>>24518082
>Mishima's story The Cigarette (煙草, Tabako), published in 1946, describes a homosexual love he felt at school and being teased from members of the school's rugby union club because he belonged to the literary society.
>The Cigarette was published in the new literary magazine Humanity (人間, Ningen), followed by The Middle Ages in December 1946.[112] The Middle Ages is set in Japan's historical Muromachi Period and explores the motif of shudō (man-boy love) against a backdrop of the death of the ninth Ashikaga shogun... This elevated writing style and the homosexual motif suggest the germ of Mishima's later aesthetics.
>Writing to editor Sakamoto Kazuki, Mishima declared: "This next novel will be my first I-novel ever; of course, it won't be an I-novel of the Literary Establishment sort, but it will be an attempt to vivisect myself in which I will turn on myself the blade of psychological analysis that I have honed for the hypothetical figure so far. I will aim for as much scientific accuracy as I can; I will try to be Baudelaire's so-called 'victim and executioner.'"
>While working on his novel Forbidden Colors, Mishima visited gay bars in Japan...
Jirō Fukushima published a memoir containing letters from Mishima claiming that the two were gay lovers. Here's a picture of Mishima with Akihiro Miwa, another one of his lovers, a drag queen he met while doing "research" in gay bars lul