God Is Dead, Long Live the Emperor! Nietzschean Motifs of Death and Nihilism in Some Late Writings of Yukio Mishima (1925–1970)
God Is Dead, Long Live the Emperor! Nietzschean Motifs of Death and Nihilism in Some Late Writings of Yukio Mishima (1925–1970)

Summary/Abstract: This critical essay proposes an interpretation of the nihilism at the heart of the titular story of the newly translated collection of writings by Yukio Mishima (1925–1970), Voices of the Fallen Heroes and Other Stories (Vintage International: New York, 2025). The proposed Nietzschean reading takes this nihilism to be at least one natural consequence of ‘the death of God,’ which finds an unexpected parallel in Mishima’s reframing of Emperor Hirohito’s renunciation of his own divinity following the defeat of the Japanese Imperial Army in WWII. The essay concludes with some reflections on the limits of Nietzsche’s non-metaphysical justification of ‘higher types’ in light of the Japanese loss of belief in their own higher man and god-in-human-form, the emperor himself

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