Word: mishima
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...YUKIO MISHIMA...
Whatever the critics may think, writers still have a touching faith in the old-fashioned novel, and it is fascinating to see just what products can emerge when a modern novelist sets about writing one. Spring Snow is the first installment of Yukio Mishima's latest fictional testament. Three more volumes will follow, the final one delivered to the publisher only a day before the author killed himself by ritual disembowelment (seppuku) after his bizarre attempt to foment an uprising in the Japanese army a year and a half...
...WINTER of 1970, Erich Segal was riding the top of the best-seller list with a novel that was not so much phenomenal literature as it was a literary phenomenon. The book and the movie brought Segal international fame (out selling Sagan in France and Mishima in Japan). It also supplied proportionate hassles. That Yalie reverence, inspired by his association with Yellow Submarine, evolved into cynicism and hostility. It was exacerbated by the cooling of an initially cordial critical reaction. Why didn't they love him more when he was more famous? Segal says, "It was the difference between knowing...
...BEAUTY of life, its ineffable yearnings, have their corollary. Mizoguchi is too much in love with his world to treat it harshly--in his film at least--and Yukio Mishima's Rite of Love and Death (1965), showing with it this Friday, is similarly made within assumptions rather than about them. But Rite has none of the warmth of Mizoguchi: love is sublime and passionate rather than tender, death is ordained and noble rather than resented and mesay. Mercifully, considering its intensity, Rite lasts only 25 minutes. It portrays the double suicide of a young lieutenant and his wife...
Together, the two films range as widely as is possible within the confines of the Japanese tradition: Mishima with his complete fidelity to the ritualistic demands of society, Mizoguchi with his reverence for human strength and frailty, a love so all-encompassing that it can forgive even the transgressions of society when they are couched in the actions of an individual