Yukio Mishima

by Damian Flanagan

The most internationally acclaimed Japanese author of the twentieth century, Yukio Mishima (1925–70) was a prime candidate for the Nobel Prize. But the prolific author shocked the world in 1970 when he attempted a coup d’état that ended in his suicide by ritual disembowelment. In this radically new analysis of Mishima’s extraordinary life, Damian Flanagan deviates from the stereotypical depiction of a right-wing nationalist and aesthete, presenting the author instead as a man in thrall to the modern world while also plagued by hidden neuroses and childhood trauma that pushed him toward his explosive final act.
           
Flanagan argues that Mishima was a man obsessed with the concepts of time and “emperor,” and reveals how these were at the heart of his literature and life. Untangling the distortions in the writer’s memoirs, Flanagan traces the evolution of Mishima’s attempts to master and transform his sexuality and artistic persona. While often perceived as a solitary protest figure, Mishima, Flanagan shows, was very much in tune with postwar culture―he took up bodybuilding and became a model and actor in the 1950s, adopted the themes of contemporary political scandals in his work, courted English translators, and became influenced by the student protests and hippie subculture of the late 1960s. A groundbreaking reevaluation of the author, this succinct biography paints a revealing portrait of Mishima’s life and work.

Genres: Biography, Japan, Nonfiction, Japanese Literature, Literary Criticism, Literature, History

256 pages, Paperback

First published August 15, 2014

Reviews

[Dmitri · Rating 4 out of 5]

"The sharp knife of psychological analysis I have so far applied to fiction I will turn upon myself. It will be an attempt to perform a vivisection. I vow to make it as scientifically precise as possible, making myself, in Baudelaire's words, both 'executioner and executed'." - Mishima letter to his publisher about 'Confessions of a Mask' (1949)

"Originally I was not possessed by gloomy thoughts. What confronted me with my real problem was beauty alone. I do not think the war had affected me by filling my mind with gloomy thoughts. When people concentrate on the idea of beauty they are, without realizing it, presented with the darkest thoughts that exist in the world. That is how human beings are made." - 'The Temple of the Golden Pavilion' (1956)

"What is the meaning of having a military? It is to defend Japan! What does defending Japan mean? Defending the cultural and historical traditions centered on the Emperor! Japan has fallen asleep and become a spiritual husk. If the Japanese don't stand up, we will all end up being nothing more than soldiers of America! Aren't you samurai? Why do you defend a constitution that rejects you? Is there not one of you who will stand up with me? Now it is certain I will die. Long Live the Emperor!" The soldiers heckled him with "Shoot him!" "Drop Dead!" and "Madman!" - Speech to the Self Defense Forces prior to suicide inside SDF HQ (1970)

************

Yukio Mishima is complicated in many ways, in other ways less so. We all may have met writers, actors, body builders, bisexuals and militarists, but not likely any Nobel nominated neo-samurai who try to restore an Emperor, overthrow the government and commit harakiri in the process. However on November 25, 1970 this actually happened, ending a brief but prolific career as Japan's most celebrated author and proving the maxim that life may indeed be stranger than fiction.

Born in 1925, a year before Hirohito would become Emperor, his first 20 years were lived in a military dictatorship; after 1945, his last 25 years under a constitutional democracy. For biographer Damian Flanagan, writer, critic and translator of Japanese this dislocation during his life made Mishima try to transcend the forces of history. To rescue cultural myths in a changing world the Emperor became the 'manifestation of timeless ritual' against a modern pull of western decadence.

After Perry's gunboats of 1854 Meiji modernization began in 1868. Mishima's childhood reflected social upheavals that came. His grandfather was in government and grandmother from aristocracy. His father an unsuccessful bureaucrat, he was raised in the stifling household of his grandmother. A sheltered boy, he turned to books for escape. In 1937 he entered private school, excelling in letters, Japan into war. Death filled the skies as adolescent fantasies were realized.

Chancing upon a painting of St. Sebastian martyred with arrows he had his first erotic experience. Sex and violence would feature in his work. Proust, Wilde, Nietzsche and de Sade were among favorites. Japanese classics were taught in nationalist ways. The war over, his mentor killed an officer and himself for defaming Hirohito. Mishima gained notice before finishing high school. His father ripped up his writing insisting he follow his path. He earned a law degree in 1947.

