Mishima, Yukio

His real name is Kimitake Hiraoka, a Japanese author born in Tokyo, where he mainly grew up with his grandmother. His father was a government official who did not think very highly of literature, and it has been held that Yukio Mishima adopted his pseudonym only so that his father would not find out that he was writing. Mishima received his basic education at a school for young aristocrats. During the Second World War, he did not manage to qualify as a soldier but instead had to work at a factory. After the war, he studied law at the University of Tokyo in 1944-47. Afterwards he worked for a year or so at the Ministry of Finance before he started working fulltime on his authorship. The person who initially brought him out and enabled the publication of his stories in different magazines was the Nobel Prize winner Kawabata.