Yukio Mishima: Saints and seppuku
In March 1937, an official in the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry, Azusa Hiraoka, traveled to Europe on government business and acquired some guides to Italian museums. Prudishly fearing, however, that his 12-year-old son might be exposed to the depictions of female nudes contained within, ...
Natsume Soseki's Pre-Raphaelite dreams
In 1900, the future novelist Natsume Soseki — then a scholar of English literature — arrived in London to commence two years of study abroad. Back in Japan, his best friend, the renowned haiku poet Masaoka Shiki, had — as explained in the first ...
How the visual arts shaped Japan's modern literature
Early on in Natsume Soseki's 1908 campus novel "Sanshiro" — one of the most important expositions of the inter-connectedness of visual and literary art ever written — a young scientist, Nonomiya, looks up at a long, thin, white cloud floating diagonally in the sky. "Do ...
