the world of cinema has lost another great talent. japanese actor ken ogata died of liver cancer on october 5th. known mostly to the western world for his powerful performance as the legendary novelist yukio mishima in paul schraders "mishima: a life in four chapters", ogata was a powerhouse in his native japan. reccommended viewing would include "mishima: a life in four chapters", "vengeance is mine" and "the ballad of narayama".

ในขณะที่คนอื่นๆเลือกอาชีพนี้เพราะใจรักทะเล  รุยจิเลือกเป็นชาวทะเลเพราะเขาเกลียดแผ่นดิน

.................

อย่างไรก็ตามเมื่อเวลาผ่านไปหลายปี   เขาก็เลิกสนใจกับเสน่ห์ของเมืองร้อน  เขากลับมีลักษณะพิเศษน่าพิศวงเช่นเดียวกับชาวทะเลคนอื่นๆคือ  เขาไม่มีทั้งความผูกพันกับผื่นแผ่นดิน หรือทั้งกับทะเล  คนที่เกลียดแผ่นดินอาจจะต้องอยู่ตลอดไปบนบก  แหละอันที่จริงการอยู่ห่างไกลจากผืนแผ่นดินต้องเดินทางในทะเลเป็นเวลานานๆก็ย่อมทำให้คนเราหวนคิดถึงแผ่นดิน  ความรู้สึกนี้ทรมานเขา  คนเราเฉาโฉดเพรียกสิ่งซึ่งตนเองเกลียดชัง  รุยจิเกลียดการอยู่กับที่ของแผ่นดินสภาพที่เหมือนๆกันทุกเมื่อเชื่อวัน  แต่ทว่าเรือก็เป็นคุกอีกประเภทหนึ่งเช่นกัน

คืนฝัง /THE SAILOR WHO FELL FROM GRACE WITH THESEA

โดย YUKIO MISHIMA แปลโดย ช.ชาลี

เขาเชื่อว่าชีวิตนี้สรุปได้ด้วยสัญลักษณ์และการตัดสินใจง่ายๆ   ความตายเริ่มลงรากของมันตั้งแต่เมื่อคนเราเกิด   และมนุษย์เรามีหน้าที่เพียงปลูกและรดน้ำต้นไม้นี้   การสืบพันธุ์คือการสร้างสรรค์แบบจอมปลอมของดวงความคิด   ดังเช่นผลลัพธ์ที่ตามมาคือสังคมที่สับปลับ  ตัวบิดาและครูในฐานะหน้าที่ที่แท้จริง   ต่างก็มีความผิดอย่างบาปมหันต์  ดังนั้นมรณกรรมของบิดาโนโบรุเมื่อตอนเขาอายุได้แปดขวบจึงเป็นเรื่องที่น่ายินดียังความปลาบปลื้มใจให้แก่เขา

จาก คืนฝั่ง : THE SAILOR WHO FELL FROM GRACE WITH THE SEA

โดย ยูกิโอะ   มิชิม่า แปลโดย ช.ชาลี

" Os enfermos, como as mulheres bonitas, são olhados até à exausão; vivem no tédio de serem constantemente cercados pelos olhares dos outros e é com a sua própria existência que preenchem o olhar que lhes devolvem: o vencedor é aquele que consegue impor o seu olhar." 

in O Templo Dourado de Yukio Mishima

Negara yang sekarang sedang gencar-gencarnya melakukan soft-power adalah... Jepang. Secara tidak kita sadari, Jepang udah ngelakuin program ini sejak tahun 1950-an, tak kurang 10 tahun setelah mereka takluk di hadapan Amrik dkk. Tapi jangan salah, softpower yang mereka lakuin bukan lewat industri, bukan lewat politik, militer apa lagi. Mereka melakukannya lewat budaya, dan hasilnya luar biasa. Dari pelosok Danau Victoria di Zimbabwe ampe kampung-kampung di Jakarta, siapa sih yang gak kenal Doraemon?

