Yukio Mishima

I did an intensive study of it because I study Japanese literature, but usually people only read selections in high school. It's a slightly difficult book in the original Japanese because the language is very different and old-timey. There are some modernized versions that people read, some of which are not that bad, but we read the original in high school.

Murakami is trash

tetralogy

Reading the classics in school is always a double edge knife.

There is a picture book children's version of his life story in my school library with an amusing cover.

He was not gay. That is just an assumption.

Mishima was "not gay" in the sense that he "went to gay bars for.. uh.. research". In other words, he was gay.

No. Going to gay bars does not make you gay.

Shakespeare was not gay. Jesus was not gay. Stop saying everyone is gay.

So who's the greatest then?

t. gay

What is the best book of Yukio to start with?

Natsume Soseki

People are straight unless proven otherwise. There is no evidence that he was gay. Saying so is speculation.

You are gay
I am gay
OP is gay
We all gays
Lets make out

No all that is false except OP.

Why do you care so much about a writers sexuality? It certainly influenced his writing but he's not like today's gay where they make their sexuality the focal point of their personality/artistic work.

Just read the damn work and learn to try and appreciate issues that are outside of your comfort zone

I'm interested in Japanese nationalism, apart from Mishima and shintaro Ishihara what are some respected authors?

Mishima was not gay.
He was an homosexual, that is different

>Murakami is trash

t. Ryu Murakami

>historical figure was not known as homophobe and/or wasn't openly banging every woman he came across
>hurrdurr wat if he was gay lmao xDDD

This has to stop.

The Sound of Waves imho.

Comfy as fuck. Also the most authentic depiction of how we look at each other lustfully I have read in a while.

He went there with his wife and associated with literal fascists, who would have known if he was gay.

When people say he was gay what they mean was he lived a libertine lifestyle that included fucking men. Being married doesn't compute to some folk in this

>When people say he was gay what they mean was he lived a libertine lifestyle
>included fucking men
>fucking men
>not gay somehow

An author being gay is a pretty dumb reason to miss out on Whitman, Proust, Auden, Baldwin, Balzac, Bentham, Bowles, Byron, Cather, Cheever, Cocteau, Forster, Gogol, Thomas Gray, Houseman...

>confirmed for not having started with the Greeks

Gay in a marginal sense. He fucked men and women, he wasn't some fruitcake whose central being was formed around a LGBTQ identity

You forgot Wilde

I feel like his homosexuality and subsequent deletion from society helped his work getting out there, later on.
Like finding a secret book in a private library.

The Greeks had no concept for homosexuality. You can't compare that to modern cases where people have a radically different conception of what sexual attraction is in relation to your character.

Most gay people aren't flamboyant and most people look and act exactly like their straight counterparts. I will give him that he is bisexual and not gay though.
>he wasn't some fruitcake whose central being was formed around a LGBTQ identity
Sure maybe he wasn't some San Francisco tier lisp having, affected accent type but he was certainly flamboyant.

>The Greeks had no concept for homosexuality.
That's the point.
The modern conceptions are just as BS.
Specifically the extremely shitty Kinsey definition of defining personal sexual preference by counting how many dicks you've touched relative to vaginas.

I think it's the other way around and that the Greek conception of sex acts as separate from a persons identity as being BS. The Greeks did not have the access we have to modern science and the things it has taught as about sexual attraction. It makes no sense to talk about sex acts separate from who a person is when we know that excluding bisexual people and bi/homo-curious people that sexual attraction for a specific gender is something hard baked into them and not subject to choice.
You also can't reduce modern sexual ideas about identity to just the Kinsey scale.

>Yukio
god. I just realised this man doesnt have the highest traps ever (trapezius muscle). I thought that scarf was part of his neck.
>I-im not the only one right
>you see it too right

Flamboyant is what sense? If you mean in a Hemingway-esque sense then sure but not in the "camp" sense we usually attribute the label

>there's no evidence he was gay!!
What kind of straight man would write Confessions of a Mask? That book reads like my diary t b h.

If this thread is still up when I get home I'll try to give a proper answer.