Within months at the Ministry of Finance his father relented allowing him to write. Mishima mythologizes in memoirs as he did in his first 1949 novel 'Confessions of a Mask'. It is a semi-autobiographical work about the schism between a young man's public face and inner life, a portrait of nihilism and sado-masochistic fantasy as he comes to terms with his homosexuality. Inside a year it became critically celebrated. It still remains a question how much was made up or true.

After this breakthrough novel Mishima began a large output of work, both serious and entertaining. He wrote plays and essays, romances and dramas, some adapted to film. As a staple of society parties and gay bars he dated women and men. In 1951 he traveled in the west, visiting New York, Rio, Paris, London, Athens and Rome. Once a pale and frail youth rejected by the imperial army a narcissism took hold. With weight training he transformed his body into a male ideal.

In the 'Temple of the Golden Pavilion' Mishima fictionalized a 1950 arson of Kinkaku-ji, a 14th century Buddhist reliquary in Kyoto. The novel enters the mind of the monk who set the fire. The temple represents Japan itself, a timeless culture that had survived the conflagrations of war, infuriating the arsonist. He attempts to break into the sanctuary at the top of the structure but is unable to gain access. Mishimi later defined it as 'the transcendent presence of the Emperor'.

Marrying in 1958, a daughter was born a year later. His days were filled with socializing and practicing kendo, the art of Japanese swordplay. Each night he wrote from 11-7, leaving few hours for sleep. His wife was a compliant homemaker but complained about his libertine lifestyle. In the '60s he had mixed results with critical and popular acclaim, failing to win the Nobel prize. He continued to travel, write and act, producing a four volume 1400 page novel between 1965-70.

'The Sea of Fertility' spans from the end of the Meiji era to a near future with four reincarnations of the narrator's friend. In 'Sun and Steel' Mishima embraced Shintoism, lamenting deaths in a 1936 military coup Hirohito had put down, and of the suicide missions made meaningless by his renunciation of divinity. Mishima became fixated with the far right and protests opposing 1970 renewal of the US security treaty. He resolved to either restore the Emperor or die a heroic death.

On a fall morning in 1970 Mishima entered the Self Defense Force offices to meet with its general. With him were four members of the Shield Society, his private militia to protect the Emperor, to discuss training with the SDF. Drawing his sword the general was taken hostage and doors barricaded. Demands summoned the army to a balcony where he gave his fateful speech. The coup failed and Mishima opened his belly with his blade as compatriots chopped off his head.

[☾⋆｡ A °✩.⟡ · Rating 5 out of 5]

So absolutely excellent !
Also Mishima saying that Dazai would’ve been fixed if he just went to the gym?!?!?! That will remain in my brain forever

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’ve read a dozen Mishima novels, story collections, and plays, as well as John Nathan’s biography of this monumental writer, and Flanagan’s work immediately brought back so much of the enthusiasm I’ve always felt reading Mishima. This biography is a must-read, as far as I’m concerned, for anyone interested in Mishima in his evolution as both a literary figure and a human being.

It’s hard to think of Mishima at the end of his life as anything other than crazy, but Flanagan’s detailed portrait of him helps to explain the reasons for this in addition to depicting the fascinating manifestations of Mishima’s mindset late in his life.

Early on Flanagan writes: “What makes Mishima such a fascinating subject is that he represented in his own person the intense psychological traumas of the whole sweep of modern Japanese history, its precipitate caesuras and volte-faces under intense external pressures that produced a deep sense of cultural schizophrenia.” That’s quite a lot for one person to represent, yet Flanagan gives highly readable examples throughout this biography to show the truth of the statement.

The parts of Mishima’s life and work that are shared and expounded on are well worth the reader’s time, as is the act of re-reading so many of them. Flanagan is an excellent writer who knows how to deliver on a stunningly led life – the life of one of last century’s most talented authors, and a modern-day super-man on the scale of D’Annunzio, Hemingway, and perhaps a handful of others.

I highly recommend Flanagan’s Mishima.

[Richard · Rating 5 out of 5]

I very much enjoyed this short, well-written and compelling biography. Mishima is an intriguing and in some ways disturbing writer, but reading this biography has done much to help me understand him while at the same time providing me with insights into twentieth-century Japanese history and giving me a greater appreciation of the novels. Highly recommended.

