Word: mishima
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...YUKIO MISHIMA...
...serial publication of Yukio Mishima's last works, a tetralogy called The Sea of Fertility, has the eerie effect of making him seem the fastest and most prolific dead writer in history. A bit more than a year ago came the English translation of the first posthumous volume, Spring Snow. Last summer it was Runaway Horses. Now we have The Temple of Dawn...
...Mishima sealed this literary package with his ritual suicide in 1970, when he was only 45. Unlike, say, Ernest Hemingway, who shot himself at 61 in apparent despair over a deteriorating mind, Mishima killed himself in what seemed a gesture of robust if wasteful heroism, the ultimate act of self-control. Since his death was so theatrically deliberate, the temptation is strong to judge the tetralogy as an artistic and philosophical suicide note to the world. The note is now three-quarters completed for English-language readers. It is fascinating and ambitious, but the final message (and literary value...
That is, of course, lurid imagery as well-blood and the imperial sun. Mi-shima's sensibility was at once delicate and apocalyptic. Like Spring Snow, the first volume of The Sea of Fertility, Runaway Horses shivers with fragile yet highly wrought detail. Here Mishima also experiments, to lovely effect, with the Buddhist doctrine of reincarnation, lunuma, it seems, may be the reincarnation of Kiyoaki Matsugae, the doomed young lover of Spring Snow...
...Mishima claimed that his tetralogy contained everything he knew about life - and presumably about death. That may have been intended in part as a rationalization for his suicide, though some Japanese have suspected that he killed himself, on a crank's political pre text, because his creative powers were failing. Western readers will have to wait for the rest of the tetralogy to make a judgment. The first two works are sometimes stunningly good; yet in both there is an odd moral frigidity, a special chill evident in his earlier works as well. For all his gifts, Mishima seems...