Yukio Mishima (1925-1970) was many people. The best known in Japan of the writers to emerge there after World War II, he was by far the most published abroad. Mishima completed his first novel the year he entered the University of Tokyo. More followed (some twenty-three, the last completed the day of his death in November, 1970), along with more than forty play, over ninety short stories, several poetry and travel volumes and hundreds of essays. Influenced by European literature, in which he was exceptionally well read, he was an interpreter to his own people of Japan's ancient virtues, to which he urged a return. He had sung on the stage, starred in and directed movies and was a noted practitioner of Japan's traditional martial arts. He seemed at the height of his career and vitality at the age of forty-five, when after a demonstration in the public interest he committed suicide by ceremonial seppuku. Meredith Weatherby was an American publisher of Japanese texts.
"Yukio Mishima was one of the greatest avant-garde Japanese writers of the twentieth century." -- Judith Thurman - New Yorker "We read the bloody details with wonder...such is the power of his writing." -- Gore Vidal - The New York Review of Books "Confessions of a Mask follows in the spirit of Oscar Wilde's dictum that 'man is least himself when he talks in his own person. 'Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.'" " -- Wired
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