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Exquisite Nothingness: The Novels of Yukio Mishima
'Extremely sharp, focused and to the point … effectively sets out the background to Mishima, his desires and motivations, as they are reformulated in his literary texts [with] real insight' — Professor Stephen Dodd, Emeritus Professor of Japanese Literature, SOAS
Yukio Mishima (1925-1970) was a sensationalist, a militarist, a self-publicist, a contrarian, a charlatan, a joker, a poser, a paradox and a hypocrite – but he was also a literary genius. Nominated several times for the Nobel Prize, his work remains one of the cornerstones of twentieth-century Japanese literature, an enduring, provocative and disturbing force probing the strangeness and fragility of our existence in a violent, unpredictable world.
In Exquisite The Novels of Yukio Mishima, David Vernon explores the full range of Mishima’s achievement, with a chapter devoted to each of his major novels, including established classics like Confessions of a Mask, Thirst for Love, Forbidden Colours, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea and the vast final quartet The Sea of Fertility, as well as startling works only recently available to English the captivating anti-nuclear science fiction Beautiful Star and the surreal satire on modern times Life for Sale.
More than half a century since his shocking suicide, Exquisite Nothingness aims to reposition Mishima’s art at the centre of his controversial legacy, acclaiming its depth, beauty and devastating emotional power.
Yukio Mishima (1925-1970) was a sensationalist, a militarist, a self-publicist, a contrarian, a charlatan, a joker, a poser, a paradox and a hypocrite – but he was also a literary genius. Nominated several times for the Nobel Prize, his work remains one of the cornerstones of twentieth-century Japanese literature, an enduring, provocative and disturbing force probing the strangeness and fragility of our existence in a violent, unpredictable world.
In Exquisite The Novels of Yukio Mishima, David Vernon explores the full range of Mishima’s achievement, with a chapter devoted to each of his major novels, including established classics like Confessions of a Mask, Thirst for Love, Forbidden Colours, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea and the vast final quartet The Sea of Fertility, as well as startling works only recently available to English the captivating anti-nuclear science fiction Beautiful Star and the surreal satire on modern times Life for Sale.
More than half a century since his shocking suicide, Exquisite Nothingness aims to reposition Mishima’s art at the centre of his controversial legacy, acclaiming its depth, beauty and devastating emotional power.
356 pages, Kindle Edition
Published September 23, 2025
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September 11, 2025
An erudite and gripping literary biography of a fascinating and important author. Mishima was incredibly prolific and in his 45 years of life wrote 34 novels, 50 plays, and a great number of short stories and essays. Vernon very overtly structures the book for the English-language reader, focusing on the work that not only has been translated but also accessible in print and so available to us all, while frequently alluding and peaking our interest about the work that is harder to access or remains untranslated.
Each of the fifteen chapters of the book is dedicated to a particular novel (including four at the end of the book to Mishima's grand tetralogy The Sea of Fertility, one for each of the parts). He starts from Confessions of a Mask, which wasn't Mishima's first novel, but the one that catapulted him to literary fame when it was published in 1949. The book is structured chronologically, in three parts, separating the early novels from the mid-career to the last grand undertaking. While Vernon very intentionally focuses on the textual analysis, he introduces biographical details as needed to better understand the author's ambition in each work. Vernon also enriches the text with the examination of Mishima's literary and cultural influences--with particular attention to musical and theatrical influences from Hamlet and Beethoven's Fidelio to Wagner--as well as literary reception: how Mishima's words were received at home and abroad. This helps immensely to better understand the trajectory of this writer who--while resisting modernity--at the same time has embodied modernity's ideas of an artist who turns his life into art: as Vernon shows, he put "The End" on his final work on the same day he committed a ritual suicide.
This books also helps to rehabilitate the work of an author whose radical right-wing politics have long overshadowed his literary heritage. Today, more than half a century after his death, we can return to his novels and to read them afresh, finding in them both powerful reflections on modernity itself and appreciate how the desire for truth and beauty can become thwarted in a man's troubled psyche. Vernon most powerfully states his own ambition in this paragraph from the last chapter of the collection, "The Decay of the Angel":
"To this day, in Japan and abroad, to venture a declaration in favor of Mishima's work is, for many, to risk aligning oneself with his pathology, his dark and dangerous diagnosis of a broken, empty world. While it is true that an affinity for this art need not entail any sympathy for his sociopolitical or historical outlook, it is also true that Mishima's complexity and peculiarities in life have eclipsed his complexities and peculiarities in art. There are vital connections between the two, though we should be cautious in aligning them too straightforwardly.
