Mishima’s Sword: Travels in Search of a Samurai Legend

In 1970, the world-famous Japanese writer Yukio Mishima plunged a knife into his belly and was decapitated using his own antique sword. In the decades since, people have asked endless far-ranging questions about this spectacular suicide. Christopher Ross wondered, What on earth happened to Mishima’s sword? And so Ross sets off for Tokyo on a journey into the heart of the Mishima legend—the very heart of Japan. It was a country Ross knew well after nearly five years of living there–but nothing could have prepared him for this. While searching for the fabled sword, Ross encounters the rather startling range of those who knew Mishima…a world, or perhaps more accurately a demimonde, of craftsmen and critics, soldiers and swordsmen, boyfriends and biographers (even the man who taught Mishima hara-kiri). The trail Ross follows inspires a travelogue of the most eye-opening–and occasionally bizarre–sort, a window into the real Japan that is never seen by tourists and the occasion for digressions on, among other things, socks and the code of the samurai, nosebleeds and metallurgy… even how to dress for suicide. Mishima’s Sword is a dazzling read–the perfect book for all those intrigued by things Japanese, from gangsters to Genji, from manga to Mishima.