Product Description
Kazu runs her restaurant with charm and shrewdness, but when she falls in love with one of her clients, she renounces her business to become his wife. When Kazu decides to ressurect her husbands political career she is forced to choose between her marriage and her irrepressible vitality. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (9)

A Satisfying Meal
Written in 1960, After the Banquet was one of Mishima's great literary successes in Japan. It followed the less than enthusiastic reception of Kyoko's House, his most autobiographical novel since Confessions of a Mask. Critics complained that the characters in Kyoko's House were simply slivers of Mishima's complex personality rather than fully fleshed out literary creations. Perhaps in response to this, Mishima grounded the plot and dramatis personae of After the Banquet firmly in reality, so much so that he was sued for libel by the former foreign minister on whom he modeled the character of Noguchi.

Noguchi is an aging liberal politician who enters into an affair with Kazu, the proprietress of a famous restaurant. The two of them marry, and since both of them are in the public eye, the marriage attracts a good deal of attention.They make an unlikely couple.Noguchi is dry, ascetic, reserved, aristocratic. Kazu is a country girl who worked her way up, wise to the warm and sweaty aspects of life, impulsive, generous, self-indulgent, noble, sneaky.Noguchi is persuaded to come out of retirement and run for governor on the Radical Party ticket.Though naïve about politics, Kazu is fully supportive:she throws the full force of her outgoing personality, as well as her considerable bank account, into her husband's campaign.

Mishima clearly understands how politics in Japan worked at that time, and much of the novel concerns itself with electoral tactics and dirty tricks.Japanese prefectural politics turn out to be not so different from American politics: incumbents use the full weight of the money and favors they amass to smother the opposition.Kazuis a much more natural politician than her reserved husband, and much more willing to do whatever it takes to win the election.Mishima, who almost always saw political allegiance as form of self- immolation, shows Kazu losing her money, her naivete, her reputation and important friendships in her reckless pursuit of victory. She is buffeted by conflicting desires: she loves and wants to obey her husband, but she can't deny her need to succeed on her own terms.Tension fairly bursts out of her - she laughs, shouts, sweats, weeps, sings - and the reader sympathizes with this middle-aged woman's struggles to create a social milieu where she can breathe.

Perhaps because the story is mostly told from Kazu's point of view, this is one of Mishima's least philosophical novels.Even the political scenes are more about mechanics and maneuvering than about Japan's place in the world or the role of the emperor or the code of the warrior - issues that came to preoccupy and then overwhelm Mishima.The writing is colloquial, sensual, and gently satirical.Mishima describes gardens in all weathers, the sapping humidity of a Tokyo summer, the chafe of clothing against full-figured snowy flesh. The plot rises and falls in a graceful arc, culminating with the election.

In After the Banquet we are left with the impression of a great writer enjoying himself, not overly straining, but hitting the target nonetheless. If not Mishima's most profound novel, it is one of his most enjoyable.

Got what I expected :)
Like the description said, the book was in very good condition.
It has a kind of odd smell though. Haha the book was cheap and like new though.

No Title
A strange book, written by a Japanese author in 1960.Later, he committed ritual suicide, as seen in the movie "Mishima".In some ways, it is so uttterly immersed in the Japanese culture, describing in exquisite detail nature and Kazu's kimonos.It seems to be about the clash of two polar opposite natures, who, nevertheless, marry, and then discover who they really are, as revealed in the campaigning of a political election.In the end, Kazu chooses life over the very real peril of an untended grave, which was then a horror to any Japanese.It got better the further along it went.
A stunning sentence- ". . . her words were not slipping through his face as through a sieve, but sinking deeply and certainly . . ."

Timeless sentiments
This is actually one of the easier to understand writings from the infamous Mishima. The provocative sentiments he evokes in this story gives timeless relevance in every corner of the earth in this romance between an entrepreneuring new rich with noble spirit to elevate her loved one, an aristocrat who ran out of money.

Mishima's strongest writing outside The Sea Of Fertility.
Mishima wrote After The Banquet well into the second half of his career. It was one of his last books before The Sea Of Fertility. So, his worldview was surely fully formed by this point. Yet, the book breaks quite a few of the stereotypes that surround Mishima's work.

