A five-time Nobel nominee in a self-designed military uniform, standing on a Tokyo balcony with a commandant tied to a chair behind him, urging a thousand soldiers to overthrow the government. This episode follows Yukio Mishima from that jarring final image back to his beginnings as Kimitake Hiraoka, born in Tokyo in 1925 and raised in the darkened sick room of his grandmother Natsuko, a descendant of the Tokugawa founder who kept him from sunlight, sports, and other boys. At twelve he was returned to his father Azusa, who held him beside speeding trains and tore up his hidden manuscripts to force masculinity onto a frail, bookish son.

We trace the birth of the pen name on a train passing Mishima Station and snowy Mount Fuji, the 1945 medical exam where a cold was misdiagnosed as tuberculosis and kept him out of the army, and the survivor’s guilt that followed Japan’s surrender, his sister’s death, and his mentor’s suicide. The conversation then covers his isolation in a left-leaning post-war literary scene, the bestselling The Sound of Waves, the crushing rejection of Kyoko’s House in 1959, and his turn to kendo, bodybuilding, the Hagakure, and the Shield Society militia, culminating in the incident of November 25, 1970.

• How Natsuko’s status anxiety and Azusa’s violence shaped a boy who built a fortress out of words
• The influence of Kabuki and Noh theater and the idea of the mask as both artistic device and psychological armor
• Why critics accused Mishima of fascist sympathies for romanticizing pre-war values
• His hatred of consumer culture as a green snake strangling Japan and his view of the emperor as a sacred cultural symbol
• The prepaid Christmas gifts, legal defense funds, and finished manuscript that suggest the coup was staged as a deliberately authored death