Word: mishima
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...Yukio Mishima completed his tetralogy, The Sea of Fertility, one November morning in 1970. Then he dressed himself in the somewhat Grau-starkian uniform of his private army, the Shield Society, and led a group of young right-wing followers to a military headquarters in western Tokyo. There, in a violent and extravagantly eccentric display of the artist engage, he broke into the commander's office, harangued some mocking soldiers from a balcony about the disgraces of fading Japanese imperial tradition, withdrew and committed harakiri. A companion ritually lopped off the head of Japan's most celebrated postwar...
RUNAWAY HORSES by YUKIO MISHIMA...
...high price to pay for an artistic effect, but Mishima's death did at least serve to endow his last works, now being published in English translation, with an eerie sense of death anticipating art. This is especially true of Runaway Horses, the second volume of the tetralogy; for its subject is right-wing rebellion and, presented in weirdly loving detail, the beauties of seppuku (ritual suicide). Camus said that "suicide is something planned in the silence of the heart, like a work of art." In Mishima, for all of the peculiar sensationalism of his death, there...
...luxury of fiction allowed Mishima the license of idealization difficult to discover in his actual self-destruction. His fictional suicide is Isao lunuma, a right-wing student with an obsessional love of Samurai tradition and a hatred for the 20th century's destruction of imperial values. lunuma enjoys an almost erotic anticipation of the moment when he will solemnly disembowel himself for the Emperor. In the 1930s, he assembles a group of similarly obsessed conspirators to plot the assassinations of Japan's leading industrialists, hoping to precipitate a general uprising against the corruption of Japan's ancient...
...Life. British, German and Japanese export models are being offered at no extra cost despite the devaluation of the dollar. They include a posthumous Yukio Mishima novel (Runaway Horses), the second volume of a tetralogy that began with Spring Snow; Nobel Prizewinner Heinrich Böll's Group Portrait with Lady, a study of private lives in Nazi Germany; and two of the best books ever done by Iris Murdoch and Doris Lessing. In The Black Prince, Murdoch has happily abandoned those platoons of characters for a manageable menage a six (or so). The result is an engaging exercise...