Is there any work from him worth checking out or he's just a meme?

Why did Satoko deny that Kiyoaki ever existed at the end of The Decay of the Angel?

Temple of the Golden Pavilion, The Sea of Fertility, and Sailor Who Fell are the ones I'd start with.

Mostly memes, but as far as Japanese literature goes he's easily one of my favorites. Temple of the Golden Pavilion sits low on my Mishima scale, but it's an interesting read so worth checking out. A less popular but pretty interesting read if you're into post-war Japan is Confessions of a Mask.

Satoko is a figure of continuity vs everything else as a figure of reincarnation. Kinda typical of Mishima and his excessive aphoristic commentary.

Asides from Murakami I have prefered every single other Japanese writer I have read (which is a maybe ten). I just don't like him very much. He's an egoist and he slathers his puerile philosophy through everything he writes so thickly that it ruins anything else that could have been redeeming. If I jump through enough hoops I can pretend that, in certain works, it's actually just a set of ideas that compliment the novel and bring everything to an aesthetic conclusion, but to do so is to ignore that this isn't the case and he is literally using his medium to figure out and to convince others how to live. I could read almost any Japanese author and get the good that he has without the rest.

>Gay shit
Only if you're gay, fag.

i find him interesting to read because his personality and worldview is so completely different to mine, or anything else i normally encounter. he's a repulsive person with terrible ideas, but i think he communicates them well and it's fascinating to encounter such an alien perspective

Obligatory post from self hating jap sjw
pastebin.com/Zkc29Lcq

another bonzo here :)

It annoys me we'll probably never get a translation of his cultural and political essays, I have to read his notes on Samurai in fucking spanish

Sun and Steel got me into working out

just found this, convenient
docs.google.com/file/d/0BwGbhGWPReybN1dGcDFRYTA5dms/edit

Power Top

Would you mind naming these 10 or so other writers? At least a few of them?

Kawabata, Inoe, Tanazaki, Oe, Abe, Soeski, Dazai, Akutagawa, Murasaki, Basho, Sei Shonagon, Endo. I can't think of any others but I don't have time to sit and think of them all.

Patriotism is a great short story.
It's a nice, short way to introduce yourself to Mishima.
I'm reading Spring Snow right now.

Have you read After the Banquet?

not OP, but utage no ato is one of my favorite mishima pieces. it's super japanese though, i feel like most people wouldn't like it.

Are you the person I replied to? I'm asking because I would like to know how someone could think that this novel is spoiled by some sort of "puerile philosophy". I think it showcases Mishima's talent for sensuous descriptions of the environs but also delves quite deep into the psychological motivations of the characters (for another example of this see Death in Midsummer). It contrasts quite a lot with his novels centering on young men (like Runaway Horses or Gogo no eikou) which some people might accuse of being facile and pretentious since these traits coincide with protagonists's characters.

I don't understand how you can appreciate soseki, dazai, tanizaki, akutagawa or oe and still enjoy mishima. they are all more empathic to downtrodden characters while oe makes mishima look like a violent Japanese don Quixote. check out the stories seventeen or his masterpiece, the silent cry.

I actually like Kawabata and have no idea why he was friends with mishima.

iirc mishima didn't like dazai at all. maybe because dazai was unsuccessful in his first few suicide attempts??? that sounds crazy but it sounds like mishima. but then again all you have to do is read no longer human or the setting sun and it's clear why dazai would get under mishima's skin.

I think Mishima was jealous of Dazai. Apparently he showed up to a party celebrating Dazai (at the very beginning of Mishima's career) and made a huge point of telling him that he hated his writing.

Dazai clowned his ass, though. His response was essentially, "You don't like my writing but you show up uninvited to a private party celebrating my work?"

I think he made a crack about his rumoured homosexuality but I heard he took it in good faith

When reading Decay of the Angel you have to remember that it is basically a suicide note.

that's funny and sounds believable. I recall reading mishima having beef with some other Japanese writers but didn't read many specifics. I've read he once called oe "an ugly man" even though apparently mishima was known to enjoy oe's work (he did praise, nips the buds shoot the kids).