[Patrick McCoy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Yukio Mishima is certainly a fascinating figure and two definitive biographies have been written by John Nathan and Henry Scott Stokes, so is there anything left to be said-Damian Flanagan shows that there is, in his Critical Lives biography, Yukio Mishima (2014). It has been a while since I read the two previous biographies, but I think Flanagan's comparison to Osamu Dazai and his assessment of Mishima as the literary torch bearer for Dazai is original-he goes on to suggest that Shusaku Endo would take the torch from Mishima after his death and later shows how Mishima was gradually eclipsed as the main man of letters from Japan by contemporary sensation Haruki Murakami. There are other anecdotes about how Mishima acquired his pen name and how he quit his day job to write full time that were new to me as well. The author reviews memoirs of one of Mishima's early loves to confirm that Mishima was engaging in homosexual affairs at an earlier age than thought as well. Furthermore, Flanagan also gives close reading to some of Mishima's works that were not seen as successes and therefore were not translated into English such as Kyoko's House. Flanagan starts his book with Mishima sensational death by seppuku and returns to the incident at the end, because it is an extremely audacious death and pulls together many of the themes of Mishima's life. It is another fine biography that tries to makes sense of the short and bright life of one of Japan's greatest writers of the 20th century.

[Adam · Rating 4 out of 5]

The events of Mishima's life are well documented but Flanagan has done a good job in looking at what shaped Mishima with a renewed perspective, looking a little more closely into the effect his family background had on him. An aspect that comes across also in the book is the transformation of Mishima from the weak young man not partaking in Kendo etc, into the body building Mishima of his later years extolling the virtues of martial arts, and with the battle between that of the physical with that of literature, and of Mishima's descent into radicalisation. That said the book gives a glimpse of a Mishima caught between left and right politics, famously addressing a hall of left wing student demonstrators with the gambit that if only they recognise the Emperor that he'd join them.

As the book's description mentions at the centre of Flanagan's book is the notion of time, in the book this begins with Mishima being presented with the watch given to him by the Emperor on his graduation, Flanagan reminds us that Mishima was fastidious with keeping to deadlines in his writing and life, throughout the book we're reminded of Mishima's staggering prolificness, this notion of the importance of time culminates in Mishima's writing and conception of Hōjō no Umi and with his final act at the SDF headquarters.

This is an erudite addition to the writing on Mishima with additional images, many of which not see before.

[✿ · Rating 5 out of 5]

v v interesting, i chuckled a lot

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic! Wasn't sure about the "time" thing, though ... Mishima was obsessed with "time", apparently. I've read lots of books with different theories, but no one's yet gone for "the chap was unwell and should have been in hospital".

Bits I liked:

"Mishima's early fantasy raptures about death, far from being normalized during adolescence into more 'healthy' interests, would find themselves in perfect accord with the exterior world around him."

"Mishima relates the legend of how St. Sebastian was a beautiful youth who mysteriously appeared from the sea." - we get all excited about the arrows and loincloths, but it's this aspect of the story that fascinated Mishima, apparently.

"Given the way 'Kyoko's House' is saturated in nihilism, one can only conclude that something quite terrifying must have happened to Mishima in 1958. Indeed it had: he got married." Boom, tish!

"At one point [Mishima's future father-in-law] asked [Mishima's father] if his son was a homosexual and, having been told that he was specifically getting married to prove he wasn't, threatened to call off the wedding."

"In the afternoon he watched the wedding ceremony [of the crown prince] on TV and like the rest of the nation was stunned when a young man - an opponent of the emperor system - ran up to the carriage of the crown prince and attempted to climb in. When the eyes of the assailant and the assailed met, Mishima described it as a moment of glittering drama more entrancing than anything in the ceremony itself."
Watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JPIBG... I like the commentary! "He said he was an anti-royalist. Nobody disbelieved him."

"he would secretly call Kawabata's most famous work, 'Snow Country', 'trashy patchwork'."

[Tim Pendry · Rating 5 out of 5]

This relatively recent biography (2014) of Yukio Mishima has the virtue of concentrating on the person and the social and political conditions of his time rather than on his literary merits. The works are, of course, all covered and placed in their context but it is the person who matters.

Naturally the book has to start and end with his quixotic failed coup and 'seppuku' in 1970. This act has defined his legend (or is it myth?) ever since - of which Paul Shrader's excellent 1985 film 'Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters' with Philip Glass's superb music is the quintessence.

And that is the point. The film was the quintessence in the West and, while respected and honoured as a literary figure in Japan, the 'heroic' aspect is one that appeals to a certain international masculine Western desire for meaning more than it does to the Japanese themselves.

Part of the secret to Mishima lies in his complexity. He was a mass of paradoxes and it is these that make him so fascinating. The book is excellent at showing that the literary 'mask' was never quite the reality of the man who was, in some ways, more 'ordinary' than we might expect.