Lewat anime-lah, Jepang berusaha menyampaikan identitas bangsa mereka. Mereka menunjukkan bahwa seberapa besar infiltrasi budaya (cee elah bahasane) dari Amerika Serikat sejak pemaksaan oleh Commodore Matthew Perry untuk masuk ke Jepang dan menyuruh Jepang untuk beristiadat dengan cara Western, tapi Jepang tetaplah Jepang. Harajuku, contohnya. Hanya dari sebuah nama jalan di Jepang, peminat Harajuku udah menggila banyaknya di seluruh dunia. Kalo ada festival manga pasti deh ada yang kulitnya hitem, putih, kuning ampe biru. Menandakan bukan cuma AS yang the superpower, Japan is the next - mereka ngungkapin ini secara ga langsung.

Bahkan anime Jepang -beberapa di antaranya- dituhankan! Haruhi Suzumiya, anime yang cukup baru, belum satu dekade, udah ada aja yang jadi cult sama si Haruhi! Gila. (Hampir2 gue terpengaruh untuk ikut ke aliran Haruhiism XD)

Agaknya dendam dan mimpi seorang sastrawan Jepang, Yukio Mishima, udah terwujud. Bahwa Jepang akan menguasai dunia kembali dan Jepang tetap sebagai sebuah bangsa yang punya integritas dan harga diri yang tinggi.

Gila ga tuh, bahasa gue melayang2.

Inspirasi : Kompas taon 2008, yang bagian Etnika, tanggal berapa gue lupa, baca pas di Anyer..

Yukio Mishima, La voce delle onde, Feltrinelli, Milano 2003

With a structure alone that sets it apart from the fraught-with-contemporary-failures category of biopics, Paul Shrader's Mishima: A Life In Four Chapters is marvelous to behold, swelling with rhapsodic music, filled with gloriously textured images, and showing a conceit for genre stereotypes dictating that "accuracy" is the heart of biography, instead bearing faithfulness to Mishima's own vision that truth is best conveyed through the marriage of literature and art, pen and sword, word and action, through whose union alone can beauty be born.

Si hace unos años el boom correspondió a la literatura hindú, en los últimos tiempos hemos presenciado el descubrimiento de autores japoneses como Haruki Murakami ó Banana Yoshimoto que se han convertido en nombre habituales en nuestras librerías. Entre los aspectos más positivos de la globalización, se encuentra la posibilidad de acercarnos a culturas lejanas (en este caso escritores) que hace unos años eran exotismos de difícil acceso. La literatura japonesa tiene una tradición y prestigio de siglos que en la épcoa contemporánea se vio continuada con autores como Rynosuke Akutagawa (‘Rashomon’), Junichiro Tanizaki (‘Hay quien prefiere las ortigas’), Kobo Abe (‘La mujer de arena’) ó Natsume Soseki (‘Kokoro’). Yukio Mishima es otro de sus grandes autores pero, desgraciadamente es más conocido en occidente por su brutal muerte por harakiri que por su obra.

‘El rumor del oleaje’ (1956) es una obra excepcional en su producción, tanto por su brevedad como por su temática y tono. Es una delicada fábula, casi un cuento, como una flor brotada en medio de un terremoto. Ambientada en la pequeña isla de Utajima, donde sus pacíficos habitantes viven de la pesca, narra la historia de amor de dos adolescentes: Shinji, que vive con su madre y su hermano y Hatsue, hija de uno de los hombres más ricos de la isla. La novela se vertebra en dos planos. Por un lado, la historia de amor de los protagonistas, con una aire de puerilidad que a todos nos recordará ese primer beso, los primeros cosquilleos en el estómago, los rubores infantiles, etc., Por otro, la recreación de los habitantes y la sociedad de la isla, donde perduran tradiciones casi medievales presentando un contraste abismal con los inicios del Japón industrial de la época.

