Ken Ogata wears an unidentified watch

On the morning of November 25, 1970, the novelist Yukio Mishima put on the uniform of his private militia, drove to a Japanese army base, took a general hostage, gave a speech from a balcony that the soldiers below jeered, and then committed seppuku. Paul Schrader's Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985), produced by Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas, builds its whole structure around that last day, cutting between it and chapters drawn from Mishima's life and his novels. Ken Ogata plays him.

In one of the dressing scenes the camera catches his wrist: a white-gloved hand, the gold tassel of a ceremonial sword close by, and a square yellow-gold dress watch on a dark leather strap. The dial is a plain champagne with slim baton markers and a crown set in the middle of the case side, an elegant, ordinary mid-century dress watch. No brand name is legible on it, so it stays, honestly, a square gold watch and nothing more.

There is something to that anonymity. A man who choreographed his own death down to the uniform, the balcony speech and the ceremonial sword still strapped an ordinary gold watch to his wrist for it.