A talented straight man. You realize it's fiction, right? Faggots aren't some mysterious godlike beings who dwell atop Mount Olympus unknown to us mere mortals. You're just disgusting degenerate perverts.

Those are the ends of his headband.

Have you ever been fucked in the ass? It's pretty cool.

thanks sherlock holmes

Shakespeare was definitely bisexual.

Loved "The Way of the Samurai"

Gogol was a fag?
WEW

Bisexuality didn't exist until the late 1980s. You realize all this shit is a "social construct" right?

Even /pol/ still respects him. OPs just a faggot incapable of accepting someone who wrote material he agrees with is gay.

Was Shakespeare attracted by both women and men? Yes, which means he was a bisexual.
You're the spooked one, since you can't possibly separate the word "bisexual" from LGBTQ+ causes and popular culture. If both men and women turn you on, you are bisexual. That's it.

Can someone point me out to a Mishima story that isn't centered about a young man or youth in genera. I've read Runway horses, Temple of the Golden Pavilion and Forbidden colours and I want a novel that focuses on an adult(there's always a nihilistic adult in all of these books but those are either antagonist or side-character).

/pol/ does not know how actually gay he was. Most people tend to think that he did at the very least repress it due to muh traditions, which is not the case. Generally almost no one knows that Mishima actually had gay sex multiple times in his lifetime.

This topic is so stupid (for a variety or reasons) I don't even know where to begin. I'm just going to assume its bait and you're not actually this dumb.

He created a military leather club of young boys men and boys, he's gay as fuck. Note that his wife doesn't she for defamation

I like Soseki, Kawabata & Akutagawa. R8 my Japtaste, senpai. Also, do you like Oe or Tanizaki? I've been meaning to check them out.

I mean, maybe, but you have to admit this is contrived. Guy in his early twenties, in 1949 Japan, writes a book about growing up gay that reads like a thinly-veiled autobiography. OK sure, maybe he wanted to explore masculinity or whatever and he thought that was a good frame. The book isn't proof, but it is evidence. There are some parallels between Confessions and Sun and Steel too, as I recall.

I don't know why you have such a chip on your shoulder about this. Are you experiencing cognitive dissonance because you believe no gay man can ever produce anything of artistic merit? Do you feel that raising the possibility of a respected author being gay is yet another assault by the acronym'd masses against decency, culture and good taste?

We're looking at it as if Mishima himself thought it was some great brave transgressive act to fuck men as well as women when he didn't nearly place as well value in it as westerner's do when they discuss his legacy. He indulged in the aesthetics of the ancient Greeks he admired, including the masculine form but he didn't view that as antithetical to his reactionary politics, he would have saw western "gay pride" in the same lense as other aspects of modernity

*sue

uuuh... that one about the monk in death in midsummer?

that is manly as fuck bro

Nips can be gay, since that is more part of their pre-modern tradition. Also Mishima almost married the would-be empress as far as I remember. That is based.

>how am I supposed to take his body of work seriously now?
By not being a faggot?
Only faggots let the authors sexuality, or gender for that matter, influence them. Real men judge authors solely on the merit of their writing.

what are gays?

This. He was a big fan of the Greeks. Being the pitcher wasn't gay in his mind.

>how am I supposed to take his body of work seriously now?
/pol/ is a helluva drug

Not him but Tanizaki is great. You should start with Makioka Sisters. Dazai is obviously good as well but only when his main character is female lol

I'd say his fantasies of killing and eating young men was a bit more problematic.

OP, I've got some bad news for you regarding Japanese culture...

>R8 my Japtaste
Pretty standard intro into Japanese literature tier. Those three authors are great though. I think pre-Meiji stuff is amazing and I'm surprised that asides from Basho and Murasaki no one ever mentions them.

If you want to get into Japanese lit you HAVE to read Man'yōshū, the very first poetry compilation of the country. Just like how western literature is a dietetic so it is with Japanese literature. This is referenced so much in other poetry it's pretty much mandatory.
I would add Ki no Tsurayuki and Sei Shōnagon as authors to read alongside Murasaki as the preeminent authors of the Heian period.
For the Kamakura and Muromachi periods Nijō Yoshimoto wrote incredibly influential renga poetry, Motokiyo Zeami wrote the most important Noh plays, and the Gozan Bungaku (literature by zen monks).

