November 25th marks the date of Mishima’s death fifty years ago. See these articles: The Importance of Being Mishima Yukio — Yukio Mishima’s enduring, unexpected influence — Yukio Mishima’s dark fantasies of imperial Japan — Mishima in the World: 50 Years Later — Mishima: Historical Visionary aestheticsDamian FlanagandeathembodimentHosoe EikōIrmela Hijiya-KirschnereitJapanjohn grayKishin ShinoyamaMishimaphilosophical literaturephotographysuicide
A tape recording of a conversation with novelist Yukio Mishima (1925-70) has been found in which he talked about his view of literature and life and death about nine months before he committed suicide by disembowelment. — The Japan News. JapanJohn besterMishimaphilosophical literatureYukio Mishima
Here is an interview I came across with Yourcenar. As one would expect she takes no prisoners and clearly would rub up activists the wrong way — hence they systematically avoid her, assuming they’d even read top-notch stuff like “Hadrian”. I guess she would be unknown to “creative writing” courses constituted as they seem to be by…
Nice piece especially if one is a Mishima fan and like me one has yet to visit Japan, Japan being one of the very few countries on my travel bucket list: Perhaps this explains why the author Yukio Mishima took his pen name from the city, though the writer claimed that he just happened to be…
Speaking of autoscopic doubles (Toole-Ignatius Reilly) I’m working on a review of Cory MacLauchlin’s Butterfly in the Typewriter: The Tragic Life of John Kennedy Toole and the Remarkable Story of A Confederacy of Dunces. Cory reminds us that today marks the death of Toole. It is often said “how can one assess the greatness of the author on one work?”…
I’ve been thinking a lot about my instinctive predilection for writers whose life and work bleed into each other, an attraction I felt long before I was fully aware of their biographical details. The first was Kafka; the second Rolfe; the third Musil; the fourth Mishima and the fifth, Toole. I’ve come to the conclusion that these philosophical novelists…
One of my favourite philosophically orientated novelists is Mishima. I can’t attest to the reliability of this bio-sketch but it’s a start. There is not much scholarly literature on Mishima but here is an appreciation in, of all places, the British Journal of Psychiatry. Paul Schrader made a superb attempt at expressing Mishima’s thinking (insofar as…
manwithoutqualities 