Download or read book Persona written by Naoki Inose and published by Stone Bridge Press. This book was released on 2013-01-01 with total page 866 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Traces the life of the Japanese author who went from sickly youth to dedicated student of the martial arts, looking at his family life, the wartime years, and his career as a writer who advocated for traditional values.
Download or read book Mishima a Biography written by John Nathan and published by Little Brown. This book was released on 1974 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Finally back in print: The definitive biography of the legendary Japanese writer-legendary as much for his tumultuous life and macabre suicide as for his Nobel-nominated writings.
Download or read book The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea written by Yukio Mishima and published by ببلومانيا للنشر والتوزيع. This book was released on 2024-10-28 with total page 150 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "It was the sea that made me begin thinking secretly about love more than anything else; you know, a love worth dying for, or a love that consumes you. To a man locked up in a steel ship all the time, the sea is too much like a woman... Things like her lulls and storms, or her caprice... are all obvious." The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea tells the tale of a band of savage thirteen-year-old boys who reject the adult world as illusory, hypocritical and sentimental, and train themselves in a brutal callousness they call "objectivity." When the mother of one of them begins an affair with a ship's officer, he and his friends idealize the man at first; but it is not long before they conclude that he is in fact soft and romantic. They regard their disappointment in him as an act of betrayal on his part, and react violently.
Download or read book Mishima Aesthetic Terrorist written by Andrew Rankin and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2018-09-30 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Half a century after his shocking samurai-style suicide, Yukio Mishima (1925–1970) remains a deeply controversial figure. Though his writings and life-story continue to fascinate readers around the world, Mishima has often been scorned by scholars, who view him as a frivolous figure whose work expresses little more than his own morbid personality. In Mishima, Aesthetic Terrorist, Andrew Rankin sets out to challenge this perception by demonstrating the intelligence and seriousness of Mishima’s work and thought. Each chapter of the book examines one of the central ideas that Mishima develops in his writings: life as art, beauty as evil, culture as myth, eroticism as transgression, the artist as tragic hero, narcissism as the death drive. Along with fresh readings of major works of fiction such as The Temple of the Golden Pavilion and “Patriotism,” the book introduces less familiar works in different genres. Special prominence is given to Mishima’s essays, which contain some of his most brilliant writing. Mishima is concerned with such problems as the loss of certainties and absolute values that characterizes modernity, and the decline of strong identities in a world of increasing uniformity and globalization. In his cultural criticism Mishima makes an impassioned defense of free speech, and he rails against all forms of authoritarianism and censorship. Rankin reads Mishima’s artistic project, up to and including his spectacular death, as a single, sustained lyric, an aggressive piece of performance art unfolding in multiple media. For all his rebellious energies, Mishima’s work is suffused with a sense of ending—the end of art, the end of eroticism, the end of culture, the end of the world—and it is governed by a decadent aestheticism which holds that beautiful things radiate their most intense beauty on the cusp of their destruction. Erudite and authoritative, yet written in clear, accessible prose, Mishima, Aesthetic Terrorist is essential reading for all those who seek a deeper understanding of this radical and provocative figure.
Download or read book The Life and Death of Yukio Mishima written by Henry Scott Stokes and published by Cooper Square Press. This book was released on 2000-08-08 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Novelist, playwright, film actor, martial artist, and political commentator, Yukio Mishima (1925-1970) was arguably the most famous person in Japan at the time of his death. Henry Scott Stokes, one of Mishima's closest friends, was the only non-Japanese allowed to attend the trial of the men involved in Mishima's spectacular suicide. In this insightful and empathetic look at the writer, Stokes guides the reader through the milestones of Mishima's meteoric and eclectic career and delves into the artist's major works and themes. This biography skillfully and compassionately illuminates the achievements and disquieting ideas of a brilliant and deeply troubled man, an artist of whom Nobel Laureate Yasunari Kawabata had said, "A writer of Mishima's caliber comes along only once every two or three hundred years."
Download or read book Life for Sale written by Yukio Mishima and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2020-04-14 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A propulsive, madcap story” (The New York Times) about a salaryman who decides to put his life up for sale in the classifieds section of a Tokyo newspaper after a botched suicide attempt. • "An outstanding writer not only of Japan, but of the world." —The Atlantic After salaryman Hanio Yamada puts his life up for sale, interested parties quickly come calling with increasingly bizarre requests. What follows is a madcap comedy of errors, involving a jealous husband, a drug-addled heiress, poisoned carrots—even a vampire. For someone who just wants to die, Hanio can't seem to catch a break, as he finds himself enmeshed in a continent-wide conspiracy that puts him in the cross hairs of both his own government and a powerful organized-crime syndicate. By turns wildly inventive, darkly comedic, and deeply surreal, in Life for Sale Yukio Mishima stunningly uses satire to explore the same dark themes that preoccupied him throughout his lifetime.
