Persona - by Naoki Inose (Paperback)

About the Book

A critical biography of a modern Japanese literary giant, whose brilliant career ended in a spectacular ritual suicide.

Book Synopsis

A critical biography of a modern Japanese literary giant, whose brilliant career ended in a spectacular ritual suicide.

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 Confessions of a Mask and The Temple of the Golden Pavilion are still in print in English), and his legacy-his persona--is still honored and puzzled over.

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.

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, Persona removes the mask that Mishima so artfully created to disguise his true self.

Review Quotes

"Mr. Sato has performed something of a miracle in skillfully and patiently adding layer after layer of information, both about the writer and the social and political context in which he worked, in order to give us not only a comprehensible account of the novelist's complex personal vicissitudes but what is in effect a trenchant commentary on the history of cultural and political life in postwar Japan. . . . Persona now joins a very small group of studies that succeed in portraying, rather than simply sketching, the life of an iconic figure in modern Japanese culture."

-J. Thomas Rimer, Professor Emeritus of Japanese Literature, Theatre, and Art at University of Pittsburgh

"This is a whale of a book--both unusually massive and extremely informative and stimulating. . . . Those who are interested in the brilliantly gifted writer of mid-20th century Japan who is its subject will learn much from this volume, and should be stimulated to go back and read, or re-read, what Yukio Mishima has left us."

--Paul McCarthy, The Japan Times

"From this biography the reader gains a great sense of the milieu from which Mishima arose, the approaches he took in his cutting-edge writing, and his increased fascination with conservative, hypermasculine Japanese traditions... this is an essential addition to all collections with a strong emphasis on world literature and Japanese history, and for English-reading students of 20th-century Japanese literature."

--Library Journal, November 2012

"Naoki Inose's biography is immensely detailed and punctilious and not easy reading for a foreigner not versed in Japanese culture and history... but does show him to have been an extraordinary man, in many respects a sympathetic one, and a writer of extraordinary range... I hope that this biography revives interest in the best of his novels, especially in the tetralogy. "

--Wall Street Journal, December 2012

"Personais a book about Japan itself, as filtered through the life of one of its perhaps most important creations.... If Japan truly represents the Occident and the Orient as so many would have us believe, it's because of icons like the talented, tragic Mishima."

--Will Eells, Three Percent

"Mishima's life and his many interests... make for fascinating reading, and Persona is a riveting account."

--M.A. Orthofer, The Complete Review

"Persona is well researched and contains much tantalizing insider information. Like a good novel, it leaves more questions than answers about the man behind the persona."

--Kyoto Journal

"Persona deftly reveals to us the actual man and writer who willingly traded his life for a legend: Yukio Mishima. Lurching forward vivid drama by drama and then backtracking to provide us with context, the biography opens up a whole epoch of sexual, literary, and artistic creativity, guiding us through the fiction, the friendships, and the passions that ultimately made Mishima Mishima."

--poet Forrest Gander, 2012 Pulitzer Prize finalist

"Who was Yukio Mishima? Persona... seeks to answer that question with the use of a comprehensive set of primary resources such as interviews, unpublished writings and personal records."

--JETwit.com

About the Author

Hiroaki Sato is a prolific, award-winning writer of books on Japanese history and literature, and a translator of classical and modern Japanese poetry into English. American poet Gary Snyder has called Sato "perhaps the finest translator of contemporary Japanese poetry into American English."

He is the author of the classic works Legends of the Samurai. and The Sword and the Mind and most recently The Forty-Seven Samurai.

His reviews and articles have appeared in The Philadelphia Inquirer, The New York Times Book Review, AsiaWeek, Mainichi Daily News, St. Andrews Review, Journal of the Association of Teachers of Japanese, The Journal of American and Canadian Studies, Comparative Literature Studies, The Japan Times, The Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, The Journal of Japanese Studies, Modern Haiku, Japan Focus, and others.

He recently received the 2017-2018 Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission Translation Prize for Silver Spoon (Stone Bridge Press).