| NOTA |
(★)(Translated by John Bester)(When Mishima committed ritual suicide in November 1970, he was only forty-five. He had written over thirty novels, eighteen plays, and twenty volumes of short stories. During his lifetime, he was nominated for the Nobel Prize three times and had seen almost all of his major novels appear in English. While the flamboyance of his life and the apparent fanaticism of his death have dominated the public´s perception of his achievement, Japanese and Western critics alike are in agreement that his literary gifts were prodigious.／ Mishima is arguably at his best in the shorter forms, and it is the flower of these that appears here for the first time in English. Each story has its own distinctive atmosphere and each is brilliantly organized, yielding deeper layers of meaning with repeated readings. The psychological observation, particularly in what it reveals of the turmoil of adolescence, is meticulous.／ The style, with its skillful blending of colors and surfaces, shows Mishima in top form, and no further proof is needed to remind us that he was a consummate writer whose work is an irreplaceable part of world literature.／ ◆Yukio Mishima, one of the most spectacularly gifted writers in modern Japan, was born into a samurai family in 1925. He attended the Peers´ School and Tokyo Imperial University, and for a time worked at the Ministry of Finance. His first full-length novel,´Confessions of a Mask,´ appeared in 1949, and since then he published over a dozen novels, almost all of which were translated into English and other languages during his lifetime. They include : ´Thirst for Love´,´Forbidden Colors´,´Death in Midsummer´,´The Sound of Waves´,´The Temple of the Golden Pavilion´,´After the Banquet´,´The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea´, and ´Spring Snow.´／ Mishima´s reverence for the Japanese martial arts led him to take up Kendo (a type of fencing, with wooden swords) and Karate, as well as body-building, and by 1968 he had become a Kendo master of the fifth dan. He also organized a ´private army´ called the Shield Society, and in November 1970 he and his group forced their way into a Self-Defense Force headquarters in Tokyo, where Mishima, after reading out a proclamation, committed ritual suicide with a young follower in the commanding officer´s room. On the morning of his death, the last volume of Mishima´s tetralogy,´The Sea of Fertility,´ was delivered to his publisher. He is survived by his wife and two children.／ ▼CONTENTS／ ●Preface ●Fountains in the Rain ●Raisin Bread ●Sword ●Sea and Sunset ●Cigarette ●Martyrdom ●Act of Worship) |
BASE de DATOS, Biblioteca del Centro Cultural de la Embajada de Japon
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