two buttons. He foresaw a place for himself in the pantheon of Japanese heroes, if it came to death on his last day. At least that is what I think, as it is the only way I can interpret the note he left on his desk in Japanese on the morning of Nov. 25, 1970. "Human life is limited," he wrote, "I want to live forever."

Deeply moved by Mishima's death, shocked to the core, Morris sat down after the events of 1970 and devoted the next several years to writing his monumental study of Japanese heroes, The Nobility of Failure. Ivan dedicated his work to the memory of Mishima and in his introduction to this thick tome he remarked that Mishima's case came "foursquare" as he put it, within the category of heroism in the Japanese mode. In Japan, the true hero fails utterly and ignominiously and crudely. He has to bow out to a chorus of hisses. That was just the reception that Mishima received from the soldiers at Ichigaya on Nov. 25, 1970. "Stop playing the hero," they shouted up at him.

I am in two minds, at the time of writing in late October, as to whether to go to the memorial service being held this Nov. 25 at a hall in Kudan to mark that 40th anniversary of Mishima's death. The place is the Kudan Kaikan (which until 1953 was called Gunjin Kaikan, or Soldiers' Hall), a rather dour building at the bottom of the hill that leads to the Yasukuni Shrine. The time is 5 p.m., and the meeting will commence with a Shinto ritual. A priest clad in robes will wave the sacred sakaki branches, suitable for the occasion. A seminar will follow, with about 1,300 people to attend, the organizers say. The chief organizer is Masahiro "Mike" Miyazaki, who served as one of Mishima's right-hand men in the late 1960s, helping Mishima to gather students for the Tatenokai. Miyazaki is a freelance journalist and lecturer. (His e-mail is sna76980@yahoo.co.jp)

In closing, let me mention one key issue. Everybody believes that Mishima wanted to die. Born in 1925 and growing up in the era of militarism, this haunted man was caught up in a time warp. So far, many would agree with what I write here. What was fundamental was that he wanted to die with someone. I felt that powerfully. It wasn't in anything he said, it was in his mien – in his behavior – at times erratic, as on the day when he mailed to me at my home an envelope full of glossy black-and-white photos of himself dying in various horrible ways. The question had become with whom was he to die? His choice fell upon Morita, who was at 25 fully 20 years his junior. Theirs was a shinju, a lovers' double suicide. Japanese friends have been saying this to me for donkey's years. It must be true. Someday, somehow, someone may come up with evidence. In the meantime this is the credible case history in Japanese eyes. Ask the older generation, for example, the society women of Mishima's generation. They will tell you, as they did me, this was such a case.

The really extraordinary thing, though, is the case of Furu-Koga, the man with the sword. Years ago, I was told that after serving a prison sentence of a few years, he went off to Shikoku, married a priest's daughter, and has lived quietly and has not been bothered by the media, by common agreement, for these 37 years or so. To my knowledge, no one has ever intruded on him. There are no photos that I know of. This is confirmed by Miyazaki. He says that Furu-Koga's present whereabouts are unknown. This is indicative, I would say, of the sensitivities still surrounding the case. Furu-Koga, the beheader, has gone off the map. I have not made a sincere effort to track him down, I confess. The man is carrying a load of memories such as the rest of us have not known. Not that Mishima is easy to shuck off. Anyone who knew him may have had their share of nightmares. Though it is very long time since I woke up screaming, my conscious self is constantly aware that this man I knew took the plunge. "When will you ever stop dancing with the ghost of Mishima?" my wife teases me.

Probably never, is the answer. He was a great writer. He wrote a Japanese that could be translated into English, just like that (compare the difficulties of translating the elusive Yasunari Kawabata into English!) Morris used to recommend the novel Kinkakuji (The Temple of the Golden Pavilion), which he translated. See the last 50 pages of this work written in 1956, when Mishima was just 31. Oh how his mind ranged. He saw emptiness ahead, at a time when most people were expecting industrial Japan to carry on, pointed vertically upward forever. Not at all, said Mishima, we've run out of juice, as a society, something is very badly wrong with Japan, he said. He was miles ahead of the pack. Let that be his epitaph: he always had something to say. ❶

Henry Scott Stokes is a Tokyo-based freelance journalist. He has been a member of the Club since 1964, when he arrived in Japan to open the Financial Times office. He is the author of the biography, The Life and Death of Yukio Mishima.