Download or read book Confessions of a Mask written by Yukio Mishima and published by ببلومانيا للنشر والتوزيع. This book was released on 2024-10-28 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Confessions of a Mask tells the story of Kochan, an adolescent boy tormented by his burgeoning attraction to men: he wants to be “normal.” Kochan is meek-bodied, and unable to participate in the more athletic activities of his classmates. He begins to notice his growing attraction to some of the boys in his class, particularly the pubescent body of his friend Omi. To hide his homosexuality, he courts a woman, Sonoko, but this exacerbates his feelings for men. As news of the War reaches Tokyo, Kochan considers the fate of Japan and his place within its deeply rooted propriety. Confessions of a Mask reflects Mishima’s own coming of age in post-war Japan. Its publication in English―praised by Gore Vidal, James Baldwin, and Christopher Isherwood―propelled the young Yukio Mishima to international fame.
Download or read book The Sound of Waves written by Yukio Mishima and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2013-04-09 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A timeless story of first love set in a remote fishing village in Japan. • "A story that is both happy and a work of art.... Altogether a joyous and lovely thing." —The New York Times A young fisherman is entranced at the sight of the beautiful daughter of the wealthiest man in the village. They fall in love, but must then endure the calumny and gossip of the villagers.
Download or read book Mishima written by Marguerite Yourcenar and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2001-09 with total page 174 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On November 25, 1970, Japan's most renowned postwar novelist, Yukio Mishima, stunned the world by committing ritual suicide. Here, Marguerite Yourcenar, a brilliant reader of Mishima and a scholar with an eye for the cultural roles of fiction, unravels the author's life and politics: his affection for Western culture, his family and his homosexuality, his brilliant writings, and his carefully premeditated death.
Download or read book Star written by Yukio Mishima and published by ببلومانيا للنشر والتوزيع. This book was released on 2024-10-28 with total page 80 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: All eyes are upon Rikio. And he likes it, mostly. His fans cheer from a roped-off section, screaming and yelling to attract his attention—they would kill for a moment alone with him. Finally the director sets up the shot, the camera begins to roll, someone yells “action”; Rikio, for a moment, transforms into another being, a hardened young yakuza, but as soon as the shot is finished, he slumps back into his own anxieties and obsessions. Being a star, constantly performing, being watched and scrutinized as if under a microscope, is often a drag. But so is life. Written shortly after Yukio Mishima himself had acted in the film “Afraid to Die,” this novella is a rich and unflinching psychological portrait of a celebrity coming apart at the seams. With exquisite, vivid prose, Star begs the question: is there any escape from how we are seen by others?
Download or read book Sun Steel written by Yukio Mishima and published by New York : Grove Press. This book was released on 1970 with total page 116 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Consists of a series of essays
Download or read book Yukio Mishima written by Acie Cargill and published by . This book was released on 2019-07-19 with total page 84 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Yukio Mishima, one of Japan's best writers of the 2oth century, was deeply attracted to the patriotism and martial spirit of Japan's past, which he contrasted unfavourably to the materialistic Westernized people and the prosperous society of Japan in the postwar era. Mishima himself was torn between these differing values. Although he maintained an essentially Western lifestyle in his private life and had a vast knowledge of Western culture, he raged against Japan's imitation of the West. He diligently developed the age-old Japanese arts of karate and kendo. He formed a controversial private army of about 80 students, the Tate no Kai (Shield Society), with the aim of preserving the Japanese martial spirit and theoretically helping to protect the emperor (the symbol of Japanese culture) in case of an uprising by the left or a communist attack.On November 25, 1970, Mishima and four members of his militia entered a military base in central Tokyo, took the commandant hostage, and tried to persuade the soldiers at the base to join them in supporting the emperor and overturning Japan's pacifist Constitution. When this was unsuccessful, Mishima committed suicide by seppuku. It seems that this was his original purpose, a ritual suicide in the samurai tradition. He had written his closing letters and got all his affairs in order before they went on their mission. He left enough money for his assistants to have a legal defense.
