The Life and Death of Yukio Mishima

On November 25, 1970, Yukio Mishima, easily the most famous writer of his generation in Japan, committed seppuku at a military headquarters in Tokyo. At the age of forty-five, Mishima brushed away wealth and an international literary reputation - Nobel laureate Yasunari Kawabata had proclaimed that "a writer of Mishima's caliber appears only once every two or three hundred years" - in a highly public and gruesome suicide for which, it seemed, he had been preparing for much of his life.
Henry Scott Stokes's The Life and Death of Yukio Mishima is an accomplished account of Mishima's life, describing his strange, isolated childhood and his youthful and meteoric ascent to literary fame. Scott Stokes also depicts Mishima's increasing nihilism as well as the militaristic fanaticism that manifested itself in his private army, the Tatenoikai.
The author, who knew Mishima in his final years, has written a new epilogue for this revised edition of his 1974 biography. The Life and Death of Yukio Mishima is not only a useful and penetrating explication of a great writer's work but also a deeply personal portrait of an extraordinarily complicated man.