Word: mishima
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Published in a three-part serialization, it is one of the most popular novels in recent Japanese literature. Critics have proclaimed Murakami, also the author of the much-lauded Dance Dance Dance and Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, the heir-apparent to the great Yukio Mishima (Decay of the Angel...
...their very different ways, each of the Big Three of modern Japanese literature--Yukio Mishima, Yasunari Kawabata and Junichiro Tanizaki--devoted himself to commemorating aspects of an older, purer Japan they all felt would wither after their country's defeat in World War II. That left their postwar successors, most notably Haruki Murakami, to record the ghosts and vacant lots of a land whose spirit seemed to have vanished, leaving a soulless, synthetic wasteland of Dunkin' Donuts parlors, automated fashion victims and cinder-block abortion clinics...
More threatening are the groups that wish to restore the imperial cult. The writer Yukio Mishima collected around himself a band of uniformed young men who shared his passion to make the Japanese--the military forces in particular--once again worship the Emperor. His student followers ended up by worshipping Mishima, and one joined him in his samurai-style suicide in 1970. Even today there are groups of right-wing Emperor worshippers who go around assassinating those they regard as unpatriotic. The mayor of Nagasaki was shot by a right-wing extremist in 1990 after saying the late Emperor Hirohito...
...however much he tried to school himself in foreign masters of despair -- Mishima, say, or Celine -- Miller could not help remaining a fearlessly joyous soul, "100% American," as he put it, right down to his repudiation of America. No one ever embraced life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness more lustily. An Emersonic boom was his, and Whitmanic energy. Like Emerson, he saw the Greek roots in enthusiasm -- the word means divine possession -- and knew that the poet "speaks adequately only when he speaks somewhat wildly . . . Not with intellect alone, but with intellect inebriated by nectar." And like Whitman...