Mishima: A Vision of the Void

On November 25, 1970, Japan’s most renowned postwar novelist, Yukio Mishima, stunned the world by committing ritual suicide. Here, Marguerite Yourcenar, a brilliant reader of Mishima and a scholar with an eye for the cultural roles of fiction, unravels the author’s life and his affection for Western culture, his family and his homosexuality, his brilliant writings, and his carefully premeditated death.