Works by
Yukio Mishima
(Writer)
[January 14, 1925 - November 25, 1970]

Books

• Sun and Steel (1970)
  In this fascinating document, one of Japan's best known-and controversial-writers created what might be termed a new literary form. It is new because it combines elements of many existing types of writing, yet in the end fits into none of them.
  
  At one level, it may be read as an account of how a puny, bookish boy discovered the importance of his own physical being; the "sun and steel" of the title are themselves symbols respectively of the cult of the open air and the weights used in bodybuilding. At another level, it is a discussion by a major novelist of the relation between action and art, and his own highly polished art in particular. More personally, it is an account of one individual's search for identity and self-integration. Or again, the work could be seen as a demonstration of how an intensely individual preoccupation can be developed into a profound philosophy of life.
  
  All these elements are woven together by Mishima's complex yet polished and supple style. The confession and the self-analysis, the philosophy and the poetry combine in the end to create something that is in itself perfect and self-sufficient. It is a piece of literature that is as carefully fashioned as Mishima's novels, and at the same time provides an indispensable key to the understanding of them as art.
  
  The road Mishima took to salvation is a highly personal one. Yet here, ultimately, one detects the unmistakable tones of a self transcending the particular and attaining to a poetic vision of the universal. The book is therefore a moving document, and is highly significant as a pointer to the future development of one of the most interesting novelists of modern times.

• Way of the Samurai (1967, 1977)

• Silk and Insight (1964, 1998)

• The Sailor Who Fell From Grace with the Sea (1963, 1965)

• After the Banquet (1960, 1963)

• Kyoko's House (1959)

• The Temple of the Golden Pavilion (1956, 1959)
  Because of the boyhood trauma of seeing his mother make love to another man in the presence of his dying father, Mizoguchi becomes a hopeless stutterer. Taunted by his schoolmates, he feels utterly alone until he becomes an acolyte at a famous temple in Kyoto. He quickly becomes obsessed with the beauty of the temple. Even when tempted by a friend into exploring the geisha district, he cannot escape its image. In the novel's soaring climax, he tries desperately to free himself from his fixation.

• The Sound of Waves (1954, 1956)
  Set in a remote fishing village in Japan, The Sound of Waves is a timeless story of first love. 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.

• Forbidden Colors (1953, 1968)

• Thirst for Love (1950, 1969)

• Confessions of a Mask (1948, 1958)

Tetralogy:  The Sea of Fertility

1. Spring Snow (1968, 1972)
   The first novel of Mishima's landmark tetralogy, The Sea of Fertility.
   
   Spring Snow is set in Tokyo in 1912, when 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.
   
   Among this rising new elite are the ambitious Matsugae, whose son has been raised in a family of the waning aristocracy, the elegant and attenuated Ayakura. Coming of age, he is caught up in the tensions between old and new -- fiercely loving and hating the exquisite, spirited Ayakura Satoko. He suffers in psychic paralysis until the shock of her engagement to a royal prince shows him the magnitude of his passion, and leads to a love affair that is as doomed as it was inevitable.

2. Runaway Horses (1969, 1973)
   The chronicle of a conspiracy and a novel about the roots and nature of Japanese fanaticism in the years that led to war--an era marked by depression, social change and political violence.

3. The Temple of Dawn (1970, 1973)
   Dramatizes the Japanese experience from the eve of World War II through the degradation of the postwar era.

4. The Decay of the Angel (1970, 1974)
   The dramatic climax of the Sea of Fertility, bringing together the dominant themes of the three previous novels; the decay of Japan's courtly tradition and samurai ideal, and the essence and value of Buddhist philosophy.

• The Sea of Fertility
  All four books of the tetralogy.

Movies

• Black Lizard (1968)
  Kinji Fukasaku, director with Akihiro Maruyama, Isao Kimura, and Yukio Mishima  VHS

• Afraid to Die (1960)
  Yasuzo Masumura , director with Ayako Wakao and Yukio Mishima  DVD

Plays

• Five Modern Nŏ Plays (1973)

• My Friend Hitler: And Other Plays (1968, 2002)
  Though best known for his novels, Yukio Mishima published more than sixty plays, almost all of which were produced during his lifetime. Among them are kabuki plays and others inspired by No dramas -- two types used in classical Japanese theater. Of play-writing Mishima once observed, "I started writing dramas just as water flows toward a lower place. In me, the topography of dramas seems to be situated far below that of novels. It seems to be in a place which is more instinctive, closer to child's play." For English readers, these plays have been one of Japan's best-kept secrets -- until now.
  
