Though he is most famous as a novelist, Yukio Mishima was also a prolific dramatist. From 1949, when his first play was published, to 1969, the year before his death, he wrote more than 60 such works, nearly all of them staged in his lifetime.
Writing plays seems to have come to him with conspicuous ease. "I started writing drama just as water flows toward a lower place," he noted in "The Temptation of Drama," one of the three essays included along with the five plays translated in this book. "In me, the topography of drama seemed to be situated far below that of novels. It seems to be in a place which is more instinctive, closer to child's play."
Indeed, Mishima used to express astonishment that Tennessee Williams found playwriting so difficult that he could sometimes manage only a line or two a day. For Mishima, a play was simply based upon structural logic, "and once a structure is built . . . you write it in one stretch."