What do you think of Yukio Mishima?

Last week I read The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea after seeing it recommended in a few posts here. I can definitely see why people are attracted to Yukio Mishima's writing style and characterization, but the plot of the book really didn't work for me. I honestly could come up with no reason for the ending other than sensationalism and it was just hard for me to believe that a group of such young boys would choose to do that.

Is there something I missed that gives the story some redeeming value?

And are all of Mishima's books like this? If I really disliked this one, is it worth trying his other stuff?

Can't speak to The Sailor Who Fell From Grace with the Sea but I just finished Spring Snow which didn't do too much for me. It is a love story that was somewhat plodding. Surprising to me was that this book is the first of a trilogy, and upon completion of the work(s) in 1970(?) Mishima committed seppuku.

Can't speak to The Sailor Who Fell From Grace with the Sea but I just finished Spring Snow which didn't do too much for me. It is a love story that was somewhat plodding. Surprising to me was that this book is the first of a trilogy, and upon completion of the work(s) in 1970(?) Mishima committed seppuku.

Mishima is my favorite Japanese author. Try Forbidden Colors or his Sea of Fertility Tetralogy.

Mishima is hard to get your head around, and Sailor... is the same. the ending seems shocking, but it is building there the whole time. Mishima distracts the reader with a love story, only breifly touching on the boys and their erratic leader. By the time we realize what the kids have transformed into, it is far too late. It is an offhanded remark about the way that people seem to worry about creating a perfect life for their children, and ignore their mental well being.

I believe Spring Snow is the first of the tetralogy and it's not moving me to the second volume. However, it sounds like I'll need to give The Sailor Who Fell From Grace with the Sea a shot. It will have to wait some as the TBR pile is huge!

A late post but haven't been checking back here at LT in awhile. Read Mishima's tetralogy in March -- Spring Snow, Runaway Horses, The Temple of Dawn, The Decay of An Angel. I found it immensely enjoyable and satisfying - the 2nd, Runaway Horses, is my favorite.

Started in with Mishima by reading The Sailor Who Fell From Grace with the Sea. It blew me away. It's hard to explain why it did .. but at the end .. it kept milling about in my mind for days after.

Also managed to read Christopher Ross' compelling semi-biography/travel/? book last month. It's hard to classify it as a biography actually but it was a good read - Mishima's Sword.

Have a few other books left on the shelf - Thirst For Love and one other. Will catch up with them once I'm done with Soseki's I Am A Cat. Yep .. am reading way too much asian fiction lately.

Another vote for Forbidden Colors. Also, After the Banquet. I looooooove Mishima.

The Sailor who Fell from Grace with the Sea has a more amateur feel to it than a lo of his work, and elements of that book also occur in The Temple of Dawn. It is a very good book, but somewhat sparsely worded and less dabbling than much of Mishima's work. It is still an excellent novel but I think Mishima tried to ascertain a level of shock value with this one. I agree that Forbidden Colors is amazing, and gives a better impression for a first Mishima novel than the aforementioned novel.

Mishima is probably my favorite author. Spring Snow grabbed my attention and I rapidly ripped through the other three books of the tetralogy. I also enjoyed The Sound of Waves. Mishima was extreme, no doubt about that, but the guy could make a three page description of kimono fabric riveting.

Jumping in late here, I loved Spring Snow when I read it years ago and just managed to find a copy of Runaway Horses. (For some reason, for years & years that one was never in the bookstore when I thought to look for it.) Anyhoo, do I need to reread Spring Snow or can I just start in on Runaway Horses?

I also read Thirst for Love and loved it. It's a bit melodramatic, but the lyrical language makes me forgive that part.

Said of Mishima, above, "...the guy could make a three page description of kimono fabric riveting."

That's pretty high praise actually, particularly if a description of fabric isn't of much interest to you. It isn't to me, but I find the same thing true of my recent reading of short stories and the novel Geisha in Rivalry by Kafu Nagai.

Dang; these guys are making me really interested in kimono fabric!

