Yukio Mishima: Master of Paradox

Yukio Mishima died a gruesome public death by ritual disembowelment (hara-kiri) on November 25, 1970. Only forty-five at the time, arguably Japan’s most famous novelist of the postwar period, he had written dozens of books of essays and 40 plays, all lavishly staged, thirty-five novels, and 170 short stories, twenty-five volumes’ worth.

John Nathan, Takashima Professor of Japanese Cultural Studies emeritus at UCSB, translator of Mishima’s The Sailor Who Fell From Grace with the Sea and author of Mishima, A Biography, the only biographer with whom the Mishima family has cooperated, knew Mishima professionally and personally. On the occasion of the centennial year of Mishima’s birth, Professor Nathan’s talk will combine a literary analysis of principal themes in Mishima’s vast oeuvre, his obsessions with death and beauty, and anecdotes drawn from his personal experience of the author. His purpose will be to bring vividly to life an artist of volcanic complexity and contradiction who complained that he always wanted to feel alive but never could.

Host or Publisher Elling Eide Center