No writer's life can be entirely separate from their art, but we need to locate more in Mishima, especially in The Sea of Fertility, than simply the advocacy of a right-wing conservatism, a yearning for the past and obliteration of the present. Mishima is an erudite and multifaceted writer, just as The Sea of Fertility is an erudite and multifaceted work of art, and his anxieties and obsessions tend to be timeless human apprehensions which concern us all, whether we are Japanese or not, existing in the present, the past--or an as yet unimagined future."
I deeply appreciated Vernon's plea for complexity, so present throughout this book. Vernon's work is deeply informed by and relies on queer and feminist scholarship, especially in examining Mishima's bisexuality and the complex representations of queerness and sexuality in his writing, as well as his frequently stereotypical yet sometimes cleverly subverted female characters. Obsessed with body image and the masculine/feminine divisions, Mishima was on occasion able to transcend the binaries and create unforgettable characters uniquely their own.
I particularly admire that, while giving The Sea of Fertility its due as the grand achievement of the writer's art, Vernon actually avoids the pitfall of so many writerly biographies and allows each of the novels he's discussing to stand on their own (as opposed to being diminished as shadows of the grand final work). Each novel is shown to be unique and fascinating, and Vernon points out the unique aspects of each while at the same time pointing to the preoccupations and connections between them. As I read Vernon, I created my own list of Mishima novels I would like to read, and first started with the thriller Life for Sale, the chapter on which Vernon subtitled "Pulp Friction." Life for Sale is a high-paced novel of crime and intrigue, whose deeper meaning Vernon sees in that it shows how a character who rejects the values of modernity (the pursuit of individual happiness, success in business and family life) risks to be embraced by the world's emptiness, and be subsumed by nihilism and meaninglessness. As can be expected from Vernon's description, this book proved to be a highly entertaining wild-goose-chaise that took me to very unexpected places.
Next on my list is probably The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, intriguing thematically as the protagonist struggles to balance the powers of beauty and destruction, but also because of its formal qualities: "Its grasp of experience and the workings of fiction operates in defiance of customary expectations concerning plot and character, confusing many with its refusal to submit to routine requirements in motivation, point of view, and perspective." Count me hooked!
One thing I wished for was that Vernon told us more about Mishima's translators and the history of translation of his work to English. Beyond giving translators their due for their labor, I find it worthwhile to pay attention to for different reasons. Translation lands a book into a different political/historical moment in the receiving culture, and I'd be curious to know a little more about how the books resonated in the English-centric world -- and for what reasons. How did people in the English-language world read them in light of Mishima's right-wing ideas? Some part of this story comes in the aside of Mishima's bid for the Nobel -- but I would love to know more.
Last but not least, I really enjoyed Vernon's chapter endnotes, filled with fascinating asides. My favorite is the story about his novel After the Banquet, in which Mishima too closely followed a newspaper article that inspired the plot of the novel, and got sued for it. He lost the suit, and as a result of that, Vernon writes, "The phrase 'invasion of privacy' even entered [Japanese] language, with the English word for 'privacy' retained -- since no precise equivalent was considered to exist in Japanese."
Overall, I think this is a wonderful and very alive literary biography, written in an engaging and conversational tone, and beautiful in its engagement with the complexities of human life and the pursuit of art. A great introduction to an important author.
Each of the fifteen chapters of the book is dedicated to a particular novel (including four at the end of the book to Mishima's grand tetralogy The Sea of Fertility, one for each of the parts). He starts from Confessions of a Mask, which wasn't Mishima's first novel, but the one that catapulted him to literary fame when it was published in 1949. The book is structured chronologically, in three parts, separating the early novels from the mid-career to the last grand undertaking. While Vernon very intentionally focuses on the textual analysis, he introduces biographical details as needed to better understand the author's ambition in each work. Vernon also enriches the text with the examination of Mishima's literary and cultural influences--with particular attention to musical and theatrical influences from Hamlet and Beethoven's Fidelio to Wagner--as well as literary reception: how Mishima's words were received at home and abroad. This helps immensely to better understand the trajectory of this writer who--while resisting modernity--at the same time has embodied modernity's ideas of an artist who turns his life into art: as Vernon shows, he put "The End" on his final work on the same day he committed a ritual suicide.
