Word: mishima
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...YUKIO MISHIMA committed suicide the day he completed Tennin Gosui, thus blending art and life inextricably into an eloquent statement of emptiness and silence. Now translated into English by Edward Seidensticker, The Decay of the Angel is the last volume of the tetralogy The Sea of Fertility, which Mishima regarded as his greatest work. The four-part narrative follows the experiences and reflections of Honda Shigekuni, from his days as a student in Part One to his near senility in Part Four...
...DECAY OF THE ANGEL by YUKIO MISHIMA Translated by EDWARD G. SEIDENSTICKER 236 pages. Knopf...
During the '60s, journalists searching for a Western equivalent of Yukio Mishima used to mention Ernest Hemingway. It was a prophetic comparison, but they might as usefully have thought of Edgar Allan Poe reincarnated in Norman Mailer-a garish, night-blooming talent driven by an energetic sense of publicity. Mishima, the literary genius of Japan's postwar generation, often mentioned for the Nobel Prize, delighted in shock and contradiction. He possessed luminous and fertile abilities: his complete works in Japanese are now being collected in 36 volumes. He was also a master of what Russians call posh-lust...
Henry Scott-Stokes, the author of the first Mishima biography, was the London Times's Tokyo bureau chief during the late '60s. He knew the novelist casually during the last years of his life, and his book is humane, intelligent and, for the moment, probably as close as a Western reader is likely to get to the subject. Scott-Stokes never sensationalizes -Mishima did that for himself-but in addition to his literate examination of the man's work, he surmises that the famous death scene was part of a double love-suicide, a shinju, involving Mishima...
Actually, the whole of Mishima's career may have been a rehearsal for that death. Born to an upper-middle-class Tokyo family, he had a fairly sinister childhood. He was raised as a little girl by his grandmother, who kept him much of the time in her gloomy sickroom. The fetid memories of such an upbringing formed much of the basis of his 1958 novel, Confessions of a Mask. "Something within me responded to the darkened room and the sickbed," he wrote elsewhere. He was fascinated, too, by death, which for him possessed an erotic attraction. His first...