Word: mishima
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Japanese Novelist Yukio Mishima, who committed ritual suicide in 1970, was amazed when he first learned how many American intellectuals and artists go to psychoanalysts. "Would it not be more proper," he wrote, "for the psychoanalysts to consult the artists instead?" In Japan it is not just creative people who avoid the couch. Everybody does. Tokyo, with a population of 11 million, has only three psychoanalysts in private practice. New York City (pop. 9 million) has nearly...
...rise, however, now that more and more Japanese corporations are discarding their traditional paternalism. Tensions and anxiety are certainly increasing among the Japanese. But instead of setting up psychiatric care for their executives and workers, the corporations have begun subsidizing group trips to Zen temples for sessions of meditation. Mishima saw this coming a decade ago. Writing about the Japanese way of thinking, he concluded that it is Buddhism, with its conviction that existence is a transitory and basically unessential phenomenon, that keeps the Japanese off the analysts' couches...
...MISHIMA'S NOVEL, like much Japanese fiction, is weak on plot and characterization. The story is contrived and unsatisfying; the characters are more agents who elaborate certain intellectual ideas than real people who interact in human fashion...
...Mishima writes with a powerful insight of the problems of man's relationship to the world and to reality. The clarity of his perception is stunning, as the various characters of the book unfold their complex metaphysical relationships. Long passages describing intense self-scrutiny hold the reader in an almost morbid fascination, until he must be relieved at the end to see Honda give up his vain attempts at understanding...
...Mishima said that he put everything he knew about life and art into The Sea of Fertility. Thus his suicide came not as a denial, but a culmination and fruition of a process of realization. "Suicide," he once said, "is art." For him it was by no means a retreat from the suffering of the human condition, but the logical and appropriate conclusion to life itself...