God Is Dead, Long Live the Emperor! Nietzschean Motifs of Death and Nihilism in Some Late Writings of Yukio Mishima (1925–1970)

Anthony Kosar

doi:10.33182/agon.v19i1-2.3612

Authors

Anthony Kosar Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.33182/agon.v19i1-2.3612

Keywords:

Yukio Mishima, Friedrich Nietzsche, nihilism, the death of God, Nietzscheanism

Abstract

This critical essay proposes an interpretation of the nihilism at the heart of the titular story of the newly translated collection of writings by Yukio Mishima (1925–1970), Voices of the Fallen Heroes and Other Stories (Vintage International: New York, 2025). The proposed Nietzschean reading takes this nihilism to be at least one natural consequence of ‘the death of God,’ which finds an unexpected parallel in Mishima’s reframing of Emperor Hirohito’s renunciation of his own divinity following the defeat of the Japanese Imperial Army in WWII. The essay concludes with some reflections on the limits of Nietzsche’s non-metaphysical justification of ‘higher types’ in light of the Japanese loss of belief in their own higher man and god-in-human-form, the emperor himself.

Author Biography

Anthony Kosar, Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg

Anthony Kosar works in the history of philosophy and has long-standing interests in European intellectual history, cultural and historical philosophy (Geschichtsphilosophie), ethics, and the philosophies of Friedrich Nietzsche. His writing on these topics, which he has presented at international conferences abroad, has been published in the series Nietzsche-Lektüren. He is currently a doctoral candidate in Philosophy at the Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg with a dissertation on Nietzsche, the “metaphysics of language” and morality. He lives in New Jersey with his wife and their two sons.