My lone encounter with Mishima was Temple of the Golden Pavillion recommended as a work of critical importance. I don't bail on books but at about pg 230 of the 300 total. That's even more unlike me. I just found it insufferable rattling around inside the brain of the protagonist. I have Sound of Waves on the shelf, and Acts of Worship which is short stories. I'm frightened by both but the accolades accorded him above makes me ponder putting my tippy-toe back in again with the short stories.

-- Gerry

i read Spring Snow and Sound of Waves a little while while back and found them both mostly sweet. Forbidden Colors is in my TBR list and i understand it's quite dark. i'm looking forward to the change.

I'm about 1/2 way through Runaway Horses and I'm finding it difficult. The writing is just as wonderfully lyrical, but the characters are maddening! If only I didn't know that Mishima actually sympathized with the radical teenagers, it probably wouldn't bother me so much. His own suicide was very similar.

Kinda creepy, actually. They remind me of skinheads.

I am currently reading Thirst for Love and I have to say I don't understand the appeal. But I am eager to hear people make arguments otherwise! Or, just to explain his style to me...It is such a complex story that is told in such a superficial way...I described the sensation to my friends as similar to walking around without your glasses on. It is impossible to connect with the characters (especially Etsuko) and understand them. I get that Etsuko is supposed to be dark and mysterious...but am I supposed to hate her? I don't have a lot of experience reading Japanese fiction, so I think maybe the problem is that I don't understand the style. I personally like to read books because of the stories told within them and I feel like he is more interested in clever prose than telling a story.

Mishima is probably my favourite author of all time. He's extraordinary but i do admit he can be tough to get into. nevermind that everytime i read him i feel like i've only understood about 20% of what's going on, each time i re-read, the book just unfolds and opens up and reveals more.
The first Mishima i ever read was Confessions of a Mask, which seems to be possibly his most accessible piece. I usually tell people who ask to start with that.

Other than being accessible, what did you think of Confessions of a Mask?

any suggestions for book club discussion questions...especially for Thirst for Love?

I just finished Spring Snow this past week and it was probably one of the best novels I've ever read, albeit a little slow in the beginning but very much worth it...

From what I gathered from reviews, Thirst for Love isn't a good starting point. Most people seem to recommend Spring Snow and The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea to start...

I plan to read Sailor, Confessions of a Mask, Sound of Waves, or Runaway Horses next since its the next book after Spring Snow in the Sea of Fertility cycle and hear almost just as good.

It was my high school government teacher's favorite Mishima.

Of course, I could read Temple of the Golden Pavilion since it is a favorite of Utada Hikaru, one of my favorite singers. =)

I really like Mishima. The Fertility tetraology is my favorite, with Runaway Horses being my favorite of the Fertility books and one of my favorite books period (and Spring Snow a close second.) Temple of the Dawn was good, but not as good as the first two. Decay of the Angel was a bit of a disappointment. I'm not a big fan of Sailor Who Fell From Grace, either.

I recently read After The Banquet and enjoyed it. What was especially interesting to me was how he explored the same themes from the viewpoint of a fifty-year old female innkeeper rather than his usual. I recall the stories in Acts of Worship being good, but I can't remember anything about them right this moment. Oh wait, I just remembered one - Patriotism? Talk about a punch to the gut!

Looks like I need to read Forbidden Colors.

I just finished The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea, I have to say I found the part with the kitten more disturbing than with the new father, amybe because by then we knew what they were like. I thought the mother seemed selfish, she never seemed to be home to look after the boy so its no wonder he looked for support from another group of boys.
I read The Sound of the Waves earlier in the year and it was a nice easy read, the language is very simple but carefully constructed so the love story feels whole.

I only know Patriotism, and really enjoyed it. Many people reccomended Temple of the Golden Pavillion to me but I couldn't find it.

Patriotism is an amazing story isn't it! Read the first two of the Fertility tetraology before you read Temple - Spring Snow and Runaway Horses. They're both amazing, but Runaway Horses is one of my favorite books of all time. If you liked Patriotism I can guarantee Runaway Horses.

