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  • The Paris Review

    My Younger Brother Spreads His Palms, Maple Leaves: Yukio Mishima’s Haiku

    by Hiroaki Sato Oct 26, 2018 7 minutes

    Yukio Mishima.

    Many are likely to be surprised to learn that Yukio Mishima—yes, the writer who chose to die by dazzlingly public disembowelment and decapitation in 1970—wrote haiku. When you think of it, though, if you go to school in Japan, you will automatically be asked to compose haiku in grammar school or, at any rate, in junior high school. Also, sometimes, but not often, your parents will meticulously preserve every scrap of your school compositions or the school magazines printing your stuff. Both happened to Mishima. As a result, we have about a hundred eighty of his haiku collected among his complete works.

    Mishima was a literary prodigy. With haiku, it also helped that his Japanese-language teacher in the Middle Division of the Peers School was Kurō Iwata. Iwata didn’t just encourage his students to write. After the war, he established his reputation as an authority on Edo haikai. He published, among other things, a large compilation of commentaries on all of Bashō’s hokku.

    One of Mishima’s earliest haiku dates from when he was seven years old, and it reads:

    おとうとがお手手ひろげてもみじかな
    Otōto ga o-tete hirogete momiji kana
    My younger brother spreads his palms, maple leaves

    The “younger brother” here is Chiyuki, two years old at the time. He went on

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