Volume 22, Number 20 · December 11, 1975
Writer, Rightist or Freak?
By Hide Ishiguro
Mishima: A Biography
by John Nathan
Little, Brown, 300 pp., $8.95
The Life and Death of Yukio Mishima
by Henry Scott Stokes
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 344 pp., $10.00
Yukio Mishima died in November 1970 at the age of forty-five by carrying out a carefully staged seppuku, or suicide by disembowelment. He was one of the more talented writers in postwar Japan and had written a few brilliant novels and plays and many more works that were merely clever and competent. His death shocked the Japanese public. Some thought he had gone mad, others that this was the last in a series of exhibitionistic acts, one more expression of the desire to shock for which he had become notorious. A few people on the political right saw his death as a patriotic gesture of protest against present-day Japan. Others believed that it was a despairing, gruesome farce contrived by a talented man who had been an enfant terrible and who could not bear to live on into middle age and mediocrity. Still others saw it as a public act of homosexual love for Morita, the young student who, by agreement, gave Mishima the final blow and who died after him. In feudal Japan, Shinju, or double suicide, was a way in which lovers sometimes ended their lives when their emotions had reached their peak.
Review, 2653 words
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