P.S. I don't know that its of much importance to read the tetraology in order.

I looove Mishima too. He is one of my personal saints.

Confessions of a Mask = Quintessential Mishima. I would start with this one.

Forbidden Colors = Perhaps the most homoerotic Mishima novel. Lots of sinewy young flesh. This one has some marvelous characters and is an important chronicle of the clandestine life of gays in Japan in those days.

The Temple of the Golden Pavillion = Deliciously bitter and sociopathic. Beautiful. Definitely one of his best novels.

The Sailor Who Fell from Grace With the Sea = The descriptions of the sailor in the beginning are some of the most homoerotic lines ever written. The part with the kitten really disturbed me too. These kids would scare the hell out the kids in Lord of the Flies.

I haven't read the tetraology yet. I will soon though. I want to read all of Mishima's translated works.

Seconding Mishima's Sword - it is an excellent book. It reads very much like a travelogue, and it provides some very interesting insights into Mishima's writing, life, and death. Having said that, it is written in a very non-objective, editorial style, and the author can only really make educated guesses for many of Mishima's motivations.

I haven't finished reading the Sea of Fertility cycle yet, though I have read Spring Snow. I enjoyed it, although the language seems a bit stiff to me, though that may certainly be a product of the translation I read. The novel does come across as very conservative in its sensibilities, which isn't surprising considering Mishima's own politics, though I can see it being a little odd to Western readers.

Mishima was very odd in many ways. Which is why he is so fascinating. I'm sorry to hear the translation of Spring Snow seems stiff. I have loved the translations I have read so far. There is a wonderful simplicity and purity in the writing style of Mishima that I find very beautiful.

Here is an interesting interview with poet Mutsuo Takahashi by Jeffrey Angles. In it Takahashi discusses an evening he spent with Mishima shortly before the failed coup and suicide.

http://intersections.anu.edu.au/issue12/takahashi_interview.html

I reviewed Mishima's Sword when it came out. If you're interested, have a look: http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/fb20060521a1.html

I think he was a cultural schizophrenic.

So was Tanizaki Junichiro, but his schizophrenia was in serial, first a lover of things Occidental to the extent that it fills his novels with extraneous pronouns, then a hater of the same (really, his own charicature of the same), while Mishima was in parallel.

Before commenting meaningfully on his writing style, I need to reread him as I have not read him since becoming fluent in written Japanese. I have read his opinion about mimesis and did not like it. I do not know if it stemmed from a Francis Bacon-like dislike for the slimy or otherwise not hard (our father of science thought frogs disgusting), square-edged language, or from reading Norinaga who put it down as animal language unlike the clearly divine Japanese. I would wonder if he avoided words with nigori . . . i am bailing out for i think a defrag has automatically started in my pc... sorry -- no, it was windows defender. Enough, anyway!

I recently finished reading Spring Snow and Runaway Horses and was very impressed. I'll definitely be reading the other books in The Sea of Fertility tetralogy. I've also picked up a copy of Mishima's Sword which was mentioned on this thread and sounds very interesting.

I was wondering if anyone could recommend a straight-up biography of Mishima?

You could try Mishima: A Biography by John Nathan.

Thanks, yomisugi!

Do any of you know where a photograph of Mishima as St Sebastian by Kishin Shinoyama was published in a magazine?

Thanks, Greg

Interesting question, Greg. I don't know, and google hasn't been forthcoming. I hope someone knows the answer. (Are you sure that it was published in a magazine and not one of Shinoyama's books?

32 > This also might be of interest.

http://www.bondibooks.com/Online/2009/7/HosoeBarakei63/HosoeBarakei63.html

I am a fan of Mishima too. It was The Temple of the Golden Pavilion that hooked me. Forbidden Colours was compelling and unforgettable story of bitterness and revenge that on one hand I consider a masterpiece of literature one on the other I (slightly) wish I had never read it. Acts of Worship, a collection of short stories has the same kind of Mishima cold semi-homoerotic "mood".

