One afternoon in the late 1960s, Henry Scott Stokes received a visit at the Tokyo office of the London Times from the writer Yukio Mishima, who declared to the startled young journalist, "You are the first person to take me seriously."
The episode is not mentioned in the new edition of Stokes' 1974 biography, "The Life and Death of Yukio Mishima," but it is a telling moment. Mishima appears at some indeterminate time to have elected Stokes as one of the persons best suited to oversee the reported facts of his life and, as fate would have it, his death. Stokes would have the triple distinction of being the sole foreign reporter at the press conference held 15 minutes after Mishima's suicide at the Self-Defense Forces headquarters in Ichigaya, the only non-Japanese at the writer's home the following day and the only foreigner to attend the subsequent funeral.
As a biographer, what is one to make of a figure variously portrayed as a narcissist, rightwing imperialist, homosexual, keen observer of human nature, leading writer of his day and a man who staged what must rank as the most dramatic death of any Japanese in living memory? At the very least, Mishima's life and execrable death make a compelling story, one that almost upstages his own fiction.