Details
Publish Date
1/1/13
# of Pages
864
Dimensions
6 x 9"
Price (Print/Ebook)
$59.95/$19.95
PISBN
9781611720648
EISBN
9781611725247
Persona
A Biography of Yukio Mishima
Yukio Mishima (b. 1925) was a brilliant writer and intellectual whose relentless obsession with beauty, purity, and patriotism ended in his astonishing self-disembowelment and decapitation in downtown Tokyo in 1970. Nominated for the Nobel Prize, Mishima was the best-known novelist of his time (works likeConfessions of a Maskand The Temple of the Golden Pavilion are still in print in English), and his legacy—his persona—is still honored and puzzled over.
Who was Yukio Mishima really? This, the first full biography to appear in English in almost forty years, traces Mishima's trajectory from a sickly boy named Kimitake Hiraoka to a hard-bodied student of martial arts. In detail it examines his family life, the wartime years, and his emergence, then fame, as a writer and advocate for traditional values. Revealed here are all the personalities and conflicts and sometimes petty backbiting that shaped the culture of postwar literary Japan.
Working entirely from primary sources and material unavailable to other biographers, author Naoki Inose and translator Hiroaki Sato together have produced a monumental work that covers much new ground in unprecedented depth. Using interviews, social and psychological analysis, and close reading of novels and essays, Persona removes the mask that Mishima so artfully created to disguise his true self.
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About the Author(s)
Naoki Inose
A Japanese journalist, historian, social critic and biographer of literary figures such as Yukio Mishima and Osamu Dazai. His biography was published in English under the title Persona: A Biography of Yukio Mishima, edited and adapted by Hiroaki Sato.
Hiroaki Sato
A prolific, award-winning translator of classical and modern Japanese poetry into English. American poet Gary Snyder has called Sato "perhaps the finest translator of contemporary Japanese poetry into American English."
