Yukio Mishima The Death Of A Man

In commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Yukio Mishima, one of the leading figures in modern literature, The Death of a Man presents a sublime--and often shocking--visual record of the last few months prior to his sensational ritual suicide in November 1970. The author of masterworks such as The Temple of the Golden Pavilion and Forbidden Colors, Mishima, a celebrated figure in postwar world literature, remains a controversial figure in Japan. His reactionary politics and the spectacular nature of his death had so profoundly impacted Japanese society that images associated with the event were never publicly shown. In the months prior to the November incident, he enlisted Kishin Shinoyama to create a photographic, radical work of fiction, a photo essay on the death of the Japanese "everyman." In images often suffused with militarism and eroticism, a parade of men, including a sailor, a construction worker, a fisherman, and a soldier, are shown meeting grisly, dramatic ends. Published for the very first time, these stylized images of men dying alone serve as prologues to the real-world culmination of Mishima's pursuit of total art. Locked in a performance with one inescapable end, Mishima offered his own body as its final act. With texts by Mishima and his closest intimates and first-person reminiscences of his final moments, this book promises to be an unprecedented interrogation on the nature of performance and the role of artist as actor, provocateur, and revolutionary.

This incisive biography begins with the spectacularly tragic last day of the militant Japanese novelist, perhaps best known for his monumental four-book masterpiece The Sea of Fertility.

For the first time in English, a glittering novella about stardom from “one of the greatest avant-garde Japanese writers of the twentieth century” (Judith Thurman, The New Yorker) All eyes are on Rikio. And he likes it, mostly. His fans cheer, screaming and yelling to attract his attention—they would kill for a moment alone with him. Finally the director sets up the shot, the camera begins to roll, someone yells “action”; Rikio, for a moment, transforms into another being, a hardened young yakuza, but as soon as the shot is finished, he slumps back into his own anxieties and obsessions. Being a star, constantly performing, being watched and scrutinized as if under a microscope, is often a drag. But so is life. Written shortly after Yukio Mishima himself had acted in the film “Afraid to Die,” this novella is a rich and unflinching psychological portrait of a celebrity coming apart at the seams. With exquisite, vivid prose, Star begs the question: is there any escape from how we are seen by others?

A beautiful hardback edition of a great Japanese classic, beautiful, lyrical and deeply ominous. A band of savage thirteen-year-old boys reject the adult world as illusory, hypocritical, and sentimental, and train themselves in a brutal callousness they call 'objectivity'. When the mother of one of them begins an affair with a ship's officer, he and his friends idealise the man at first; but it is not long before they conclude that he is in fact soft and romantic. They regard this disillusionment as an act of betrayal on his part - and the retribution is deliberate and horrifying. 'Mishima's greatest novel, and one of the greatest of the past century' The Times VINTAGE QUARTERBOUND CLASSICS: Bound to be beautiful

Nine short stories by the Japanese literary genius provide insights into the struggles and problems of his contemporary countrymen.

The story of a man coming to terms with his homosexuality in traditional Japanese society has become a modern classic.

'Was it death he was now waiting for? Or a wild ecstasy of the senses?' For the young army officer of Yukio Mishima's seminal story, 'Patriotism, ' death and ecstasy become elementally intertwined. With his unique rigor and passion, Mishima hones in on the body as the great tragic stage for all we call social, ritual, political.

Traces the life of the Japanese author who went from sickly youth to dedicated student of the martial arts, looking at his family life, the wartime years, and his career as a writer who advocated for traditional values.