On November 25, 1970, Yukio Mishima shocked his country when he took a top general hostage and urged the soldiers of the Jietai (Japan's Self-Defense Forces) to instigate a coup. When his astonishing plan failed, he participated in a shinju (a ritual double love suicide). It was an impressive tragic public display that his fellow citizens still find difficult to understand.

Mishima, who was once an advocate for the Westernization of Japanese art and society, in the later part of his life promoted classical Japanese ideals. A novelist, playwright, film actor, martial arts enthusiast, and political commentator, Mishima was undoubtedly the most famous person in Japan at the time of his death.

Henry Scott Stokes, one of his closest friends, wrote a biography that illuminates the achievements and troubling views of a brilliant and deeply troubled man, an artist about whom Nobel Prize-winning author Yasunari Kawabata said, "A writer of Mishima's caliber appears once every two hundred or three hundred years."