Japanese society and culture was Westernised to a far greater extent than we in the West often appreciate. Its literature (Tanizaki springs to mind) had long sought to square traditional forms with imported ideas from the decadent era and such writers as Dostoeveski.

Flanagan brings out the degree to which Mishima was very much part of the cultural West, He was well travelled, aware of international current trends, concerned to be respected in Western literary circles and, to the end, was never a 'fascist'.

Even at the end, his Emperor-worship was allied to overt support for liberal democracy and to the American alliance as barrier to communism. In some respects, he was a neo-conservative 'avant la lettre'. Fascists who appropriate him have got it rather wrong.

What he did have was a sophisticated Heideggerian vision of what the Emperor should be as an idea (an idea as much derivative of European as Japanese thought) regardless of what he actually was, something many Catholics understand when they speak of the Pope.

He wanted a sense of dynamism around him (his criticism of young radical Left activists was that they had proved men of straw when it came to action in the streets) although the more one looks into him, the more one realises that he had become more than a little unhinged by the end.

But let's go back to the beginning of the story and understand that Mishima, possibly because of his early hot-house upbringing, was and knew himself to be dysfunctional. He wrote to make himself functional through an imaginative world not always connected with his real self in the world.

Much of his implicit autobiography in his work is invented. His stories tell a version of his reality and not the reality of his actual conduct in the world as he drove himself hard for literary and social success in a world of high cultural Tokyo 'snobbisme'.

In fact, the authenticity of Mishima is hard to find before he discovers his invented militaristic side and even that is clearly a form of performance art - made authentic because (I believe) he placed himself in a position where he had to go through with something or be 'shamed'.

He is clearly more bisexual than homosexual and yet he postures in literary terms as exclusively homosexual. He postures as traditionalist and yet his home life and connections were modelled on Western modern forms.

A constant theme is his own sexual impotence or sense of impotence and the confusion this creates. This impotence is probably not unimportant when it comes to his final act. It is (I believe) central to an underlying depression that must ultimately express itself in 'action' in the world.

Flanagan emphasises the notion of time as an important way into understanding Mishima with macro-time (social change and career) being constantly calibrated with micro-time (personal chronological obsessions) but somehow he is not entirely persuasive.

Deeper than this, Flanagan presents a man who is fundamentally depressed, insecure and ashamed of himself and who seeks resolution through performance - being the literary lion, acting, being photographed, performing, being, in fact, quintessentially, inauthentic.

What happened in 1970 is perhaps best understood as an exceptionally dramatic mid-life crisis that builds up to a crescendo as a man who knows he is inauthentic (the wearer of 'masks') seizes hold of an invented authenticity with some form of coherence and then just 'goes for it'.

This crisis appears to have started with his fascination with hopeless Japanese pre-Meiji Japanese rebels in the mid-1960s and resulted in a parallel existence in which he ran an intense 'literary lion' life alongside a deepening engagement with a form of existential historicism.

Flanagan points out that he poured his final energies into the four volume 'Sea of Fertility' series of novels which he finished precisely before the events of November 1970 and into an increasingly cultic military unit to the point where something had to happen to resolve his crisis.

Japan is famously a shame and not a guilt society. Mishima had by this time spent years playing a particular role to cover up an inherent hollowness of the soul. He had reached the point where he would have to reinvent himself again or go through with the play he had created for himself.

Unfortunately, he had trapped himself into a fantasy of death that had existed in some form since he was an adolescent. Unforgivably in fact, he had created a cult to pander to his narcissism that would kill another young man who believed in him. Perhaps he was just exhausted with life.

We might say that Mishima, presented in Western right wing circles as heroic, was, in fact, a narcissistic and weak man who lacked the self-knowledge to distinguish reality from fantasy and who trapped himself into suicide instead of facing life head on and seeking help.

Yet none of this detracts from his genius, true genius. The genius lies not only in his enormously prolific and fascinating literary output but precisely in Mishima as performance artist, narcissistically creating something almost greater than a person - a legend.

And of what does this legend consist of beyond the writings and the easily forgotten 'literary lion' aspects of the case? It consists of a man constructing for himself, in a meaningless world (philosophically speaking), an existentially viable mythological role that exists beyond his time.

When Mishima distinguished between the really existing Emperor (the 'sein' Emperor) and what the Emperor should be (the 'sollen' Emperor) and spoke at different times of defending and assassinating the Emperor, he was speaking of a profound existential masculine drive.