Why does she make a point of showing the fickleness of memory
>Memory is like a phantom mirror. It sometimes shows things too distant to be seen, and sometimes it shows them as if they were here.
when on the other hand she remains adamant of her control about it?
>I have forgotten none of the blessings that were mine in the other world. But I fear I have never heard the name Kiyoaki Matsugae.
I feel just as betrayed as Honda did. What compels her to deny Kiyoaki's and by extension her past? I don't remember Spring Snow that clearly.
By the way, Donald Keene writes that Mishima had written the final chapter of the novel months before his actual death.

>Mishima, however, was unnerved by the similarities between Dazai and himself, which were at that time personal, and not obviously literary. Both men were snobs; both desired to create a sensation and be heroes of the general public; and both were obsessed with suicide. Mishima, in advance of his meeting with Dazai, made up his mind to be aggressive, to be a “literary assassin,” as he once said. When he and his friend joined them, Dazai and his group of admirers were sitting in an upstairs room in their Ginza restaurant. It was a squalid room, with dirty tatami (rice-straw mats), just the kind of place Mishima disliked, and the company was drinking low-quality saké, the only alcohol that could be obtained in Japan then, unless one bought imported liquor at black-market prices. Mishima did not drink in those days; and he sat a little apart from Dazai and his disciples, listening tensely to their conversation—waiting for an opportunity to pounce. When there was a brief silence, Mishima broke in. “Mr. Dazai,” he said, “I hate your work.” The novelist, as Mishima told it, paused for a moment before replying, seemingly surprised (not unnaturally). Then he remarked to those sitting close by: “I know he loves me, though; otherwise, he wouldn’t have come here.” The remark stung Mishima, presumably because it had an element of truth; and he remembered the taunt for the rest of his life. He would often tell his “Dazai story”; twenty years later he was still obsessed with the memory of the remark: “I know he loves me, though...” Dazai was one of the very few men who “put down” Mishima, and he never had an opportunity to retaliate, as Dazai committed suicide in 1948;

From "The Life and Death of Yukio Mishima"

very interesting. thanks for sharing, user.

no, i'm not the OP you replied to. i actually find the work beautiful, the use of such "sensuous" descriptions to invoke the psychological motivations of each character is what makes it so distinctly japanese. people seem to misunderstand this work a lot, but i've always attributed that to cultural ignorance.

the story goes that they were at a drinking party together, it was not to celebrate Dazai's work. Mishima did take the opportunity to tell Dazai that he doesn't like the way he writes, to which Dazai simply said "he's here, so he must think i'm good".

it's a famous incident but stems from another writer's [drunken] anecdote, so who knows how accurate it is. mishima has stated before that dazai has a rare talent, just can't absolve his tactics- so i believe something like this must have occurred.

if this thread stays alive i'll dig up some japanese sources later today.

ah nevermind on digging up sources, i see this user got one in english, thanks.

Unmei-kun, can you answer my question please, I'm not very smart

THe paragraph after also speculates on his relationship with kawabata, they were drawn together by similar interests, not least their cultural nationalism

>It is interesting to contrast Mishima’s relationship with Dazai and with Kawabata. He met Dazai only once and had a very strong reaction to him; the long-haired, pale-faced writer could have been close to Mishima had he lived: even his suicide seems to stress an element they had in common. Mishima’s friendship with Kawabata, though it lasted for almost twenty-five years, was far less intense. Mishima kept his distance from everyone and made no exception for Kawabata; they had, in a sense, a literary alliance, based on mutual understanding and appreciation rather than friendship. Kawabata was much less tense than Mishima—or Dazai—and seemed unlikely ever to contemplate suicide (in fact, he gassed himself eighteen months after Mishima’s death).

well that explains it. I've read that Kawabata himself was emotionally affected by mishima's suicide which is weird for the kind of friendship that is described.

from wiki
>However, his Japanese biographer, Takeo Okuno, has related how he had nightmares about Mishima for two or three hundred nights in a row, and was incessantly haunted by the specter of Mishima.

