Star

Paperback

$14.99

Star

$14.99

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★★★★★ Trusted by hundreds of readers worldwide

A Film Idol Confronts His Own Image

Published in 1960, Star is Yukio Mishima's compressed novella about Rikio, a young film actor who arrives on set to shoot a movie about suicide while quietly contemplating the real thing. The setting is claustrophobic: a single film shoot, a handful of characters, a mind circling its own reflection. Mishima wrote it during the period when he was beginning to leave pure literary ambition behind in favor of something more physical, more ritualized, and the novella reads like a hinge between his early psychological fiction and the later works that fused art with action.

Translation and Context

This edition is translated by Sam Bett, whose rendering keeps the prose tight and contemporary without losing Mishima's characteristic precision. Bett captures the strange detachment of Rikio's interior voice, the way celebrity creates a kind of permanent dissociation between the self and its public mask. The novella is short enough to read in a sitting, and the compression is part of the point. Nothing is wasted. Every observation of the film set, the crew, the other actors carries weight because Mishima was, characteristically, writing about himself. The autobiographical dimension becomes more apparent the more you know about his later trajectory.

Why It Matters

For readers already familiar with Mishima, Star fills in a gap between Confessions of a Mask and Sun and Steel. For newcomers, it is a clean entry point: brief, unsettling, and written with the control of a novelist who knew exactly what he was doing at every level of the sentence. The themes of narcissism, performance, and self-destruction run through all of Mishima's major work, but here they are distilled into fewer than a hundred pages.