Word: mishima
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...MISHIMA...
...Yukio Mishima had written 40 novels, 18 plays, 20 volumes of short stories and as many books of essays. He was Japan's literary exotic, sometimes mentioned for the Nobel Prize-a slick self-promoter and deliberately flashy vulgarian who redeemed his excesses with a gift that sometimes approached genius. In November 1970 he committed his famous ritual suicide (seppuku) after attempting to incite the Japanese army to a ridiculous uprising in behalf of the country's imperialistic traditions...
That spectacular exit dictated forever the critical terms on which Mishima and his works would be discussed. Perhaps he intended it that way. No writer who devoted as much creative energy to his life as to his novels could have found a valedictory image more arresting than a photograph, distributed round the world, of his own severed head...
...Mishima's samurai patriotism doubtless had a certain crackpot authenticity. He and his small private army were allowed to train with Japan's self-defense force. At the end, he was fanatically Japanese, yet he also cared deeply about foreign opinion. He has been lucky in his posthumous biographers in the West. The first, English Journalist Henry Scott-Stokes, last year published a sensitive and sympathetic analysis (The Life and Death of Yukio Mishima) that appreciated Mishima's accomplishments while explaining them in terms of his lurid narcissism...
Unlike Scott-Stokes, John Nathan wrote his biography with the cooperation of Mishima's family. An associate professor of Japanese literature at Princeton, Nathan acted for a time as Mishima's translator; among other things, he impressed Mishima the muscle builder by being able to beat him at arm wrestling. Nathan's access to Mishima's family and friends yields fascinating gossip: details of the damp sickroom in which Mishima's dictatorial grandmother raised him until he was twelve, of his puritanical father's efforts to steer him away from writing and into...