- Let me ask you this: what do you wish for more than anything else? When he spoke, though his voice stammered slightly, his words were bold: - Before the sun... at the top of a cliff before sunrise, while paying reverence to the sun... while looking down upon the sparkling sea, beneath a tall, noble pine... to kill myself. Thus wrote Yukio Mishima through the characters Lieutenant Hori and Isao of Runaway Horses, the third book in Mishima’s tetralogy The Sea of Fertility. Mishima gave the last chapters of its final book to his editor on November 25th, 1970, shortly before committing seppuku or ritual suicide after a failed coup d’etat. The narrative of Runaway Horses is very focused on the subject of seppuku, and to me as a Westerner, it is hard to understand why someone would value ceremonial death over life. In order to understand the significance of suicide for Mishima and modern Japan, I must firstly look at the cultural legacy of seppuku. In the West, a better-known word for seppuku is hara-kiri. However, it is rarely used by the Japanese themselves as it is a vulgar, colloquial word for suicide, and none of these...