Word: mishima
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...such an arcane, expensive and deadly pastime. "What is extreme flying for me but a kind of dialogue?" he asks himself. "A conversation with myself about what I am capable of." Ramo's reverence for his fellow stunt pilots borders on the religious--he compares them variously with Yukio Mishima, John Coltrane and Pablo Picasso--and his lyrical flights sometimes lose the reader in the clouds. But when he's in the cockpit performing feats of gritty derring-do (and occasionally derring-don't), his airplane groaning and shuddering around him with the strain, the book soars. "Flight...
...crimes, nationalism, teenagers, the World Cup, second-rate writers, third-rate politicians: no matter what he's discussing, Haruki Murakami appears strangely, almost disconcertingly placid. During nearly three hours of conversation, emotion flickers across the face of the most popular Japanese writer since Yukio Mishima precisely once. After a wry put-down of a rival novelist, his eyes sparkle with mischief and his lips curl into a smile. But Murakami's words-both written and spoken-are a different matter. Listen to them carefully and you soon realize he is brimming with passion. As American novelist Jay McInerney puts...
...Japanese have a good claim to having invented the novel. Lady Murasaki's Tale of Genji (Genji Monogatari), written some 600 years before Don Quixote, is a weirdly fascinating narrative of erotic and court intrigue. For Western readers it can only reinforce the image of Japan as, in Yukio Mishima's words, "a nation of flower arrangers...
...artist embodied the tortured contradictions of contemporary Japan as completely as Mishima, the homosexual who worried about Japan's effeminate image, the sickly aesthete who turned himself into a modern-day samurai and in 1970 finally committed seppuku, the ancient samurai ritual suicide, after failing to inspire a coup d'Etat. Mishima was thoroughly steeped in the traditions of Western literature - his early work shows the imprint of Oscar Wilde and The Temple of the Golden Pavilion is wholly Dostoyevskian - but he was obsessed with the notion of purifying the national character and returning Japan to its pre-Meiji...
Murakami's protagonists stand just a little bit apart and aside in a society that has traditionally commanded full participation of its members. But they don't think of themselves as rebels, either. Mishima would hate these guys. Connoisseurs of the exotic will find little to savor here. American and European readers would be mistaken if they imagined these characters to be entirely familiar, but in their own quiet way they seem emblematic of creeping globalization in one of the world's most insular and traditional societies...