Download or read book Yukio Mishima written by Damian Flanagan and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2014-12-15 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Yukio Mishima was the most internationally acclaimed Japanese author of the twentieth century: prodigiously talented, dazzlingly prolific and a prime candidate for the Nobel Prize. Yet in 1970 Mishima shocked the world with a bizarre attempt at a coup d'etat, which ended in his suicide by ritual disembowelment. In his radically new analysis of an extraordinary life, Damian Flanagan moves away from the stereotypical depiction of Mishima as a right-wing nationalist and aesthete and presents him as a man utterly obsessed with time - time-keeping devices and symbols - arguing that this compulsion was at the heart of the author's literature and life. This book untangles the frequent distortions in the writer's memoirs, which have often been taken at face value, and traces the evolution of Mishima's attempts to master and transform both his sexuality and artistic persona. Though often perceived as a solitary protest figure, this book shows how Mishima was very much in tune with post-war culture: taking up bodybuilding and becoming a model and actor in the 1950s; adopting the themes of contemporary political scandals in his work; courting English translators and even becoming influenced by the student protests and hippy subculture of the late 1960s. Yet while being in thrall to the modern world, the flip side of Mishima's personality - his hidden neuroses and the traumas of his youth - continually pushed him towards a firm rejection of modern Japan and his explosive final act of self-annihilation.
Download or read book The Temple of Dawn written by Yukio Mishima and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2013-04-09 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The third novel in the masterful tetralogy, The Sea of Fertility, in which a brilliant lawyer will go to nearly any length to discover whether a young Thai princess is in fact the reincarnated spirit of his childhood friend. • “Surpassingly chilling, subtle, and original.” —The New York Times Here, Shigekuni Honda continues his pursuit of the successive reincarnations of Kiyoaki Matsugae, his childhood friend. Travelling in Thailand in the early 1940s, Shigekuni Honda, now a brilliant lawyer, is granted an audience with a young Thai princess—an encounter that radically alters the course of his life. In spite of all reason, he is convinced she is the reincarnated spirit of his friend Kiyoaki. As Honda goes to great lengths to discover for certain if his theory is correct, The Temple of Dawn becomes the story of one man’s obsessive pursuit of a beautiful woman and his equally passionate search for enlightenment.
Download or read book Spring Snow written by Yukio Mishima and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2013-04-09 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A classic of Japanese literature" (Chicago Sun-Times) and the first novel in the masterful tetralogy, The Sea of Fertility, set in 1912 Tokyo, featuring an aspiring lawyer who believes he has met the successive reincarnations of his childhood friend. It is 1912 in Tokyo, and the hermetic world of the ancient aristocracy is being breached for the first time by outsiders—rich provincial families unburdened by tradition, whose money and vitality make them formidable contenders for social and political power. Shigekuni Honda, an aspiring lawyer and his childhood friend, Kiyoaki Matsugae, are the sons of two such families. As they come of age amidst the growing tensions between old and new, Kiyoaki is plagued by his simultaneous love for and loathing of the spirited young woman Ayakura Satoko. But Kiyoaki’s true feelings only become apparent when her sudden engagement to a royal prince shows him the magnitude of his passion—and leads to a love affair both doomed and inevitable.
Download or read book S seki written by John Nathan and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2018-05-15 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Natsume Sōseki (1867–1916) was the father of the modern novel in Japan, chronicling the plight of bourgeois characters caught between familiar modes of living and the onslaught of Western values and conventions. Yet even though generations of Japanese high school students have been expected to memorize passages from his novels and he is routinely voted the most important Japanese writer in national polls, he remains less familiar to Western readers than authors such as Kawabata, Tanizaki, and Mishima. In this biography, John Nathan provides a lucid and vivid account of a great writer laboring to create a remarkably original oeuvre in spite of the physical and mental illness that plagued him all his life. He traces Sōseki’s complex and contradictory character, offering rigorous close readings of Sōseki’s groundbreaking experiments with narrative strategies, irony, and multiple points of view as well as recounting excruciating hospital stays and recurrent attacks of paranoid delusion. Drawing on previously untranslated letters and diaries, published reminiscences, and passages from Sōseki’s fiction, Nathan renders intimate scenes of the writer’s life and distills a portrait of a tormented yet unflaggingly original author. The first full-length study of Sōseki in fifty years, Nathan’s biography elevates Sōseki to his rightful place as a great synthesizer of literary traditions and a brilliant chronicler of universal experience who, no less than his Western contemporaries, anticipated the modernism of the twentieth century.
Download or read book Patriotism written by Yukio Mishima and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 1995 with total page 68 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Was it death he was now waiting for? Or a wild ecstasy of the senses?' For the young army officer of Yukio Mishima's seminal story, 'Patriotism, ' death and ecstasy become elementally intertwined. With his unique rigor and passion, Mishima hones in on the body as the great tragic stage for all we call social, ritual, political.