Como el título indica, la lectura de esta obra nos arrulla como una ola plácida, serena. No hay grande pasiones, ni obstáculos infrranqueables, ni pechos desgarrados. Es un amor sencillo, pausado, acorde con el ambiente y la vida que se respira en la isla donde viven los personajes. Un libro que se paladea, de los que se ‘comen con cucharilla muy lentamente’, para deleitarnos con los paisajes, los aromas y los colores que recrea.

Alianza Editorial en su colección de bolsillo ha reeditado la obra fundamental de Mishima.

Yukio Mishima (1925-1970). Nació en Tokyo. Hijo del secretario de Pesca del Ministerio de Agricultura, pasó su infancia al lado de su abuela, vinculada a una familia de samurais y con aspiraciones aritocráticas, que influyó mucho en la personalidad e ideas del autor. Durante su juventud sufrió una tuberculosis que le impidió participar en la II Guerra Mundial, lo que fue una humillación durante su vida. Paralelamente a su actividad literaria tuvo una intensa vida pública como defensosr de los valores tradicionales lo que le llevó a crear la “Sociedad del Escudo” en la que incluso tenían uniformes inspirados en los antiguos samurais. El 25 de noviembre de 1970 ocupó con sus discípulos un cuartel del ejército incitando a rebelarse para defender los valores tradicionales. El fracaso le llevó a suicidarse allí mismo mediante harakiri. A su muerte dejó una extensa obra entre las que destacan ‘Confesiones de una máscara’ (1948), y la tetralogía “El mar de la fertilidad” (1964-70), formada por ‘Nieve de primavera’, ‘Caballos desbocados’, ‘El templo del alba’ y ‘La corrupción de un ángel’.  

First things first: Nic Cage

Everyone who watched Conan O'Brien yesterday was in for a magnificent treat: Nicholas Cage. After the audience slogged through about 25 minutes of typical Conan dada, the king finally strutted out to plug his new movie Bangkok Dangerous and palaver with Conan for a little while. Two things caught my attention almost immediately: his bizarre hair and his exceptionally un-magnetic presence. My god, the hair. His forehead has grown exponentially and consumed even more of his hairline, yet he doesn't look like he's balding. Hollywood clearly has access to some pretty advanced hair transplant technology, but it doesn't look any less fucking weird then the cheap monstrosities you see semi-ashamed business executives with. As for his presence, I don't know what I was expecting exactly; maybe that he would be a little more animated or funny, or even interesting at all. I guess in my head I imagined him in real life as being kind of like that guy he played in face off: bug-eyed, loud, animated, a little scary but no more so than the neighborhood bum...

After he was done talking he showed a weird red clip (by that I mean it looked like someone had put red cellophane over the camera lens) of him shooting at a bad guy guy in what looked like the sparkletts bottling plant. The camera cutting to a side view and revealing that Cage and his foe were actually only a few feet apart made for some pretty solid unintentional hilarity. As Nabokov's Humbert quipped about a Western analog from his time, there was a "robust atmosphere of incompetent marksmanship." Will this be the next Wicker Man? I will be praying.

Line of the night: "This scene is really stylized." in reference to the clip he showed (shewed?)

Clarity of a New Variety

The New Republic caught something disturbing in the prepared text of Sarah Palin's speech yesterday: nuclear was spelled "new-clear." Hooked on phonics worked for me.

Cajones

Crash is a fairly short book; barely two hundred pages. In short, I was expecting to accomplish reading it within a day or so. That it became extended was unintentional. I admit that there is a limit to the amount of violence and perversity that my mind can receive.

