| NOTA |
(★)(1.In 1970, at the age of forty five, Kimitake Hiraoka -better known by his pen name, Yukio Mishima- was unrivaled as the outstanding Japanese writer of his generation. He had produced forty novels, eighteen plays, twenty volumes of short stories and essays, and had been nominated for the Nobel Prize three times. In November of that year, he performed the most spectacular feat of his career, a ritual suicide which he had painstakingly plotted for several months. Horrifying as his death was, it represented the almost inevitable climax for Mishima, a tortured, nearly superhuman being, whose life had been a relentless search for convulsive beauty. John Nathan´s fascinating biography examines Mishima´s troubled childhood spent under the domination of a sickly grandmother, who infected him with a poetic longing for the irrecoverable past ; his mother´s passive but equally ferocious jealousy ; his father´s tyrannical opposition to his son´s ambitions ; his early fixation on purity and beauty, which paved the way for his later erotic nihilism ; the conflicts between his orderly and conventional life [he married an aristocrat´s daughter and was the loving father of two children] and his homosexuality and sadomasochistic impulses ; and his increasing obsession with death as both the ´coup de theatre´ and the supreme beauty. 2.John Nathan, at the time of writing this biography Associate Professor of Japanese Literature at Princeton University, knew the novelist both personally and professionally. He was granted not only interviews with family [the only biographer with whom the Mishima family cooperated], friends, teachers, colleagues, and editors, but also had access to a wealth of private, unpublicized papers. The result is a critical portrait that unmasks the various personae of a man who felt called by a ´glittering special-order destiny no ordinary man would be permitted´. Dr. Nathan also translated a number of Mishima´s works, including ´The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea´.) |
BASE de DATOS, Biblioteca del Centro Cultural de la Embajada de Japon
印刷用ページ