First of all, the main character is a woman. This is rare for Mishima, who had quite a reputation for manliness. The last time he had a female protagonist was in Thirst For Love, his second novel. But there, the woman was obviously a cardboard cut-out more than a character, a hysterical "repressed housewife" type who lost her head over a strong, manly young man. Not in After The Banquet, though. Dig this quote: "Kazu...realized that for all her headstrong temperament, she had never loved a man younger than herself. A young man has such a surplus of spiritual and physical gifts that he is likely to be cocksure of himself, particularly when dealing with an older woman, and there is no telling how swelled up with self-importance he may become. Besides, Kazu felt a physical repugnance for youth. A woman is more keenly aware than a man of the shocking disharmony between a young man's spiritual and physical qualities, and Kazu had never met a young man who wore his youth well. She was moreover repelled by the sleekness of a young man's skin." (31-2)

This is a strange statement, coming from a man who allegedly worshipped youth and physical fitness, to the extent that he voiced a desire to die before he ever grew old. Not only is Mishima disparaging young men, he's doing so from the perspective of a woman over fifty. And this woman is not a decrepit and bitter shell like, say, the old Honda in the last two volumes of The Sea Of Fertility, but a vivacious, energetic hell-raiser. Well, then.

So anyway, in After The Banquet, the strong and lively older woman falls in love with a sixty-year-old politician who professes radical views. This happens when she is present at a dinner attended by various old politicians, and she sees that this particular man was the only one at the gathering who still expressed some passion for the present, instead of constantly reliving past glories. This part is well in line with Mishima's supposed views. After all, Mishima was also widely considered to be an old-school nationalist radical.

But, interestingly enough, he never explains Noguchi's political views in the novel. It is stated that Noguchi is a member of the Radical Party, but that's all. There is no way to tell if this party is liberal or conservative. Mishima states that Noguchi likes to lecture his wife on socialism, but not whether he is for or against it. The one scene that depicts a political speech given by Noguchi is full of deliberate comedy. Mishima portrays Noguchi as a terrible public speaker, and the only one of his positions that the book reveals is something silly about banning bicycles in public places. In other words, Mishima is quite consciously poking fun at this principled radical.

Mishima does generally speak with admiration about Noguchi's sense of honour, but within limits. For instance, Noguchi does not allow his wife to buy him a new suit, and prefers to go about dressed in clothes that he bought decades ago. Mishima shows his approval through the wife's eyes, but nonetheless describes Noguchi's behaviour as follows: "Such childish drivel, as anyone could see, covered an undercurrent of narrow-minded dread." (170) In another chapter, Noguchi gets angry at his wife when she tells him about how his friends talk about them behind his back. Mishima's commentary: "This was Kazu's first intimation that her husband's noble mind lacked sufficient powers of discernment." (94)

There's another line of thought regarding Mishima that holds that he didn't really care about politics, he only cared about dying a glorious death when he was still in his prime as a man. This explanation can be plausible, and the book's mild mockery of Noguchi, even as it praises him, may appear to support it. But that still doesn't explain the protagonist, quite old by Mishima's standard. Kazu does think about death, like many of Mishima's characters, but there's a refreshingly convincing materialistic streak to these thoughts. She wants to die as a part of a respected family, and to be buried among dignified people. This objective is more suitable to highly motivated people who build their fortune from nothing on their own than to radical dreamers with some abstract idea of honour or national greatness. And by the end of the book, she rethinks even this position. This is quite different from, say, Mizoguchi's dreams of beauty and fire in The Temple Of The Golden Pavilion -- even though, it must be noted, Mizoguchi ends up deciding that he wants to live.

Perhaps the only aspect in which Kazu might be a "typical" Mishima character is that she never thinks about having a family. It's a bit strange that a woman of fifty would appear to feel no regret about having no children. It may be that she is too cynical to believe that she might want to have children with any man, but nonetheless, in her private moments, she might still wish that she had had children, even abstractly. However, there is a passage in the book that may imply that her thoughts about death are caused in part by her lack of family.