I have also read Temple of the Dawn but I found it quite confusing, possibly because I had not (and have not yet) read the previous books in the tetralogy.

35> Start at the beginning of the tetralogy. Spring Snow is excellent. It's about time I moved on to Runaway Horses.

Spring Snow and Runaway Horses are each fantastic and more immediately gripping than Temple of the Dawn and Decay of the Angel.

I just got Spring Snow. I will read it next and let you know what I think of it.

Very good. I'm sure you'll enjoy it.

I have just finished Spring Snow. A book of indescribable beauty. It has the familiar and relentless Mishima themes of beautiful young men, the seasons, frustration and death. The best Mishima I have read. If it were not the first in a series, I would have been tempted to immediately begin reading again. My partner bought Runaway Horses (hard cover first US edition!) for me for Christmas but it still in the mail. I don't feel like starting anything else.Thanks for your recommendations.

I am glad you loved it, as I did. A book of indescribable beauty, indeed. One of my favorites, and still the best Mishima I have yet read. I will read Runaway Horses myself soon.

I finished Runaway Horses a few weeks ago and I am (re)reading The Temple of the Dawn now. Runaway Horses illuminates Spring Snow. If you love Spring Snow reading Runaway Horses will make you love it more. It clarifies what I think is Mishima's theme in the Tetralogy. Placing beautiful, elegant, pure, perhaps fanatical, irrational, spirit and youth against reason, pragmatism and age. The former a glorious and beautiful death. The later a living death and corruption. I cannot choose between Spring Snow and Runaway Horses as my favourite. Together I think they must be the best books I have read.

As I said, I have (stupidly) read The Temple of the Dawn years ago somehow not getting that it was the third book. Reading it now I am not finding it as good as the first two. I can relate to Mishima's (as Honda) reaction to Benares in India as I had very similar experiences when I first went to India. Its exploration of mythology and reincarnation / transmigration is interesting but I am expecting a bit more from Mishima than interesting.

BTW, I found old paperback editions of Confessions of a Mask and The Sound of Waves at a book stall tonight. Only $5 each. So I will be on an extended Mishima binge. I had never heard of The Sound of Waves before. I have to find a copy of The Decay of An Angel soon.

I agree with your sentiment about Runaway Horses illuminating Spring Snow and cementing the themes of the tetralogy. Spring Snow has this certain essence, something relating to tone or mood perhaps, that Runaway Horses doesn't quite possess as abundantly for me. I will read The Temple of the Dawn soon.

Yes, I know what you mean by the difference in mood between Spring Snow and Runaway Horses. It is almost perfectly expressed just in the titles. The voice telling the story in both cases is in the beautiful prose of Mishima but it is somehow older, more serious in Runaway Horses.

Thoughts on The Temple of Dawn. I found the first quarter or so a bit tedious but after that it has I think some of Mishima's most brilliant writing. It is a much darker work than the first two. It reminded my a lot of the tone of Forbidden Colours. Again the way I feel about Spring Snow and Runaway Horses and what Mishima is saying is somehow changed by reading The Temple of Dawn.

I am beginning to think its time to reread the tetralogy!

13. The sailor who fell from grace with the sea
Finished reading: 29 January 2011



I do not read a lot in translation, but there is no other way to get to Yukio Mishima. The elegant prose, and beauty of the life style is contrasted with the horror of a cruel murder. Trust versus distrust, strength against cunning, young versus old, many against one.

I've never been a big Mishima fan, but I am a fan of Tokyo. In this excellent piece they come together: http://spikejapan.wordpress.com/2012/05/04/tokyo-through-the-letterbox/

I just found out about a new Mishima biography being published in English soon and thought I would share.

Persona: A Biography of Yukio Mishima by Naoki Inose with Hiroaki Sato

More information here! http://www.stonebridge.com/shopexd.asp?id=368

Thanks for that PhoenixTerran, I will have to read that.

Using interviews, social and psychological analysis, and close reading of novels and essays, Persona removes the mask that Mishima so artfully created to disguise his true self.

