'Mishima: The Last Debate': Careful revival of a battle of wits
It was the title match of the decade: the rumble in the academic jungle. On May 13, 1969, literary titan Yukio Mishima strutted onstage in front of a 1,000-strong audience at the University of Tokyo to debate with representatives of the All Campus Joint ...
Is Japan enjoying a new literary golden age?
With more and more Japanese novels in translation achieving commercial and critical success, Nicolas Gattig and Damian Flanagan argue over whether a new wave of writers are transcending Japan's literary past.
The new Japanese Classics series from Vintage Classics presents five seminal Japanese novels, from Junichiro Tanizaki to Yoko Ozawa, with stunning cover art by Japanese illustrator Yuko Shimizu.
An invisible baseball curves through Japanese literature
There's a long history of pivotal baseball anecdotes in Japanese literature, with well-known writers such as Yukio Mishima and Haruki Murakami incorporating their love of the game into their work.
'The Decay of the Angel': Overshadowed by the death of its author
In "The Decay of the Angel," Yukio Mishima concludes his "The Sea of Fertility" tetralogy with musings on modern Japan, the loss of beauty and old age.
'Mishima, Aesthetic Terrorist': The brain behind the coup
In "Mishima, Aesthetic Terrorist," Andrew Rankin takes us to the less-visited corners of Mishima's complete works, the intellectual essays that were the fount for the ideas that played themselves out in his novels.
Making sense of the oppressiveness of summer in Japan
Japan has a venerable tradition of quirky and inventive means of escape from the oppression of summer, as well as from rigid social constraints and conventions. Some of them take distinctly weird forms. In Edogawa Ranpo's classic story, "The Stalker in the Attic" (1925), ...
'Life for Sale': Yukio Mishima's comically psychedelic take on the adventure novel
"Life for Sale" — first serialized in Weekly Playboy in 1968 — was, for long years, dismissed as mere "entertainment." Yet the surprising bestseller is a terrific example of Mishima's fecund imagination at its most free-wheeling and unfettered best.
How Japan's modern literature came under Nietzsche's spell
To truly understand some of 20th-century Japan's most iconic literary works, you have to go back to ancient Greek tragedy and the "Dionysian" philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche.
'Mishima: A Vision of the Void': Remembering a literary giant as he would have wanted
Marguerite Yourcenar's literary biography of Yukio Mishima delves into the enigmatic author as well as the social conditions that shaped his rise and fall.
Hot new Japan book releases for the sweltering summer
Time travel, yakuza, street photography and more feature in the best upcoming J-Lit releases for this summer (and beyond).
Come face to face with human mortality in Yukio Mishima's 'The Temple of Dawn' — review
A strange and uneven novel, Yukio Mishima's "The Temple of Dawn," the third volume in the "Sea of Fertility" tetralogy, is an elegy to the loss of pureness in the Japanese national spirit.