Of course, Japanese samurai culture permitted relatively recent historic models for such a mentality whereas each heroic Westerner (since the death of paganism) had to invent this mentality for himself and usually in some attenuated form. Yet all masculine cultures understand this mentality.

There was what Mishima was (or what you and I are as men) and what he should be (and what we should be) beyond the social ties imposed by contigent historical conditions. To defend and assassinate the Emperor is to say that the man who is Emperor is irrelevant to the Idea.

This is not a political mentality we can understand in the age of the House of Windsor when few if any of the British feel more than an distant allegiance to the Monarchy which we now see in terms of the high standing of a particular person - the current Queen.

However, we can understand it as an emotional drive that expresses itself, in some men, as a dissatisfaction with the socially constructed self, misses the structures of an ordered society and hankers for the do-or-die semi-suicidal mentality of the resistance or war hero.

It is the very essence of the mid-life crisis. Mishima merely did it in more style than most at the age of 45. His was an extreme expression of the death instinct where social obligation and autonomous self meet - and of the inherent implied sociopathy central to a masculinity of action.

From this perspective, he fascinates because he actually went and did what subconsciously many men feel like might like to do but instead sublimate themselves in action movies, business competition, competitive games and reading about the mafia.

It is as if this flawed and inauthentic (for the first forty years of his life) man escaped boredom and obligation into death and legend. We can choose to see this as running away from depression and himself or running towards meaning and becoming a burst of flame and light according to taste.

Flanagan does not represent all there is to be said on Mishima but he is well worth reading for providing a dense but very readable account of the 'reality' of a man who chose to spend much of his life in a state of fantasy and who made it work for him until the very end.

At the end, he was probably creatively exhausted. Whoever had been constructed out of a dysfunctional childhood in an unstable wartime Japan had said all it needed to say by 1970 and an artistic death was probably the only way out.

Mishima is explained better and not diminished by this fine analytical biography. Readers will also learn a great deal about Japan's political and cultural life. Recommended.

[Alor Deng · Rating 5 out of 5]

About as total of a glimpse at my favorite author that I can hope for. Fantastically researched and written. A must-read for ardent Mishima fans.

[Christopher · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the relatively few cases where a Freudian analysis feels warranted.

First things first: Mishima, his life and his death are all batshit. If you don't already know how he died, reading this will already be worthwhile out of interest alone.

The author leads with his death, then begins chronologically from ancestry and birth to explain how Mishima became who he was. It's a sharp, relatively short read, full of salient detail about a deeply interesting and vibrant person. At the same time, it's not entirely hagiographic; Mishima's later years, for all his brilliance, also have an element of the pathetic about them.

The one misstep is the author's focus on time, especially a distinction between micro-time and macro-time. These concepts are introduced as micro-time as feminine, and macro-time as masculine. They're never properly defined, and while you can guess at what the author means, they're not all that convincing when brought up throughout the text. More convincing is the author's analysis of Mishima's impotence (with women, at least) and broader sexual expression.

Particularly of interest is the tracing of Mishima's ultimate conclusion; the various hints he dropped of his own death drive, and the way they were apparently ignored or waved away by onlookers.

Relatively unmentioned in all this is the reaction of Mishima's wife, Yoko. Much is left out of the text to make it so terse, but I wish this had been included. What was her reaction to his death? What was her reaction to the militia he made and the vast funds he spent on them? What was her reaction to the young, athletic men he surrounded himself with? The danger he put her and their children in, at a time when political assassinations were not unknown?

Well-worth reading, especially if you know nothing or little of Mishima's history

[Daniel Gallimore · Rating 5 out of 5]

Damian Flanagan concludes his highly readable 'life' of Mishima with the observation that the writer was 'a force of nature' from which his early Japanese biographers 'could not escape', and for contemporary readers too, whether Japanese or not, he will 'likely' 'be invading our collective dreams for some time to come'. In my case, the very first work of Japanese literature that I read, now almost forty years ago, was his short story 'Patriotism' about a young officer and his wife who commit ritual suicide after he has participated in the historical attempted military coup of 1936, and Mishima's novel 'The Temple of the Golden Pavilion', also based on an actual incident of a young acolyte who set fire to the pavilion in Kyoto in 1950, made probably the strongest impression on me of all the works of Japanese literature I read in the years following: so different from anything I had encountered in English literature, with all that sincere feeling and exquisite detail, and what a great storyteller! It seems essential, however, to be able to step away from such narratives, and Flanagan enables one to do so with his sympathetic account of the psychological and historical forces that created Mishima, and leaves one liking Mishima the man and the writer more.

