Yukio Mishima wrote forty novels, dozens of plays and hundreds of stories before ending his life by seppuku in 1970, at the age of forty-five, after a failed attempt to incite a coup at a Tokyo military garrison. The Temple of the Golden Pavilion (1956) took a real event — a young acolyte burning down Kyoto's Kinkaku-ji in 1950 — and turned it into a study of a stammering, ugly novice destroyed by the perfection of a beautiful object. Confessions of a Mask (1949), which made his name at twenty-four, described a young man's discovery of his own desires with a directness Japanese fiction had not attempted. The Sea of Fertility tetralogy, whose final volume he delivered to his publisher on the morning of his death, follows one man watching a soul reincarnate across sixty years of Japanese history. He was shortlisted for the Nobel Prize three times. Obsessed in his last decade with bodybuilding, the emperor and traditional martial virtue, he founded a private militia called the Tatenokai and rehearsed his own ending for years.