'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.
Yukio Mishima’s attempt at personal branding comes to light in the rediscovered 'Star'
In "Star," Yukio Mishima confronts issues of celebrity, youth and aging in hypercharged and manically subjective first-person prose.
'Kinkakuji': Staging a Japanese classic with a German twist
A new opera based on the quintessentially Japanese novel "Kinkakuji" is set to open in Tokyo following a premiere held not in Kyoto, where the famed golden pavilion of its title is to be found, but at the Opera National du Rhin in Strasbourg, ...
Japan's most exciting book releases in 2019
2019's impressive lineup of books on Japan, include classic reprints, new fiction and studies of the nation's international relations.
'The Frolic of the Beasts': A Mishima classic, roused from its long hibernation
Andrew Clare has published an impressive array of translations of novels by Japanese authors, all while putting in long hours at the corporate coalface. Now, Clare is launching his translation — the first in English — of a classic, but little-known, Yukio Mishima novel, ...