The last time I read something as graphically violent was with Mishima's Patriotism, where a Japanese couple committed seppuku. But that was a short story. Other explicitly violent novels I came across before limited their descriptions to certain parts of the narrative. Ballard on the other hand seems to have extended such an uninhibited approach to the subject all throughout Crash. Consider the following passage from Chapter 14:

As Vaughan turned the car into a filling station courtyard the scarlet light from the neon sign over the portico flared across these griny photographs of appalling injuries: the breasts of teenage girls deformed by instrument binnacles, the partial mammoplastics of elderly housewives carried out by the chromium louvres of windshield assemblies, nipples sectioned by manufacturers' dashboard medallions; injuries to male and female genitalia caused by steering wheel shrouds, windshields during ejection, crushed door pillars, seat springs and handbrake units, cassette player instrument toggles. A succession of photographs of mutilated penises, sectioned vulvas and crushed testicles passed through the flaring light as Vaughan stood by the girl filling-station attendant at the rear of the car, jocularly talking to her about her body. In several photographs the source of the wound was indicated by a detail of that portion of the car which had caused the injury: beside a casualty ward photograph of a bifurcated penis was an inset of a handbrake unit; above a close-up of a massively bruised vulva was a steering-wheel boss and its manufacturer's medallion. These unions of torn genitalia and sections of car body and instrument panel formed a series of disturbing modules, units in a new currency of pain and desire. (p.134)

Now imagine those images, Ballard's "sinister portent of a nightmare marriage between sex and technology," spread throughout most of Crash's two hundred pages. It's downright disturbing. And there's the seeming senselessness of it all. My limited readings have confined me to literary works where violence is a means to an end, be it power, vengeance, a higher cause, hatred, survival, resentment, etc. Here, I am given the impression that the crash itself is the end.

I believe this amoral senselessness is reflective of the highly decadent cultures and societies promoted by the Western industrialized states, which they themselves tout as the pinnacle and model of modern progress that the rest of the World must follow, and envy. It praises obsessions, perverse fantasies, voyeurism, exploitation, opportunism, manipulation, delusions of grandeur, addiction, etc., behind all of which is an irresponsible individualist and consumerist ethos.

The crash then could signify the crisis caused by a flawed system. With each crisis, acts worse than the last are committed to save the defective system. But all the attempts at reproducing the system will only bring it closer to self-destruction; each crash and copulation that follows it being a rehearsal for the final crisis. Or perhaps there is no end - only a perpetual cycle of crashes. ■

Saya melihat banyak sekali gambar-gambar Mishima yang menunjukkan bahwa dia sedang bunuh diri, namun pada waktu itu saya belum sempat dan belum tertarik untuk mengetahui siapakah gerangan Mishima ini. Barulah ketika saya bertemu dengan seseorang dari Jepang saya mulai mencari tahu tentang Mishima. Pada waktu itu, adik saya memperkenalkan namanya pada orang Jepang tersebut, yaitu Misyma kalau di dalam bahasa Jepang ditulis menjadi Mishima, karena dalam bahasa Jepang tidak ada huruf Y tunggal, terkecuali harus ditambah huruf vokal. Kemudian, si orang Jepang itu langsung menceritakan secara singkat mengenai Mishima. Dia berkata dengan logat Jepang-nya, "Mishima adalah seorang penulis, tetapi dia sangat bodoh karena mau membunuh dirinya."

Kemarin saya teringat lagi pada Mishima, hari ini terealisasi juga untuk menulis tentang Yukio Mishima atau yang juga dikenal dengan nama aslinya Kimitake Hiraoka. Saya sebenarnya tidak terlalu mengerti mengapa dia melakukannya. Tetapi, setahu saya dia melakukannya karena jiwa patriotisme yang begitu mendarah-daging dalam tubuhnya. Pada 25 Nopember 1970, Mishima dan anak buahnya mendatangi markas besar militer Jepang dan diberi izin masuk. Tetapi ternyata dia menyandara komandan markas di ruangannya. Dia menuntut agat para tentara dikumpulkan di halaman untuk mendengarkan pidatonya mengenai pemulihan kekuatan kekaisaran. Namun pada kenyataannya tidak ada yang mendengarkan dia sehingga dalam beberapa menit dia menyelesaikan pidatonya dan kembali ke ruangan tempat komandan markas tadi disandera, kemudian melakukan ritual sepukku, yaitu ritual bunuh diri dengan cara merobek perutnya dan mengeluarkan ususnya.

