In a voiceover near the outset of Paul Schrader's Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985), Yukio Mishima intones what amounts to his suicide note, but what also comprises a testament to his form of art, and the artful form of his final act: “Recently I’ve sensed an accumulation of many things which cannot be expressed by an objective form like the novel. Words are insufficient. So I found another form of expression.” The assertion introduces a key theme throughout the film: the tension between world and word, between action and representation. In Schrader's film, Mishima finds his new “form of expression” in that act for which he was most widely known: the failed military coup (seeking to reinstall the emperor's glorified place and to remake the military as “soul” of the Japanese) and the seppuku or ritual suicide he enacted to end it in an outburst of retro-nationalistic fervor in 1970.

That search for “another form of expression” fits as well Schrader's own aims for the film, an ambitious remaking of normative rules for the biopic as a genre, rejecting the linear structure typical of the biopic (and, for that matter, most Hollywood cinema) in favor of a complex nested structure imbedding an account of the day of Mishima's final act, retrospective flashbacks heavily employing voiceover to sketch a selective account of his life leading to that point, and anti-naturalistically staged excerpts from Mishima's fiction. There is a sense, too, that Schrader's film also amounts to an act of ritual suicide, at least in terms of career prospects: Mishima was a project from its inception doomed to failure.

Schrader, after all, in the wake of the commercial and personal disaster of his previous picture, presented American audiences with a complexly structured film, much of it experimental in form, heavily reliant on voiceover for narrative connections, that declared itself in its title a biopic but then deconstructed the premises of the biopic genre. Its central figure was a Japanese writer little known to the broad public—few of his works had at that point been translated, fewer still were in print—who, if known at all, was remembered mostly for his manner of death, a gory end unlikely to resonate with an American public largely unacquainted with its historical and political contexts. Schrader worked with an all-Japanese cast.