There's a common image of Mishima as a "philosophical" writer, interested in big ideas more than the lives of individuals. But when he had a mind to, he could write about real life with exceptional humour and attention to detail. Kazu's worldliness annoys and upsets her husband. And it seems that Mishima likes her more than him. ... Read more

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Customer Reviews (6)

Is it a biography?Is it literary criticism?What is it?
Having recently finished Spring Snow, which perked in me a keen interest in learning more about Yukio Mishima, I made the mistake of picking up the first book about the author that I came upon, which happened to be this slender volume.Granted, given the size of the book, I didn't expect it to be the definitive biography of the man.But somehow this book managed to disappoint.It somehow failed to deliver on even my modest expectations.

The first problem is that I don't know exactly what the book is.It begins at the beginning of his life and ends with his death, yet it's not a biography.The author makes some interesting observations and provides some insight to a number of his books, but it's too inconsistently done, with a few sentences used to discuss some books and pages for others, to be considered literary criticism.It's sort of like an essay, ( I noticed after I finished reading it that the dust jacket claims it's an essay) yet it doesn't have a premise, or at least not a firm one, and doesn't end with a conclusion other than Mishima's death.So the result is that I never really felt grounded in this book.

Further, sometimes her writing is annoying, like when she lectures us about fascism in the West, (displaying either a lack of historical education or a skewed interpretation based on political biases) or when she tells us Mishima liked one of her novels.

I won't say I hated it as much as other reviewers, because given the subject, there were points in the book that interested me.But next time when I want to read a biography, I'll go right to the authoritative ones.

Mishima bio
Thank you for a well-priced book in good condition. Thanks also for the prompt delivery.

Strange and quite pointless
MISHIMA: A VISION OF THE VOID is a peculiar essay on the life and work of the Japanese writer by Marguerite Yourcenar, a French author best known for her "Memoires d'Hadrien". The book consists of 151 pages in which Yourcenar waxes lyrically about Mishima's growth as an author, some of the themes of his books, and the persistent pessimism that seems to have led to his suicide.

This book is very weird, I can only marvel that a publisher initially accepted it, nevermind that it has been translated into at least English and Romanian. It offers no surprising perspective on Mishima's work, and cannot be used to get a brief plot summary of an unknown work, since it assumes that one has read Mishima's oeuvre (at least those works translated into foreign languages). One cannot gain from it any interesting facts about Mishima's life, and in fact Yourcenar assumes that one has already read the biographies of Scott-Stokes and Nathan.

MISHIMA: A VISION OF THE VOID may have value as a tribute by one author to another, but it should have been published in limited quantities as a pamphlet, instead of being pitched as a meaningful contribution to Mishima criticism. If you love Mishima, delight in his works and enjoy the two major biographies. Give Yourcenar's work a pass.

I should have listened to the previous two reviewers
As a fan of Mishima Yukiyos work, I hoped that the other two reviwers of this book were mistaken, perhaps close minded, or otherwise wrong. However, they are right on target. Part biography and part "literary analysis", the book does neither well. The first half of the book is almost exclusively summaries of Mishima's major novels, with lengthy qoutes and plot summaries with no serious analysis. As a reader I get the feeling that Yourcenar wishes to bath in the literary sucess of Mishima by retelling his novels. I would be willing to forgive the first half of the book if the second had contained sharp, clear analysis. Instead the book makes wild claims with no support (I particularly enjoyed the line to the effect of "Confessions of a Mask describes all young people in Japan between 15 and 25 after world war 2"). The Sea of Fertility - Mishima's masterpiece - recieved a page of discussion after a length plot summary.

Since I didn't listen to the other reviewers, I hope others will.

