Three books by Yukio Mishima - Death in Midsummer - Patriotism - The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea

Yukio Mishima (1925 - 1970) was a prolific writer and one of the last great stylists of Japanese writing -- he wrote novels, many collections of short stories, both Noh and Kabuki plays (using traditional elements combined with modern setting and situations) as well as film. Death in Midsummer is a collection of five short stories as well a "noh" play. It was the first work of his that I read over twenty years ago, and one to which I return often. The Sailor Who Fell from Grace With the Sea was adapted into an English language film in 1976 (with the location changed to England) starring Kris Kristofferson and is about a boy's hatred of his mother's love affair with a sailor; Patriotism is a short story that is also included in the collection of works, Death in Midsummer, but is often published as a
"stand alone" because of it's subject matter. Mishima's loving but gory description of righteous suicide in 'Patriotism" is difficult for western audiences (myself included) but it is in my view as precise as anything Flaubert ever wrote (le juste mot), and of course like Flaubert's Madame Bovary, everyone dies horribly at the end, as did Mishima himself, committing seppuka. Unfortunately for Mishima, his own seppuka was handled somewhat ineptly as his second was not strong hearted enough to whack the poor man's head off and after three badly directed blows another had to step in to end Mishima's painful self disembowelment. His work and his own story are all very "japanese" in character, somewhat untranslatable I think, but his writings hold a certain kind of ghastly beauty. I think anyone from any background can taste the intensely doomed flavour of his work, being as it is so unconsciously existentialist that even Nietzche could not have dreamed it better (H-A) ;)