Word: shima
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Bright Widow. Nathan records Mishima's entrance into Tokyo's homo sexual world, which evidently began as a kind of professional voyeurism, the young author detachedly taking notes on the scene at a gay bar. Homosexuality sometimes figured in Mi shima's work, notably in his autobiographical novel, Confessions of a Mask. But it remained only one compartment of his extremely varied private life. Despite the flamboyant outrages he en joyed committing, Mishima had a surprising appetite for respectability. In 1958, partly because he thought it was expected of him, partly because he wanted to please...
...police, but because of the nationalistic sympathies the plot has aroused, the son is eventually released. Then, with his zealotry intact, lunuma proceeds alone to his assassination target as planned, and commits the suicide he had desired-in the book's last sentence, which is touched by Mi-shima's lucid, kinetic imagery. "The instant that the blade tore open his flesh, the bright disk of the sun soared up and exploded behind his eyelids...
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...
...Tsuyo Shima is a member of Hiseido, or the Second Generation of A-Bomb Victims. "Maybe you have visited the 'Peace Park', "he said to me. "The Japanese government has filled it with trees and flowers and a memorial for world peace. That is the place where the poorest A-Bomb victims used to live, but they were forced to evacuate so the government could build that park...
...Tsuyo Shima explained. "The ABCC does not serve the needs of A-Bomb victims. We may have been studied, but nothing is ever told...