Untuk mengetahui latar belakangnya yang tidak saya jelaskan di sini dan ingin menafsirkan sendiri sebenarnya bagaimana perangai Yukio Mishima, silahkan klik di sini.

(Maklum saya baru tahu tentang Mishima ini. :lol: )

Most startling of all, Mishima's "Patriotism" describes, in minute detail, the Japanese ritual suicide of disembowelment (seppuku). Doesn't get much more eventful than the blade becoming entangled with the entrails, "pushed constantly outward by their soft resistance". So eventful I had to put it down until another time.  How eerie to come across this in an anthology as if it were just another story.  How doubly eerie to realise its author, Yukio Mishima, suicided in the same way in 1970, just four years after he wrote it.  

The story by William Trevor, a kind of Irish "Summer of the 17th Doll", is the most stimulating.  A reviewer writing in the New York Times in 1982 says of him:

Such range and authority are not much in vogue today and may be facilely relegated to the bin of English social fiction - sensitive, humane but small. We have gotten out of the habit, I think, of prizing writers of objective fiction: the right word, the right image, the right detail, so that the words seem artless, life speaking for itself.  Our important fiction today is typically concerned with the self-revelations of the writer and of the medium. We have become so habituated to a literature that uses the world as a mirror that we hardly know what else to look for. 

(Ted Solotaroff, "The Dark Souls of Ordinary People", New York Times, February 21, 1982)

If he thought we'd become "habituated to a literature that uses the world as a mirror" in 1982, what would Mr Solotaroff say of today?

Even the most beautiful body is soon destroyed by age. Where is beauty then? Only art makes human beauty endure. You must devise an artist's scheme to preserve it. You must commit suicide at the height of your beauty.

Yukio mishima "A Life in Four Chapters"

(photo: proust on his deathbed by man ray)

Like many folks, I read most of The Chronicles of Narnia as a child.  As I've "grown up," I branched out a bit into his philosophy and literary criticism with The Four Loves, Mere Christianity, and The Allegory of Love.  I also enjoy "re-tellings" as well (who wouldn't enjoy Gregory Maguire's Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch?).  Finally, lyric novels with mythic undertones touch a soft spot in my literary heart (Yukio Mishima's The Sound of Waves and Longus' Daphne and Chloe).

For these reasons, then, I pulled Till We Have Faces out of the "to read" pile. 

Thus far, I'm pleased.  Lewis seems to be setting up a dichotomy between reason and "Greek" rationality (A.D.) and a pagan, bloody sacrifice-type world view (B.C.).

We can see the Priest character representing the pagans:

I...have dealt with the gods for three generations of men, and I know that they dazzle our eyes and flow in and out of one another like eddies on a river, and nothing that is said clearly can be said truly about them.  Holy places are dark places.  It is life and strength, not knowledge and words, that we get in them.  Holy wisdom is not clear and thin like water, but thick and ark like blood. (50)

For the Priest, and the "pagans" he represents, holiness and bloodiness are one and the same.  For a Christian reading the book, Christ came to be the ultimate sacrifice; after his bloody sacrifice on a tree, there is no more need for bulls and goats to be slaughtered on alters to please God.  In other words, the Priest and his people are B.C.  (I'm only fifty pages in, so I'm not quite sure if these things are supposed to parallel but so far it seems they do.)

We see Fox, the Greek slave who teaches the king's children, representing Greek reason.  He often speaks of how different things in the world are the embodiment of ideals.  Speaking about Pysche's beauty, he claims: "she was 'according to nature'...what every woman, or even every thing, ought to have been and meant to be, but had missed by some trip of chance" (22).  Fox doesn't often speak of religion; when he does, though, religion is an experience of the mind and reason not emotion and blood.  So he seems a bit more A.D. - Greek philosophy influencing Christian philosophy.

