The West Recovers a Work by Yukio Mishima, an Author Some in Japan Prefer Not to Remember

The novel “Kyoko’s house remained unpublished since its publication in 1959. However, in the middle of 2023 and after decades of oblivion, the work of Yukio Mishima (1925-1970) was translated into Spanish by the label Editorial Alliance. According to a press release from the publisher, this version will be available in almost all bookstores in the world. This is how the Japanese author finds himself, at least in his reading, unlike the shadow that still covers him in his country, after his controversial political and social episodes.

This novel by mishima was previously greatly condensed in the episode “art” from the 1985 biopic Paul Schrader (“Taxi driver”). The writer reconstructs a whole life in four chapters which are in turn four facets of the same character: that of a painter, a boxer, an actor and a businessman, the same who were no strangers to the author and which he himself had already explored as an artist, athlete, narcissist and nihilist.

The spirit of these four resonances, and his obsession with the power of the human body, carried over to another of his works, “The sun and the steel, an essay published in 1967; but “Kyoko’s house it all makes more sense when one carefully traces his own existence and the essence of his development as an artist and as a man.

In his first post “Kyoko’s house it turned out to be a total failure; the work was not recognized, despite the fact that the author considered it “a profound nihilistic study” and the portrait of a generation that only sees meaning between destruction and death, which is why death is intrinsic to all the work of the Japanese writer.

Yukio Mishima was one of the most prolific authors in Japan in the 20th century, compared to figures such as Yasunari Kawabata, with whom he shares the merit of representing a whole era of his country’s literature. The writer has been nominated up to three times as a candidate for the Nobel Prizebut he failed to seize it, perhaps because of his multiple polemics, his political ideas and even his controversial life.

mishima was born in 1925, a year later he started the showa erathe longest reign of any Japanese emperor, his age would always coincide with the year of that era divided into three parts: the first 20 years of war and disaster, the next 25 of rapid economic growth, from the scorched fields of the post-war period, and the last 20 years.

For his 20th birthday (1945) the Pacific War completed, and in 1964 the showa era ended in the midst of an economic crash. A November 25, 1970 the author shockingly died after demanding a constitutional amendment, calling the Self-Defense Forces into a coup and ending up committing the ritual sword suicide called Seppuku.

The death of mishima marked for many Japanese the real downfall of Showa. The author strongly believed that literature should represent his time, but also new versions of history; He was a man against the current of his time, homosexual, but father of a family, reactionary politician, apolitical stylist and proud writer of Japan, but of Western wood.

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