After six years at school, he became the youngest member of the editorial board of its literary society. He voraciously read the works of numerous classic Japanese authors as well as Raymond Radiguet, Oscar Wilde, Rainer Maria Rilke and other European authors, both in translation and in the original. At twelve, Mishima began to write his first stories. Schooling and early worksĪt the age of six, Mishima enrolled in the elite Gakushūin, the Peers' School in Tokyo. He also raided Mishima's room for evidence of an "effeminate" interest in literature and often ripped apart the boy's manuscripts. His father, a man with a taste for military discipline, employed parenting tactics such as holding the young boy up to the side of a speeding train. Mishima returned to his immediate family when he was 12.
Natsuko did not allow Mishima to venture into the sunlight, to engage in any kind of sport or to play with other boys he spent much of his time alone or with female cousins and their dolls. It is to Natsu that some biographers have traced Mishima's fascination with death. Natsuko was prone to violence and morbid outbursts, which are occasionally alluded to in Mishima's works. Through his grandmother, Mishima was a direct descendant of Tokugawa Ieyasu.
Natsuko was the granddaughter of Matsudaira Yoritaka, the daimyo of Shishido in Hitachi Province, and had been raised in the household of Prince Arisugawa Taruhito she maintained considerable aristocratic pretensions even after marrying Mishima's grandfather, a bureaucrat who had made his fortune in the newly opened colonial frontier in the north and who eventually became Governor-General of Karafuto Prefecture on Sakhalin Island. Mishima's early childhood was dominated by the shadow of his grandmother, Natsuko, who took the boy, separating him from his immediate family for several years. He had a younger sister, Mitsuko, who died of typhus in 1945 at the age of 17, and a younger brother, Chiyuki. Mishima's paternal grandparents were Sadatarō Hiraoka and Natsuko (family register name: Natsu) Hiraoka. Shizue's father, Kenzō Hashi, was a scholar of Chinese classics, and the Hashi family had served the Maeda clan for generations in Kaga Domain. His father was Azusa Hiraoka, a government official, and his mother, Shizue, was the daughter of the 5th principal of the Kaisei Academy. Mishima was born in the Yotsuya district of Tokyo (now part of Shinjuku).
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