A tepid effort yet covers the basic facts
Yukio Mishima is clearly an enigmatic, unique, bizarre, and interesting artist. I read many of his novels years ago but little of his personal history. This brief biography by Marguerite Yourcenor gives the basics of the author's life. Yourcenor's occasional self-referential comments do not really detract from this biography but neither do they add to it. Reading this biography certainly doesn't make me want to run out and buy any of Yourcenor's novels. In any case, the pace of the biography builds up nicely to the finale of Mishima's ritual suicide in an almost comic close to his life. The beauty and symbolism of Mishima's final act are layed bare in visceral physicality by Yourcenor. While the overall writing style of the biographer is tepid, the brief duration and fact filled chronology of this biography make it a fair source for those wanting exposure to the esential biographical facts of Yukio Mishima's life. ... Read more

Product Description
This psychological study focuses on one of Japan's most prolific writers, Yukio Mishima, whose fiction was suffused with images of sadomasochism, homosexual rape, hatred of women, vengeance, rage and humiliation. Mishima's violent homoerotic imagery and fascistic politics have aroused a range of reactions - from hostile criticism to idealizing fantasies and even militant devotion. Still, he has been called an extraordinary talent and compared to Hemingway, Proust and Joyce. Here we venture deep into the mind and personal history of Mishima, who was also an eccentric exhibitionist, posed nude for surreal photographs, acted in gangster films and played the part of a Hollywood celebrity. Amid his flamboyance, Mishima's sexual perversity and right-wing militant politics have also aroused trepidation in many readers and critics, especially in light of his ritual suicide by disembowelment. ... Read more

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First study of Mishima to recount his intellectual background and thought processes, to treat his major works in their proper literary context as philosophic novels, and to show the intimate and integral relation between his thought, psychology, militant sexuality and propensity to violence. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Mishima is not that easy to analyze.
The last analysis of Yukio Mishima's novels that I read was Marguerite Yourcenar's Mishima: A Vision Of The Void, which I found unreadable. Though written in a tendentious academic tone, Starrs' book is better. Even as he approvingly quotes Yourcenar, he deflates her idea that Mishima was supposedly drawn to a "Buddhist void," by arguing that Buddhism may actually not have held much meaning for Mishima. To this end, he cites passages from The Temple Of The Golden Pavilion that are antagonistic to Buddhism, and also parts of Runaway Horses that seem more sympathetic to Shintoism. He also rejects other explanations for Mishima's behaviour and writing, such as the "patriotic" explanation. This is a valuable discussion that clears away some of the rhetorical baggage that had been hung on Mishima after his death.

But then Starrs comes up with a new explanation. In his view, Mishima was a Nietzschean nihilist. His novels were philosophical arguments in favour of nihilism, and he made a distinction between "passive" and "active" nihilism. Passive nihilism is the weak, intellectual kind, like that of the Superior in The Temple Of The Golden Pavilion, whereas active nihilism is the strong, violent kind, like that of Isao in Runaway Horses. Then all of Mishima's works fall into this framework. In The Temple Of The Golden Pavilion, Mizoguchi is torn between passive and active nihilism, whereas The Sea Of Fertility is a criticism of passive nihilism, allegedly exemplified by Honda. In this context, the denouement of The Decay Of The Angel is one big expression of nihilism, meant to underscore the futility of the passive version.

Starrs considers The Temple Of The Golden Pavilion to be central to Mishima's work. By contrast, The Sea Of Fertility is "incomplete," because it does not have a character who neatly personifies a clearly demarcated conflict between passive and active nihilism. The protagonists in the last two novels of the tetralogy are more passive, and do not effectively represent active nihilism.

This sounds convincing as long as you use The Temple Of The Golden Pavilion as your main reference point. But in my opinion, that novel is not really that important. It is definitely a "philosophical" novel, though I'd pick Dostoevsky over Nietzsche as the biggest influence. But that influence makes it one of Mishima's least distinctive works. It's too glib, the lines are too clearly demarcated.

After that novel, Mishima drew away from this overtly "philosophical" style of writing. The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea is somewhat similar, in that it describes a precocious youth who moves from passive intellectual brooding to violent action, but the portrayal of the character is completely different. There's now something petty about him. His very seriousness is kind of ridiculous. Toru in The Decay Of The Angel has similar inclinations, but is resoundingly condemned.

Let's look at Ying Chan in The Temple Of Dawn. Starrs considers her a shining example of passive nihilism. He calls her "lecherous" and "evil," and states that she personifies "passive femininity," as opposed to the more manly active form of nihilism. This assertion is crucial to one of his arguments, which is that Mishima used the increasingly passive "incarnations" to illustrate the decline of the world.