"Persona" seems like the perfect title for a book about Mishima.

I thought Persona was a great title, too. I'm also looking forward reading it. Over seven hundred pages of material!

This recent BBC Radio 4 programme may be of interest:-

The Suicide of Yukio Mishima http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01m4c8y

Yukio Mishima, the celebrated Japanese author, killed himself in very public circumstances in Tokyo in 1970. Henry Scott Stokes was working as a foreign correspondent* in Japan at the time and knew the great writer well. He remembers the day of Mishima's death, and his long-standing interest in ritual suicide.

*He is also author of The Life and Death of Yukio Mishima.

Forbidden colours
Finished reading: 6 December 2012



Even in that moment I could not believe that my interior beauty was consonant with Yuichi's exterior beauty. Socrates' prayer to the various gods of the place on that summer morning when he lay under the plane tree on the bank of the Ilissus River, chatting to the beautiful boy Phaedrus until the day cooled, seems to me the highest teaching on earth: "Pan, first, and all the gods that dwell in this place, grant that I may become fair within, and that such outward things as I have may be at peace with the spirit within me."
The Greeks had the rare power to look at internal beauty as if it were hewn from marble. Spirit was badly corrupted in later times, exalted through the action of lustless loathing. Beautiful young Alcibiades, drawn by the internal, love-lust wisdom of Socrates, was so aroused by the prospect of being passionately loved by that man as ugly as Silenus that he crept in with him and slept under the same mantle. When I read the beautiful words of Alcibiades in "The Drinking Party" dialogue, they almost bowled me over: "It would be embarrassing to tell men of intelligence that I did not give my body to someone like you--even more embarrassing that to admit to the uncultured multitude that I had surrendered to you. Much more!" (299-300).

This long citation comes from the Japanese novel Forbidden colours by Yukio Mishima. It shows that the key to understanding this complex novel lies in the understanding of Mishima's ideas about Greek philosophy.

In Forbidden colours an old novelist, Shunsuke Hinoki, wants to take revenge on women, as he feels women have scorned him throughout his life. To effectuate his revenge, Shunsuke has devised a plan in which he will use an irresistibly beautiful young man, Yuichi Minami, to drive women mad with love, and lust, and jealousy. He encourages the young Yuichi to marry Yasuko, and thus destroy her life. He later carefully plots to set other women up against each other, and foment jealousy. Partially successful, the novel develops to explore myriad other human relationships of lovers and friendship. Choosing Yuichi, Shunsuke did not know that Yuichi is gay. Regardless of his sexual orientation, Yuichi is a able to develop true love for his wife Yasuko, while this relation is not governed by lust. For lust, Yuichi turns to anonymous lovers whom he picks up cruising; he does not develop relationships with these young men; in the gay scene of Tokyo, under the eyes of his gay acquaintances, Yuichi appears a very restraint and chaste young man, never giving in to flirts of foreigners or other Japanese men. However, when he meets Count Kaburagi in this scene he develops an extended, sexual relationship with him, despite the fact that he is not attracted to the old man. With Shunsuke, the other old man in his life, he develops a long-term, asexual friendship. The clearly heterosexual Shunsuke's is oriented towards women in his lust, but ultimately decides that his true friend must have been the Narcissistic Yuichi.

Thus, in Forbidden colours Mishima paints all possible human sexual and friendship relations. Shunsuke would obviously stand for Socrates, while Yuichi, takes the role of a young Japanese Phaedrus. In as much as Mishima was fascinated by Greek ideals of love, he must have been shaped by, or have tried to reconcile these Greek ideals with Japanese cultural patterns. The famous chariot parable from Plato's Phaedrus in which the soul is described as a chariot drawn by complementary forces, a good horse and a bad horse, would be very well compatible with Japanese Zen Buddhist views of Yin and Yang, which could help explain the balance achieved between lust and restraint.

It is surprising to see how a young Japanese novelist could be influenced so profoundly by classical Greek literature, at an age just about 70 years into the opening up of the Japanese mind to Western culture.