In the biography it says Kawabata had written 20 years earlier that Mishimas work showed he had deep wounds and Kawabata could have felt responsible for the suicide of his star student, or at least not giving him the right help as his mentor

fampai, i'm just a humble nihonjin. i've always attributed that to the symbolism of continuity vs reincarnation and the conflict between eastern and western values within that time period.

i think the ambiguous comment was made in an introduction to another Mishima publication. Kawabata mentions how many people tend to think Mishima is invincible, but some people might also see that he has deep wounds.

personally, i thought his guilt came from winning the nobel prize instead of Mishima (the latter essentially nominating him years prior). not so much because it's a prestigious award, but rather its significance on the future of japanese literature. it's not that he felt responsible for failing Mishima as a mentor, but rather he carried a strong sense of guilt that things may have turned out differently had Mishima been the winner instead.

>when you compare their final words
>the chills

>Explaining years later why he personally could not appreciate Dazai, Mishima wrote:

>I had previously, at a second-hand book shop, looked for Fictive Wanderings and I read those three volumes and Das Gemeine etc., but this was perhaps for me the worst choice to have made in starting to read Dazai’s works. Their self-caricatures were the thing I innately hated the most, and the consciousness of the literary world and the small-town ambition of the satchel-carrying boy arriving in the capital which is scattered throughout the works was something I couldn’t stomach. Of course I recognize his [Dazai’s] rare talent and the fact that, unusually for me, I felt a physiological repugnance like this from the beginning was perhaps because, according to the laws of love and hate, he was the type of writer who deliberately exposed the parts of me I most wanted to hide.

From Flanagan's 2014 biography

Continuing about the Mishima-Dazai interaction

>In Japan, the meeting between Dazai and Mishima has an iconic status as a kind of James-Dean-meets-Marlon-Brando collision of two literary superstars – one on the way up, the other about to quit the stage – and both with gargantuan egos to match. But it is actually deeply revealing about both men. Mishima’s ideological relationship to Dazai is similar to that of Nietzsche to Schopenhauer. The two men’s world view – their perception of the ultimate futility of existence and the fakeness of cultural and social institutions – was extremely similar. The difference was that Dazai exhibited an unremitting Schopenhauerian pessimism towards the world, with death as the only escape from the pointlessness of life. But Mishima, having been trained from his first conscious years to sublimate inner torture into thrilling fantasies of pain and death, was able to both adopt Dazai’s penetrating analyses and transform them into a Nietzschean lust for life and death. Indeed he believed that death itself was ultimately what gave life its meaning.

I am the person you replied to first. The only novels of his I view favorably at all are the ones where his egoism is either at its most distant or most subtle. The Golden Pavilion, Sailor who Fell, Thirst for Love (among others) are so stepped in his philosophy that I find them impossible to enjoy. The few novels I enjoy (in particular Spring Snow) can be enjoyed if one either pretends that they aren't vessels for his egoism or if you treat that egoism as non-genuine so it can be at least appreciated aesthetically.

>Mishima's talent for sensuous descriptions of the environs but also delves quite deep into the psychological motivations of the characters

These are things that Japanese writers generally are very good. I can read almost any of the writers I mentioned and they will give me what I like in Mishima without the bad.

You’re in the club and this guy slaps the book you're reading out of your hands.

What do you do?

Well considering he isn't even 5.1 feet I would stand up, showing him I am a full foot taller than him, that I weigh more than him and that I have bigger muscles than him (they don't even look that big on him and that's not counting that they will be smaller than you would think because he is tiny).

"Meet me at the onsen, handsome?"

Is this complete?

Show him some of my prose and retire to my bedroom to have sweaty mansex while his cuckqueened wife watches on

Just uploaded Yujiro Yasuda's award winning essay "Japanese Bridges" if anyone is interested, it's the only translated piece of work from a major literary figure that greatly influenced Mishima. It has been previously locked behind an academic paywall

I think it's fascinating and gives an insight into Mishima's own development of nationalism and death embracing nihilism.

bookzz.org/book/2596892/1e53df

thanks for the share, great piece. let's see how it is in english.

thanks, kind user

Obviously I can't compare but the translator Alan Tunsman is an academic in japanese studies and wrote a long accompanying analysis, so its not an amatuer job

oh i didn't mean to depreciate the translator. you're on the ball, tunsman is a great, passionate, professor. exceptionally approachable and genuinely cares about engaging people with the source material.

i haven't read his publications formally, but if it's anything like how he is as an academic i would fully encourage people to support him.

I wasn't implying anything, I didn't think you depreciated the translator. I was just providing more info on the piece. I'd be very interested in what you think in comparison to how it reads in the native japanese