British author Andrew Rankin was educated at the universities of London, Tokyo, and Cambridge. His other books include Snakelust, a translation of short fiction by Nakagami Kenji, and Seppuku: A History of Samurai Suicide.
In this erudite, stimulating study, Andrew Rankin takes us to the
less-visited corners of Mishima's complete works, the intellectual
essays that were the fount for the ideas that played themselves out
in his novels. . . . Rankin argues that Mishima's late works were
not so much analyses of "aesthetic terrorism" as written exemplars
of it, and assesses that Mishima's suicide was not a botched coup
d'etat, but a spectacular coup de theatre.--Damian Flanagan "Japan
Times"
This book is a real pleasure to read: it's zippy and lucid and
smart and has a nice personal touch. Given the amount that has been
written on Mishima in Japanese, it is remarkable that Rankin's
argument comes across as fresh and original. Rankin reveals that
Mishima's spectacular suicide and his kitsch aesthetic politics
were far more lucidly motivated than one had imagined. One of the
biggest payoffs is the revelation of Mishima as a great, original,
idiosyncratic literary critic and thinker.--Alan Tansman, author of
The Aesthetics of Japanese Fascism
This is a powerful book written with style about a powerful writer
who lived and died with style; a thought-provoking critique of the
artistic and intellectual themes that characterize the figure we
know as "Mishima." Rankin delves deep into the vast archive of
Mishima's essays, most of them untranslated, and juxtaposes them
carefully with the fiction to spectacular effect. The result is to
transport Mishima well beyond the immediate "Japaneseness" of his
environment and reveal a writer whose work is of increasing
relevance in a world that, more than ever, needs to understand the
motivations that drive the "terrorist."--Richard Bowring, Emeritus
Professor of Japanese Studies, University of Cambridge
This is one of the best books on Mishima I have read in years. By
using Mishima's aesthetics of beauty and violence (what the author
calls "aesthetic terrorism"), the book provides a fascinating and
insightful picture of Mishima's aesthetic, stylistic, and overall
development both as a writer and as what might be called a
"performance artist," a man who combined his own life and art in
the final performance of his attempted coup d'�tat and suicide.
Mishima is once again being taken seriously as a major writer, and
this book is a valuable contribution to the renewed discussion
surrounding his work. It is a provocative and useful study about
one of the most interesting writers of twentieth-century
Japan.--Susan Napier, author of Miyazakiworld: A Life in Art
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