Yukio Mishima

Born Kimitake Hiraoka, he spent early childhood almost entirely under his domineering grandmother's roof, sickly and kept from other children: a frailty he later reversed through obsessive weightlifting, boxing, and kendo. A medical misdiagnosis kept him out of the wartime draft, a rejection that shadowed him with guilt for the rest of his life.

He wrote at a furious pace: Confessions of a Mask, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion (based on a real monk's 1950 arson of a Kyoto temple), and the four-volume Sea of Fertility, begun with Spring Snow, while cultivating a public image as actor, model, and nationalist agitator. In 1968 he founded the Tatenokai, a small private militia devoted to restoring the emperor's authority.

On November 25, 1970, having delivered his last tetralogy volume to his publisher that morning, he and four Tatenokai members seized a Self-Defense Forces base in Tokyo; when his speech to the assembled soldiers was met with jeers, he committed ritual seppuku, beheaded by an aide.