Persona

<p><b>A critical biography of a modern Japanese literary giant whose brilliant career ended in a spectacular ritual suicide.</b></p>
<p>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 like <i>Confessions of a Mask</i> and <i>The Temple of the Golden Pavilion</i> are still in print in English) and his legacy-his <i>persona</i>—is still honored and puzzled over.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <i>Persona</i> removes the mask that Mishima so artfully created to disguise his true self.</p>