This books also helps to rehabilitate the work of an author whose radical right-wing politics have long overshadowed his literary heritage. Today, more than half a century after his death, we can return to his novels and to read them afresh, finding in them both powerful reflections on modernity itself and appreciate how the desire for truth and beauty can become thwarted in a man's troubled psyche. Vernon most powerfully states his own ambition in this paragraph from the last chapter of the collection, "The Decay of the Angel":
"To this day, in Japan and abroad, to venture a declaration in favor of Mishima's work is, for many, to risk aligning oneself with his pathology, his dark and dangerous diagnosis of a broken, empty world. While it is true that an affinity for this art need not entail any sympathy for his sociopolitical or historical outlook, it is also true that Mishima's complexity and peculiarities in life have eclipsed his complexities and peculiarities in art. There are vital connections between the two, though we should be cautious in aligning them too straightforwardly.
No writer's life can be entirely separate from their art, but we need to locate more in Mishima, especially in The Sea of Fertility, than simply the advocacy of a right-wing conservatism, a yearning for the past and obliteration of the present. Mishima is an erudite and multifaceted writer, just as The Sea of Fertility is an erudite and multifaceted work of art, and his anxieties and obsessions tend to be timeless human apprehensions which concern us all, whether we are Japanese or not, existing in the present, the past--or an as yet unimagined future."
I deeply appreciated Vernon's plea for complexity, so present throughout this book. Vernon's work is deeply informed by and relies on queer and feminist scholarship, especially in examining Mishima's bisexuality and the complex representations of queerness and sexuality in his writing, as well as his frequently stereotypical yet sometimes cleverly subverted female characters. Obsessed with body image and the masculine/feminine divisions, Mishima was on occasion able to transcend the binaries and create unforgettable characters uniquely their own.
I particularly admire that, while giving The Sea of Fertility its due as the grand achievement of the writer's art, Vernon actually avoids the pitfall of so many writerly biographies and allows each of the novels he's discussing to stand on their own (as opposed to being diminished as shadows of the grand final work). Each novel is shown to be unique and fascinating, and Vernon points out the unique aspects of each while at the same time pointing to the preoccupations and connections between them. As I read Vernon, I created my own list of Mishima novels I would like to read, and first started with the thriller Life for Sale, the chapter on which Vernon subtitled "Pulp Friction." Life for Sale is a high-paced novel of crime and intrigue, whose deeper meaning Vernon sees in that it shows how a character who rejects the values of modernity (the pursuit of individual happiness, success in business and family life) risks to be embraced by the world's emptiness, and be subsumed by nihilism and meaninglessness. As can be expected from Vernon's description, this book proved to be a highly entertaining wild-goose-chaise that took me to very unexpected places.
Next on my list is probably The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, intriguing thematically as the protagonist struggles to balance the powers of beauty and destruction, but also because of its formal qualities: "Its grasp of experience and the workings of fiction operates in defiance of customary expectations concerning plot and character, confusing many with its refusal to submit to routine requirements in motivation, point of view, and perspective." Count me hooked!
One thing I wished for was that Vernon told us more about Mishima's translators and the history of translation of his work to English. Beyond giving translators their due for their labor, I find it worthwhile to pay attention to for different reasons. Translation lands a book into a different political/historical moment in the receiving culture, and I'd be curious to know a little more about how the books resonated in the English-centric world -- and for what reasons. How did people in the English-language world read them in light of Mishima's right-wing ideas? Some part of this story comes in the aside of Mishima's bid for the Nobel -- but I would love to know more.
Last but not least, I really enjoyed Vernon's chapter endnotes, filled with fascinating asides. My favorite is the story about his novel After the Banquet, in which Mishima too closely followed a newspaper article that inspired the plot of the novel, and got sued for it. He lost the suit, and as a result of that, Vernon writes, "The phrase 'invasion of privacy' even entered [Japanese] language, with the English word for 'privacy' retained -- since no precise equivalent was considered to exist in Japanese."
Overall, I think this is a wonderful and very alive literary biography, written in an engaging and conversational tone, and beautiful in its engagement with the complexities of human life and the pursuit of art. A great introduction to an important author.
Displaying 1 of 1 review