Forbidden colours is a very long novel, and sometimes plot lines are vague, or even nearly forgotten. It is a very poetic novel, with often many beautiful descriptions. The novel is of special interest to gay readers attempting to understand the complex and hidden gay relations in Asian societies, and it beautifully explains how gay Asian man may truly find fulfillment in marriage, and starting a family.



Other books I have read by Yukio Mishima:
The Samurai ethic and modern Japan
The sailor who fell from grace with the sea

The Samurai ethic and modern Japan
Finished reading: 31 October 2012



In 1970, Yukio Mishima committed ritual suicide after a failed coup. The intentions of the coup, and Mishima's political views at the time, are hard to understand to Western readers, who have interpreted Mishima's actions as those of an irrational madman.

The Samurai ethic and modern Japan bring together four, rather disjointed essays or collections of notes, which may provide a cultural or philosophical underpinning for Mishima's ideas in the years leading to his death.

The book has the subtitle "Yukio Mishima on Hagakure. Hagakure refers to a compilation of commentaries published in Japan in the early Eighteenth Century as The Book of the Samurai. It seems that this book is predominantly associated with the warrior code, known as "Bushidō" or "the way of the warrior" with special emphasis on the warrior's readiness to die.

The meme of willingness to follow a lord in death originates in China, and was also found in the earliest annals of Japanese culture. The ancient tradition of xunsi (殉死) following a lord into the grave was outlawed in Japan as early as the Seventh Century BCE, but retained its fascination.

However, this "warrior code" must be seen in a much broader context of a practical and moral guide of the samurai. Over the centuries the class of samurai developed into a veritable form of aristocracy, and the Hagakure came to encompass a must broader life philosophy, similar to The Book of the Courtier.

The Samurai ethic and modern Japan are not a translation of the Hagakure, which is described as a much larger work in eleven volumes (p. 36). The four "essays" of very unequal length and scope, one of which merely indicated as an appendix, consists of notes which Mishima made for several undisclosed occasions. There is a lot of overlap between the four sections of the book, some repeating observations or ideas in exactly the same words. Rather than a volume of essays on Hagakure, the book should be seen as a scrapbook.

Yukio Mishima was a very well-read author, very well-versed in Western literature, as well. The scrap book forms a testimony to his long dedication to understand and apply the moral principles of the samurai code to his own life, to shape his life as that of a Japanese traditional gentleman. The code stresses dignity, appropriacy and honor. There are many references to links with Western culture, such as epicureanism, hedonism and nihilism. There are aphorisms and sections prescribing proper conduct with other people and on a variety of occasions. There are also many references to Chinese and Japanese culture, and references to other works interpreting Japanese culture, such as The Chrysanthemum and the Sword.

The Samurai ethic and modern Japan only contains Yukio Mishima's reflections on the Hagakure Analects, but offer no interpretations. Thus, while the book apparently tells the reader a lot about Japanese culture, by the end of the book one is no wiser as to Mishima's motives, or how elements of the books connect with episodes in his life and work.

The Samurai ethic and modern Japan seems mainly very interesting to the reader who is seeking to understand the Japanese Mind in general.



Other books I have read by Yukio Mishima:
The sailor who fell from grace with the sea

Thank you Edwinben. Very helpful reviews. I read Mishima decades ago and recall loved his style greatly. His nationalism, according to Time,
influenced his suicide. He loved everything Japanese to the point that the Westʻs political intrusions that he saw as an assault on Japanʻs freedom and artistic way of life could not be borne. His sense of honour led to his committing hard-kiri. Japanese art lost in that, and so did the world. But
it is not surprising, in retrospect. The Times are savage. And Japan was bound to change -- like the world over. The West itself does not escape, while not being necessarily the only destructive source of many of the changes incurred from new discoveries, some of which are the results of new discoveries and commitment to find new answers (including ways) to recurring long and short problems. Mishimaʻs vision centered on a purity of vision for old, beautiful Japan that he loved beyond his own life, I think.