  In this anthology, Hiroaki Sato translates the brilliance and richness of Yukio Mishima's writing into the English language. He has selected five major plays and three essays on dramaturgy, providing informative introductions to guide the reader. Sato's translations offer a broad historical and personal context in which those new to Mishima's work can place his writing. For those more familiar with Mishima, these translations offer another medium in which one can access his ingenious work.

• Madame De Sade (1965, 1967)

Short Stories

• The Peacocks (2001)

• Death in Midsummer: And Other Stories (1966)

• Patriotism (1966)

• Acts of Worship: Seven Stories (1965, 1995)
  When Mishima committed ritual suicide in November 1970, he was only forty-five. He had written over thirty novels, eighteen plays, and twenty volumes of short stories. During his lifetime, he was nominated for the Nobel Prize three times and had seen almost all of his major novels appear in English. While the flamboyance of his life and the apparent fanaticism of his death have dominated the public's perception of his achievement, Japanese and Western critics alike are in agreement that his literary gifts were prodigious.
  
  Mishima is arguably at his best in the shorter forms, and it is the flower of these that appears here for the first time in English. Each story has its own distinctive atmosphere and each is brilliantly organized, yielding deeper layers of meaning with repeated readings. The psychological observation, particularly in what it reveals of the turmoil of adolescence, is meticulous.
  
  The style, with its skillful blending of colors and surfaces, shows Mishima in top form, and no further proof is needed to remind us that he was a consummate writer whose work is an irreplaceable part of world literature.

In Addition

• Ba-ra-kei: Ordeal By Roses (2005) by Mark Holborn with Contributions by Yukio Mishima and Photography by Eikoh Hosoe
  Ba-ra-kei is the fierce and lyrical testament of the legendary Japanese writer Yukio Mishima, who shocked the world when he committed ritual suicide in 1970. The year marked Japan's new economic confidence, and Mishima accused the country of being "drunk with prosperity." Many in Japan regarded the suicide as a sensational act. However, with the publication of Mishima's final cycle of novels-conceived eight years prior to his death-it was revealed that his suicide was a carefully considered act, a gesture of historical implication in accord with the morbid and esoteric aesthetic that pervades his writing.
  
  Mishima's elaborate and erotic psyche was captured nine years before his death by master photographer Eikoh Hosoe. This collaboration resulted in surreal photographs of Mishima taken in the baroque interior of his home. The props that surround the writer are the antithesis of the Japanese sensibility of understatement, alluding to Mishima's dark, theatrical imagination. The images in Ba-ra-kei grant us entry into the private world of an extraordinary subject.

• New Writing in Japan (1972), Geoffrey Bownas and Yukio Mishima, eds.
  The book contains 37 examples of poetry and short stories by 18 acclaimed writers, including Oe Kenzaburo, Abe Kobo, Ishihara Shintaro and Mishima himself.

See also:

• Mishima's Sword (2006) by Christopher Ross
  In the tradition of Pico Iyer, a witty and revealing insider's journey through a modern Japan that outsiders seldom glimpse
  In 1970, the world-famous Japanese writer Yukio Mishima plunged a knife into his belly and was decapitated using his own antique sword. In the decades since, people have asked endless far-ranging questions about this spectacular suicide.
  
  Christopher Ross wondered, What on earth happened to Mishima's sword?
  
  And so Ross sets off for Tokyo on a journey into the heart of the Mishima legend---the very heart of Japan. It was a country Ross knew well after nearly five years of living there--but nothing could have prepared him for this. While searching for the fabled sword, Ross encounters the rather startling range of those who knew Mishima...a world, or perhaps more accurately a demimonde, of craftsmen and critics, soldiers and swordsmen, boyfriends and biographers (even the man who taught Mishima hara-kiri). The trail Ross follows inspires a travelogue of the most eye-opening--and occasionally bizarre--sort, a window into the real Japan that is never seen by tourists and the occasion for digressions on, among other things, socks and the code of the samurai, nosebleeds and metallurgy... even how to dress for suicide.
  
  Mishima's Sword is a dazzling read--the perfect book for all those intrigued by things Japanese, from gangsters to Genji, from manga to Mishima.