Anyway, my favorite quotation from the novel, thus far, follows:

I wanted to be a wife so that I could have been her real mother.  I wanted to be a boy so that she could be in love with me.  I wanted her to be my full sister instead of my half sister.  I wanted her to be a slave so that I could set her free and make her rich.

And here's a little research about the novel for you:

• "Till We Have Faces" on Wikipedia
• Facts, Mysteries, and Epiphanies by Kathryn Lindskoog
• Notes on "Till We Have Faces"
• "Till We Have Faces" on the Literary Encyclopedia

White Horse Magazine, which covers the international art scene, liked the writings on my site!

(By the way, I'm at www.streetlegalplay.com. Somebody has to teach me how to embed hyperlinks.)

They asked me to make a few pitches. They jumped right on the one I made about Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe.

This past May, Julius and I were in Paris. We went to see Land 250, an exhibition of Patti Smith's visual work at the Fondation Cartier.

Smith had gone on a sojourn in Paris at some point in the Seventies, partly to track the pathways of Arthur Rimbaud whom she deified. The exhibition featured, under glass cases, a dossier of correspondence (letters, postcards) from Smith to Mapplethorpe, who stayed behind in New York. Most of them contained elegies to Rimbaud.

There was an installment that was a recreation of her erstwhile bedroom, laden with graffiti and stacked with books of Symbolist poetry and notebooks filled with half-finished apocaclyptic odes.

There were whole walls full of Symbolist-inspired video, where Smith looked as though she was going to go cold turkey at any moment while raucous jam sessions pounded all around her on the East Village streets.

Mapplethorpe filmed other black and white videos of Patti in a virginal white nightgown, a direct contrast to her ratty black hair. The camera would zoom in and out as she writhed on the floor or spun in a trance with a Crucifix in her hand or held private ceremonies over large, burning red candles. Mapplethorpe's home videos of Smith played up the macabre ad absurdum.

Not much would happen in those videos either and they seemed to go on forever, just like an Andy Warhol movie.

Which brings me a little closer to my pitch to White Hot Magazine. Both Andy Warhol and Robert Mapplethorpe (I don't know if the two ever met) were gay iconoclasts from devout Catholic homes who seized on iconic rock stars. For Warhol, it was the Velvets and the Stones. For Mapplethorpe, it was Patti Smith, though he knew her well before she became famous.

It seemed to me that the themes of saints and martyrdom suffuse even Warhol and Mapplethorpe's most outrageous work. In fact, Warhol admitted that, in his images of Jackie Kennedy after the assassination, he'd deliberately depicted her as the mater dolorosa of America.

Shortly after Julius and I came back from our trip to France, we went to the Whitney Biennial. (That event is not worth my blog time here.) While at the Whitney, we went up to see the Mapplethorpe exhibit.

Goddamn, that was hard core! Just like in his Guggenheim room, Mapplethorpe made Tom of Finland look like a Peanuts cartoon. But, especially in his S&M shots, there is tons of imagery of martyrdom, much of which seems to be in direct reference to St. Sebastian - the tied-up, loin-clothed, arrow-pierced saint whose picture inspired Yukio Mishima's first orgasm at the age of 12.

Once again, Patti was plastered all over the walls of his exhibit. And it occurred to me that she might have been a sort of a perverted, Symbolist saint for Mapplethorpe, though more of a Magdalene than a Madonna figure.

So, I told White Hot Magazine that I wanted to explore that Symbolist saint dynamic in Mapplethorpe's relationship with Patti Smith. They ate it up.

So, tomorrow, Julius and I are taking a field trip to the Mapplethorpe Room at the Guggenheim. Then, on Monday, I'd better get my ass to the library and make sure I can stand this thesis on its legs.