But unlike Toru, Ying Chan is portrayed sympathetically. In the beginning of the book, when Honda sees her as a child, she makes a very pure impression. This is a key scene, because the book never focuses on her to this degree again, so it shapes much of our perception of Ying Chan. But she stays out of the picture not because of her passive femininity, but because the narrative has begun to constrict around Honda. We only see her when he does. This shows Honda's distance from youth and his inward retreat, not Ying Chan's evil.

And Ying Chan is hardly lecherous. After all, she resists the advances of that guy Honda sends to seduce her. If anything, she's admirably monogamous. Keiko's the lecherous one. It's more likely that she seduced Ying Chan rather than the other way around.

No, Ying Chan is actually exactly like Kiyoaki and Isao. She's beautiful, but not cold like Toru. Her beauty is effortless, unpremeditated. She's completely carefree, impulsive, and unaware of herself, which is precisely why Honda is drawn to her. In that sense she's much less passive than Kiyoaki. She can't express nihilism, because she doesn't think about such things. The real distinction is not between Kiyoaki and Isao on one hand, and Ying Chan and Toru on the other, but between Toru and the first three. In fact, it is revealed that Toru is not a "true" incarnation. Whereas The Temple Of The Golden Pavilion simply has no characters like Kiyoaki, Isao, and Ying Chan, and it doesn't touch on the real issue at all.

It's not about masculinity against femininity or passivity against action, it's about carefree irrationality against self-aware egoism. At first this sounds similar to the distinction between passive and active nihilism, but the thing is, self-aware egoism doesn't need to be passive or nihilistic. Mizoguchi's egoism isn't in conflict with his action, it leads him to it. His action is too theatrical and self-justifying to express a rejection of life. Actually it makes him want to live!

Starrs categorizes Toru as passive, because that fits into his explanation, but he isn't. When Honda adopts him, he is galvanized to action of sorts, and he's very capable at it. Whereas Kiyoaki is mostly passive, allowing himself to be consumed by love rather than committing violent acts. Yet it's clearly Toru who's the bad guy.

Then again, the final pages of The Decay Of The Angel imply that the first three incarnations might never have occurred, thus depriving them of meaning. The word "nihilism" is already too intellectual and self-aware to describe this irrational ending. Honestly, I think The Sea Of Fertility is impervious to critical analysis. ... Read more

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Literature and Life: World Writers ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

Mishima's Idealized Philosophy
Readers of Mishima's novels may not be familiar with this charming (well, charming for me) little book, but should be. The format is a bit different than his quasi-autobiographical portraits thinly disguised as novels; here, Mishima in commentary expresses his fascination with death utilizing the teachings of an obscure 18th-century samurai named Tsunetomo Yamamoto, with whom Mishima shared many attitudes toward life and death. Tsunetomo became a feudal archetype to Mishima for his rather extreme views of a samurai's perception of death.Indeed, the samurai life to Tsunetomo was a "Way of Dying", and since one is already figuratively "dead" by virtue of one's duty to one's lord, one should be willing to give up one's life at any moment. Whether one's actions are right or wrong is not to be dwelt upon; what really matters is that one act immediately, with resolution, in all that one does. Hence, the Hagakure praises spontaneous action and resolve as the keys to a samurai's life, which for Tsunetomo translated into accepting death without hesitation or thinking. It doesn't take a genius to see here why the philosophy of the Hagakure was attractive to Mishima and his troubled psyche. And also why it was attractive to Japanese right-wingers and the military ideologies of Japan leading up to W.W. II.

The Hagakure (lit. "in the shadow of the leaves") has traditionally been seen as an extremist segment of samurai culture. To be sure, elements of Tsunetomo's philosophy are commonly seen throughout centuries of samurai literature, but these elements were rarely expressed with such a fascination with death that Tsunetomo had. Most battleground samurai were probably more interested in survival than how to die quickly...look at Musashi's combat strategy, for instance. Most of Japan's famous swordsmen didn't think in terms of dying, they thought in terms of training and a winning strategy. The real battle warriors wanted to win, not lose :-). The irony here in talking about what it meant to be a true "bushi" is that Tsunetomo himself, for all of his "warrrior" posturing, had no actual battle experience and lived in a time of peace. Basically, he was in a situation where absolute devotion to a lord had to be re-interpreted for peaceful times, and so this "willingness to die" for one's lord became more of a personal philosophy than any reality on a battlefield.

