Mishima: A Biography

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In 1970, at the age of forty-five, Kimitake Hiranka, known as Yukio Mishima, was a preeminent Japanese writer, having produced forty novels, eighteen plays, and numerous volumes of short stories and essays. That November, he executed a meticulously planned ritual suicide, marking a horrifying yet inevitable climax to his life—a life characterized by a relentless pursuit of beauty. John Nathan’s biography delves into Mishima’s troubled childhood, dominated by a sickly grandmother who instilled in him a longing for an irretrievable past, alongside a mother whose jealousy and a father’s opposition shaped his ambitions. It explores his early fixation on purity and beauty, leading to a later embrace of erotic nihilism, and the tension between his conventional life as a husband and father and his homosexual and sadomasochistic tendencies. Ultimately, it reveals his growing obsession with death as both a dramatic act and a form of ultimate beauty.