Thinking you aren't gay doesn't make you not gay if you happen to be so. Also you are ignoring Japan's very long homosexual tradition.

Who are your favorite Japanese writers?

Since we're debating it, Mishima was likely bisexual. He had a wife and two children, and it wasn't like he was a royal who needed to do his dynastic duty, he just did. He had numerous relationships with women, but also frequented gay bars. It's likely he liked both.

On the other hand, masculinity is not a "Gay" thing. One can have an appreciation for the body, the will to sculpt oneself into a perfect physical being without being gay. I think, attraction to men or not, he just really liked bodybuilding.

No. An indulged, internalized, politicized, cultural identity that has only existed since the 1980s does not apply to anyone except the perverts who have accepted the label since. There is no evidence that Shakespeare was sexually attracted to men. His sonnets provide no evidence of that. Platonic love is not sexual.

No and yes.

Going to gay bars doesn't make you gay. I went to a gay bar with a girlfriend once because it was just my down the street. If some faggot uses that 100 years from now to "prove" I was gay I'll rise from the dead to kick his faggot ass.

His first masturbation was dedicated to pic related. He fantasized with violent fetishes. He ended his life committing harakiri. Mishima was really fucked up.

Why do homosexuals have such an obsession with baptizing the dead into their sodomite death cult?

>harakiri
IS CALLED SUDOKU YOU DUMB WESTERN PIG

Found the weeaboo. Anyway, Mishima was a "westaboo"

Mishima was a homosexual and extreme narcissist whose writings, both fictional and non-fictional, were devoted to fetishising the superficial aesthestics of roles and people whom he could not possibly hope to fulfill or become on account of his self and present. He projected his ego onto Christian saints, boys roughhousing, rebellious acolytes, Imperial Japanese soldiers, fascist youth organizations, far right revolutionaries, bodybuilders, and most famously the samurai for his own masturbatory self-indulgence. These were all masculine roles that Mishima felt obliged to pass as by imitating the aesthetics of each as mental masturbation. He viewed his homosexuality as a form of extreme narcissism as he was not loving a woman but rather a man who represented himself or an idealization thereof. Posing in these hypermasculine roles – which he termed “masks” in his debut, thinly-veiled, coming out of the closet novel Confessions of a Mask – was a way for his fragile ego to overcompensate for the emasculation inherent in his desire to engage in homosexual sadomasochistic relations as both pitcher and catcher. Mishima eventually committed harakiri in ridiculous circumstances in imitation of one the characters in his own novellas.

fapping to saint sebastian is pretty degenerate. just shows asians have always wanted the white men.

Men used to talk and write like that to eachother the way shakespeare did, fondly praising their friends and expressing their love. Doesn't make it gay, back then atleast.

He was definetely fucked up. But in the act of writing I think he was pretty decent. He discharge, using a really good prose, his illness on his work.

well maybe he should try to stop being such a cutie if don't want people fapping to him

Confessions of a Mask

It's funny that Veeky Forums places so much emphasis on his (alleged) homoness. When Japs talk about him it's always in reference to his tetralogy or Golden Pavilion, never Confessions or Sailor as with this board.

Well considering his homosexuality was the driving force behind his writing it seems perfectly acceptable to place emphasis on it.

Why do people on a "smart" board like Veeky Forums take the bait 100% of the time?

Citation needed

This guy was /polgbt/

I guess The Hunchback of Notre Dame is evidence that Victor Hugo suffered from kyphosis then.

Not remotely comparable.

Not remotely. Entirely. An author writing a fictional novel about a fictional character with a disease does not mean the author has that disease himself

>being gay and having a hunchback are totally the same
Stop.

Homosexuality is a mental illness.

Low quality bait
Keep trying ,trash

Go irrigate your asshole and put on maxi pads so the contents of your perforated colon stops leaking through your shorts while humming "Born This Way" you insufferable abomination.