The irony between ideals and reality doesn't end with Tsunetomo. Mishima wanted to visualize himself as a "warrior" too, as evidenced in his work "Sun and Steel", so he took up bodybuilding and karate and kendo to forge his body and attempt to escape the "corrosion of words". Alas, as for any actual "battlefield" experience, after Mishima received a draft notice for W.W.II, he happened to go to his induction interview with a cold and lied to the army doctor about having symptoms of tuberculosis. He was declared unfit for service. So we seem to have here another idealized vision of being a warrior more than any real willingness to face combat. However, it could probably be argued that for Mishima, reality was never the main concern anyway; what mattered to him most was his idealized vision of how a modern Japanese male should live and die, and Mishima indeed expressed those sentiments with great clarity and poetic beauty. For all his attempts to get away from "words", i.e., his literary greatness, it is precisely that literary greatness that makes him famous today, not his bodybuilding efforts nor his taking up some martial arts :-).Ah, so much for "sun and steel"...Mishima probably wouldn't be pleased that his legacy, ironically, was in his "words".

As for the Hagakure itself, somehow, probably when the yen was strong and Western businessmen were fascinated with anything remotely resembling Japanese samurai culture, the Hagakure made its way over to the West and sparked interest among Western fans of samurai culture. One finds it rather hard to explain how this unorthodox work, written by an undistinguished samurai expressing feudal views on the absolute devotion of vassels to their lord, nonetheless became a popular work among Western fans...My explanation is that Westerners went through a phase where anything remotely resembling samurai culture became a fad.Especially among the business crowd. Now that the yen isn't at the top of the world financial markets anymore, however, we see interest in Japanese business practices (and perceived relationships to samurai culture) diminishing somewhat, and new business management fads have taken their place. Western business managers have moved on to other pop philosophies. Poor old Tsunetomo and his buddies were relegated back to the scrap heap in the business world.

But it's hard to kill Western interest in obscure samurai musings completely..witness the movie "Ghost Dog", which is a modern re-imaging of Tsunetomo's philosophy. I thought the movie was disjointed and largely unsuccessful, but go figure...the old samurai peacetime-warrior has found new life after all, in Hollywood of all places.

Be a 20th Century Samurai
This is the only edition of the Hagakure to buy.it is filled with the commentary of Yukio Mishima, the last man to live the bushido life before committing suicide.The illustrations are spare and powerful, suffusing modern despair with ancient tragedy.

Women v. Hagakure
The proverbs are great, but since it is about old school Japan pricipals of the Samurai, it is more geared towards men.Women may find it interesting in a historical way, or if they plan to be domesticated by their husband.Overall goob book either way. ... Read more

Product Description
Lurid depictions of sex and impotence, themes of emperor worship and violence, the use of realism and myth - these characterize the fiction of Mishima Yukio and Oe Kenzaburo. Napier discovers similarities as well as dissimilarities in the work of two writers of radically different political orientations. Napier places Yukio's and Kenzaburo's fiction in the context of postwar Japanese political and social realities and, in a new preface for the paperback edition, reflects on each writer's position in the tradition of Japanese literature. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Translations of plays by Japan's great post-war playwright
I have to admit to not being less than excited to see "Iwashi-uri" (translated here as The Sardine Seller's Net of Love) on the Kabuki-za program back in 1995.First, it was a post-war play, which like many post Meiji Period plays, had proved to be dull and spiritless works. They also were better described not as kabuki plays but "plays starring kabuki actors" since they (usually by design) lacked the rhythm and poetry that make the classical plays so enjoyable, even when dealing with great tragedy.Second, it was written by Mishima Yukio.Though I had majored in Japanese at college, Mishima's writings were conspicuously absent from the curricula of my classes.While this was no doubt due to his strident right-wing politics and famous ritual suicide, it was enough to prejudice myself against his works.