• The Madness and Perversion of Yukio Mishima (2004) by Jerry S. Piven
  This psychological study focuses on one of Japan's most prolific writers, Yukio Mishima, whose fiction was suffused with images of sadomasochism, homosexual rape, hatred of women, vengeance, rage, and humiliation. Mishima's violent homoerotic imagery and fascistic politics have aroused a range of reactions--from hostile criticism to idealizing fantasies and even militant devotion. Still, he has been called an extraordinary talent and compared to Hemingway, Proust, and Joyce. Here we venture deep into the mind and personal history of Mishima, who was also an eccentric exhibitionist, posed nude for surreal photographs, acted in gangster films, and played the part of a Hollywood celebrity. Amid his flamboyance, Mishima's sexual perversity and right-wing militant politics have also aroused trepidation in many readers and critics, especially in light of his ritual suicide by disembowelment. Piven gives us a psychological understanding of the life, fantasies, and obsessions of Mishima, as all followed early trauma, severe conflict, narcissistic injury and an ensuing fixation on death. We see, for example, how Mishima's psychotic and authoritarian grandmother suffocated him emotionally by sequestering him from his mother and the outside world for the first 12 years of his life. Unlike other works that explain and amplify his philosophy, The Madness and Perversion of Yukio Mishima deconstructs his philosophy, removing his masks, pretenses, and disguises.

• Laughing at Nothing: Humor As a Response to Nihilism (2003) by John Marmysz
  Disputing the common misconception that nihilism is wholly negative and necessarily damaging to the human spirit, John Marmysz offers a clear and complete definition to argue that it is compatible, and indeed preferably responded to, with an attitude of good humor. He carefully scrutinizes the phenomenon of nihilism as it appears in the works, lives, and actions of key figures in the history of philosophy, literature, politics, and theology, including Nietzsche, Heidegger, Camus, and Mishima. While suggesting that there ultimately is no solution to the problem of nihilism, Marmysz proposes a way of utilizing the anxiety and despair that is associated with the problem as a spur toward liveliness, activity, and the celebration of life.

• Yukio Mishima's Report to the Emperor: A Novel (2003) by Richard Appignanesi

• Yukio Mishima, Terror and Postmodern Japan (2002) by Richard Appignanesi

• Deadly Dialectics: Sex, Violence, and Nihilism in the World of Yukio Mishima (1994) by Roy Starrs

• Yukio Mishima (1994)

• Escape From The Wasteland: Romanticism and Realism in the Fiction of Mishima Yukio and Oe Kenzaburo (1991) by Susan Napier
  Lurid depictions of sex and impotence, themes of emperor worship and violence, the use of realism and myth--these characterize the fiction of Mishima Yukio and Oe Kenzaburo. Napier discovers surprising similarities as well as provocative dissimilarities in the work of two writers of radically different political orientations. Napier places Yukio's and Kenzaburo's fiction in the context of postwar Japanese political and social realities and, in a new preface for the paperback edition, reflects on each writer's position in the tradition of Japanese literature.

• Mother, Madame Edwarda and the Dead Man (1989) by Georges Bataille
  This edition includes an essay by Yukio Mishima.

• Yukio Mishima (1989) by Peter Wolfe

• Mishima: A Vision of the Void (1986, 2001) by Marguerite Yourcenar

• Mishima: A Biography (1974) by John Nathan
  At forty-five, Yukio Mishima was the outstanding Japanese writer of his generation, celebrated both at home and abroad for The Sailor Who Fell From Grace with the Sea. In 1970 he startled the world by stepping out onto a balcony in Tokyo before an assembly of troops and plunging a sword into his abdomen; a disciple then beheaded him, completing the ritual of hara-kiri. John Nathan's riveting biography traces the life of this tortured, nearly superhuman personality. Mishima survived a grotesque childhood, and subsequently his sadomasochistic impulses became manifest-as did an increasing obsession with death as the supreme beauty. Nathan, who knew Mishima professionally and personally, interviewed family, colleagues, and friends to unmask the various-often seemingly contradictory-personae of the genius who felt called by "a glittering destiny no ordinary man would be permitted."

• The Life and Death of Yukio Mishima (1974, 2000) by Henry Scott Stokes
  This incisive biography begins with the spectacularly tragic last day of the militant Japanese novelist, perhaps best known for his monumental four-book masterpiece The Sea of Fertility.

• Reflections on the Death of Mishima (1972) by Henry Miller