It's due September 10.

Questo breve racconto di Yukio Mishima può essere letto cliccando sull'immagine sovrastante.

Stamattina stavo cercando informazioni sull'autore, in vista di un possibile acquisto, e mi sono imbattuto in un sito che propone in ebook i racconti della collana Millelire. Per saperne di più sull'autore basta wikipedia http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yukio_Mishima#Biografia mentre ciò che mi preme di più è il racconto.

Per quanto riguarda lo stile direi che per i miei gusti è troppo raccontato. La trama è molto triste perché parla di due cugini che s'innamorano, ma che vengono separati dalla guerra (il racconto è ambientato nel 1943). Ambedue incontratisi di giorno su un treno, dopo essere rimasti a stretto contatto, si convincono che l'altro ha le ali, pur consci dell'assurdità della cosa. Ci fantasticano su, vogliono scoprire se è vero che il loro amato ha le ali, però hanno paura che per quelle ali possano perdersi, che uno di loro possa volare via. Alla fine del racconto ognuno trae le sue conclusioni sul significato delle ali, ma ciò che più resta è la malinconia che pervade tutto il testo. Già l'autore sembra fin dalla presentazione del racconto mettere davanti al lettore un velo giallo pallido; un giallo vecchio che fa rimpiangere i momenti felici del passato, sconvolti da quello che è accaduto, ma che a volte lascia spazio a colori più caldi. L'autore ammette di averci messo del suo, ma non lo conosco abbastanza per capire appieno quanto ci sia di Mishima in questo racconto. E' un racconto da leggere di notte al silenzio, con una musica melodica di sottofondo e magari anche la pioggia. Spero che qualcuno possa provare curiosità e scoprire un nuovo autore, o magari interessarsi al Giappone.

Yukio Mishima, Confessions of a Mask

Yukio Mishima, Confessions of a Mask

Yukio Mishima, Confessions of a Mask

Yukio Mishima, Confessions of a Mask

The story of a troubled young man who finds love and beauty in a 15th century temple and resolves to destroy it - a story filled with references to Japanese literature and to the Buddhist philosophies and Zen parables (Nansen kills a kitten) which guide the hero's life. And which I can't even pretend to have understood.

It's a very short book, but I found it difficult because with Japanese writers (Haruki Murakami is an exception) I can't go deeper than the surface. I don't understand their philosophy - I don't know anything about it - and it's very likely I will never know. It's a very closed world for a European mind, you have to go more than that extra mile to crack it - and you have to be willing and commited to doing so. I see the poetic quality of Mishima's prose, I get a bit of the "When you meet the Buddha, kill the Buddha" idea....but this is the first and last book by Mr. Mishima I will read.

What's actually more interesting than the book is Mr. Mishima's own life: he cheated his way out of being drafted in WWII, he wrote behind his father's back (this is why he chose a pen name, his real name was Kimitake Hiraoka), he was married yet it was widely speculated that he was gay and he kidnapped a man, made a public speech that was supposed to entice a revolt and then he committed sepukku. He became famous at 24, he was nominated for the Nobel prize 3 times and in 21 years he wrote novels, short stories, essays and kabuki plays. All that and more makes for a very interesting and full life - and for a very interesting movie probably ;)

Also The temple... is inspired - more than inspired actually - it follows closely a real case: a young Buddhist burned the Reliquary in Kyoto in 1950 and Mishima even visited him in prison, before he was released on account of his schizophrenia.  Which obviously got me thinking of Truman Capote's In cold blood, published 10 years later - the subject and the manner in which it's treated really have nothing in common, but the idea of a non-fiction novel at least - that's something they share.

This is a  picture of the actual Temple taken from hanamiweb.com - where they give more details on its story, structure and what-not. In case you wanted to know :D

Yukio Mishima, Confessions of a Mask