Word: seppuku
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Mishima's abrasive career ended in seppuku (disembowelment, then decapitation by a member of his private "army"). Kawataba and Dazai were not given to such self-dramatization, but they too died by their own hands. Indeed, it is no mere verbal swagger to define contemporary Japanese writing as a matter of life and death. In the '70s one Tokyo scholarly journal devoted an entire issue to "The Writer and Suicide." There is a death wish operating through Japanese literature. Says Masao Miyoshi, a Japanese lit erary scholar (Accomplices of Silence...
...short stories and as many books of essays. He was Japan's literary exotic, sometimes mentioned for the Nobel Prize-a slick self-promoter and deliberately flashy vulgarian who redeemed his excesses with a gift that sometimes approached genius. In November 1970 he committed his famous ritual suicide (seppuku) after attempting to incite the Japanese army to a ridiculous uprising in behalf of the country's imperialistic traditions...
...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 is a shocking aesthetic correspondence between the man's art and his final...
...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...
Ultimate Dream. Evidently Mishima hoped-vainly-that his seppuku might arouse the 125,000 Japanese who belong to the 400 or so right-wing organizations in the country. When a similar revolt was staged in February 1936 by a group of young soldiers who tried to overthrow the government, it foreshadowed the disastrous Tojo regime of four years later. Mishima had written a short story, Patriotism, about that revolt, and in 1965 he made it into a movie. He himself acted the lead role of a young army lieutenant who commits hara-kiri with his wife after a night...