When I actual saw the play, though, I couldn't have been more delighted.Mishima had written the play keeping true to the rhythms, importance of music, and playfulness of the plays of the past, and if I had not known the name of the playwright, I might have mistaken it for a much older work.

"Mishima on Stage" brings this play and other kabuki plays by Mishima, as well as a number of his insightful psychological portraits written for the Shingeki stage, in script form, allowing readers not only to experience Mishima's talents as a playwright (as mentioned in the introduction, he is considered the greatest Japanese playwright of the post-war period by many critics) and compare the difference in structure between plays written in classical kabuki style, those specific written for modern theater, and even updated versions of Noh plays.

Larry Kominz is an excellent kabuki scholar with an extensive knowledge of the theater that stretches from its very beginnings (he has also written about the long history of plays about the Soga Brothers, which date back to the Genroku Period) to modern day theater, as shown in this book.One of the pitfalls of translating kabuki into English is that much of the poetic language and wordplay so integral to the theater can either be lost or translated clumsily.As such, Larry chose his collaborators well, especially Mark Oshima, who is not only a first-rate scholar and translator, but also a professional Kiyomoto performer.Mark's years of performing have given him a great feel for the cadence of plays and the natural delivery of lines.

I highly recommend "Mishima on Stage" for those who have an interest in Japanese theater or literature. ... Read more

Product Description
Because of the boyhood trauma of seeing his mother make love to another man in the presence of his dying father, Mizoguchi becomes a hopeless stutterer. Taunted by his schoolmates, he feels utterly alone untill he becomes an acolyte at a famous temple in Kyoto, where he develops an all-consuming obsession with the temple's beauty. This powerful story of dedication and sacrifice brings together Mishima's preoccupations with violence, desire, religion and national history to dazzling effect. ... Read more

Product Description
Chapters: American Kendoka, Japanese Kendoka, Steven Seagal, Yukio Mishima, Shin Koyamada, Masi Oka, Sonny Chiba, Donn F. Draeger, Teiji Ōmiya, Martin Kove, Yamaoka Tesshū, Yoshifumi Ishizuka, Naoki Eiga, Kozō Andō. Source: Wikipedia. Pages: 77. Not illustrated. Free updates online. Purchase includes a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Excerpt: Yukio Mishima Mishima Yukio) was the pen name of Kimitake Hiraoka Hiraoka Kimitake, January 14, 1925November 25, 1970), a Japanese author, poet and playwright, also remembered for his ritual suicide by seppuku. Mishima in his childhood (ca. April 1931)Mishima was born in the Yotsuya district of Tokyo (now part of Shinjuku). His father was Azusa Hiraoka, a government official, and his mother, Shizue, was the daughter of a school principal in Tokyo. His paternal grandparents were Jotar and Natsuko Hiraoka. He had a younger sister named Mitsuko, who died of typhus, and a younger brother named Chiyuki. Mishima's early childhood was dominated by the shadow of his grandmother, Natsu, who took the boy and separated him from his immediate family for several years. Natsu was the illegitimate granddaughter of Matsudaira Yoritaka, the daimyo of Shishido in Hitachi Province, and had been raised in the household of Prince Arisugawa Taruhito; she maintained considerable aristocratic pretensions even after marrying Mishima's grandfather, a bureaucrat who had made his fortune in the newly opened colonial frontier and who rose to become Governor-General of Karafuto. She was also prone to violence and morbid outbursts, which are occasionally alluded to in Mishima's works. It is to Natsu that some biographers have traced Mishima's fascination with death. Natsu did not allow Mishima to venture into the sunlight, to engage in any kind of sport or to play with other boys; he spent much of his time alone or with female cous...More: http://booksllc.net/?id=101631 ... Read more

Product Description
A tetralogy containing "Spring Snow", a love story, "Runaway Horses", with a protagonist a right-wing terrorist, "The Temple of Dawn", where a Thai princess is mystically linked with the heroes of the preceding works and, written under the shadow of the author's death, "The Decay of the Angel". ... Read more