[Zach · Rating 4 out of 5]

it may not be the actual biography that had such a dramatic effect on me but in the few days i ate this up mishima’s life managed to radically reframe the way i think about the making of art and self. the nonfiction here is great if not a little indulgent in the author’s scholastic theorizing but i was physically reacting to this throughout. gasping and laughing. the terror of existence augmented by dreams of fascism and male bodies, aching unhappiness and ego at its most grandiose. i understand so much more about mishima now; he has stubbornly stuck himself to my soul as a shadow.

“when the power of imagination is too strong, though, it becomes impossible to live like a normal human being.”

[umuttchan 花火 · Rating 5 out of 5]

Yine önceden okuyup eklemeyi unuttuğum kitaplardan...

Nerden başlasam bilemediğim bir kitap ve bir hayat.Bir Yaşam Öyküsü değil de bir Ölüm Öyküsü oluveriyor konu mishima’ya gelince.Kitabın içinde hep bildiğim insanların olması ve onlarla iletişim kurması beni çok şaşırttı özellikle Donald Keene çok diyebilirim ve tabii ki diğer yazarlarla olan ilişkileri ,Osamu Dazai ve Kawabata özellikle Kawabata cidden yer yer hatta çoğu an saygımızı ilettiğimiz yeri geldiğinde de bizi tebrik edişi cidden okunmaya değerdi.Daha da çok açıklanabilir ama sanırım kendimle tartışmak istiyorum .

[a · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent! While not as comprehensive as the biography by Stokes or Inose, it offered some very interesting insights, especially about his tetralogy. A must read in my opinion, even if you haven’t read Mishima before

[Emma · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Human life is limited but I would like to live forever.”
A gripping account of Mishima.

[Devrim Güven · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best critical biographies ever written on Mishima.

[Özgür · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mişima okuma grubu öncesi hayatıyla ilgili genel bir bilgi edinmek için okudum, son derece güzel yazılmış bir biyografi.

[Xander · Rating 4 out of 5]

I feel more prepared for the Mishimaverse

[Tosh · Rating 5 out of 5]

My very first impression of Japan, when I was a teenager was the band Sadistic Mika Band, the use of chopsticks, and Yukio Mishima. Now, mind you it is more about Mishima's suicide than say his writing - but that was enough (of course) for me to be fascinated with Japan. Like Mishima being obsessed with the painting of St. Sebastian being penetrated by arrows, I was in turn fascinated with the photograph of Mishima posing as St. Sebastian, being of course, penetrated by arrows. It was much later when I read "Confessions of a Mask," and I thought to myself "Ah now this is the writer's life!" Without a doubt Mishima is a fascinating and brilliant writer, but on the other hand his life, his narrative is just as interesting if not more so than his writing. Daniel Flanagan hits all the heights and.... well to me, Mishima is all heights. In my opinion, he was very much of a performer, posing as an author. Nonetheless,... he was/is a very good writer.

Also I have mentioned this before, but the "Critical Lives" series a must for those who love to read biographies. They take on major complexed characters with even their more complexed work(s) - and make it accessible for the general reader. A perfect book series in my opinion.

[Louis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good in its analysis of how Mishima constructed his autobiography to suit the image he was trying to put forward, altering and fabricating events in what could be seen as an effort to appear misunderstood and complicated. Did he really hate Dazai because of his works, or because he's petty and resented Dazai's success? (Was it Flanagan who described Dazai as a true genius, while Mishima had to work to achieve any success? All of the biographies are melting into one)

Flanagan makes really interesting throwaway comments without citation (Mishima ghostwrote The House of Sleeping Beauties, for example. What?) and yet provides references for the most mundane things, including the cotton wool up the arse, which seems to have reached the level of general knowledge, although we're never told if it was required.

The whole central thesis of time seems to rely mainly on Mishima removing his watch before setting out to the JSDF base on the day of his death, but that might just be what you do when you're about to slice yourself open for the emperor.

[null. · Rating 2 out of 5]

Artless and poorly-written. At the very least, good for trivia (ie: I had no idea the events of A Wild Sheep Chase by Murakami were set immediately after the Mishima Incident, or that Mishima wanted to change the setting of The Temple of Dawn to Laos after a lengthy visit).

Better to stick with Stokes or Nathan.

[فلاح رحيم · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another tale about the strange life and achievement of Mishima and his grotesque death. I kept thinking of ISIS thugs while reading about his suicidal coup in 1970. The connection is not illusory.