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“... Fifteen years after his death Mishima is everywhere. Penguin has just brought out Hagakure, Mishima’s idiosyncratic interpretation of the 18th-century code of samurai ethics, and The Life and Death of Yukio Mishima by Henry Scott Stokes, and Secker and Warburg Mishima’s tetralogy, The Sea of Fertility, in one attractive volume ...”

“... hard to live in Bulacan For bruiser as for dreamer But it’s harder when the mamasan Is – Yukio Mishima! The leading lights of Bulacan – Each dreamer and each bruiser Has bitten off more than a man Can reasonably chew, sir. God help them all in Bulacan. God help them all in Lima. God help us all – whate’ er our tan – Each bruiser and each ...”

“... his reminiscences and his attempts to prepare for the final agony. Her coldly brilliant essay on Yukio Mishima* culminates in a detailed reconstruction of the gruesome last rites of seppuku performed by the Japanese novelist. The body-count in the first twenty pages of ‘An Obscure Man’, the longest of the three novellas collected in Two Lives and a ...”

“... must have fitted neatly with a range of Japanese codes of conduct, many of them militaristic. Did Yukio Mishima read Edward Carpenter? The answer could matter quite a lot, as this might rescue the vexed question of ‘sexual politics’ from a purely English discussion, and perhaps throw light on other options within sexual radicalism than those of ...”

“... savours cultural inferiority.’ Tanizaki emerges as a kind of contradiction-embracing hero, but Yukio Mishima fares less well. A ‘middle-class prig’ fatally attracted to the West, his books are ‘shapeless and incoherent, taxing the reader’s patience, which might be better expended on other writers’. The only interesting thing about ...”

“... an array of nationalities wide enough to be almost comforting in these troubled times. The case of Yukio Mishima in particular will remind Americans that the rites of self-extinction practised elsewhere can be even more bizarre. But there is a large preponderance of American names, ranging from Poe to Billie Holiday and Lenny Bruce. The starry cast of ...”

“... at least there is a Publisher’s Note (accurate in all other respects), as well as essays by Mishima and Ken Hollings and an Autobiographical Note (which would have been more useful with a word of explanation about when and for what purpose it was written) in this volume. Theory of Religion, by contrast, a very handsome book on fine paper with extra-wide ...”

“... of Tokyo, is famous as the place where these tardy authors are locked up by anxious editors. Yukio Mishima, who was known to be seldom late in delivering his manuscript, joked that his body-building was a gesture of defiance against the limp, greenish, unslept writers sequestered in the Yamanoue Hotel. Whilst I remain somewhat sceptical about the ...”

“... Death is one of the more effective publicity stunts which the author has at his disposal. Yukio Mishima did his sales no end of good by ritually disembowelling himself in front of the world’s press cameras. In a quieter way, it is hard to see how this work could have merited print, had it not been for the interesting failures of Edwards’s ...”

“... the artist Tadanori Yokoo, and Tatsumi Hijikata, the founder of butoh dance. Richie met Yukio Mishima as a young celebrity in the 1950s; the two even went to Mishima’s gymnasium together, and a famous sequence of photographs of the novelist posing in his loincloth in the snow was shot outside Donald’s ...”

“... social exclusion – dandies from the aristocracy, Edo playboys from the samurai class. The writer Mishima Yukio was much taken by the idea of iki; he was also a great admirer of 19th-century European dandyism. Both Kuki and Mishima shared with Baudelaire a profound contempt for the democratic vulgarity of the ...”

“... Kafu, Tanizaki Junichiro, Shiga Naoya, Akutagawa Ryunosuke, Dazai Osamu, Kawabata Yasunari and Mishima Yukio. It is difficult to say whether these writers were chosen because some works of theirs have been translated into English. Other writers from Mori Ogai to Inoue Yasushi (and various women) might have been included. It is striking that – in ...”

“... wonder what, if anything, Jansen thought about recent events in Japan. For instance, he dismisses Mishima Yukio as a ‘brilliant stylist who lost sight of the distinction between art and reality’ and the public reaction to his suicide in 1970 by seppuku (‘disembowelment’) as one of ‘astonishment’. ...”