Volume 13, Number 5 · September 25, 1969
Peasants and Poets
By D.J. Enright
Thirst for Love
by Yukio Mishima, translated by Alfred H. Marks
Knopf, 200 pp., $4.95
Sensei and His People
by Yoshie Sugihara, by David W. Plath
California, 204 pp., $5.95
Japanese Poetic Diaries
selected and translated by Earl Miner
California, 228 pp., $6.95
Isn't the market for Japanese fiction just about swamped? Or maybe, since I have passed straight from reviewing Mishima's Forbidden Colors to reviewing Mishima's Thirst for Love, it is simply my personal market whose thirst has been quenched—temporarily at least. Moving from the first novel's urban scene of 'gay' bars to the Japanese version of Cold Comfort Farm in the second, one notes that something remains common: the largely arbitrary nature of what is felt and thought and done and suffered, as if Mishima's motto were 'Only disconnect.'
Review, 1620 words
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