The Mishima Bundle

The Arc in Three Books

Yukio Mishima (1925-1970) was the most celebrated Japanese writer of the postwar period and one of the most dramatic figures in twentieth-century literature. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize three times, wrote over forty novels, and ended his life by storming a military headquarters in Tokyo and committing seppuku. This bundle collects three works that trace his trajectory from literary debut to the philosophical turn that led to his death.

What's Included

Confessions of a Mask (1949) is the semi-autobiographical novel that established Mishima's reputation. The narrator, a young man growing up in wartime and postwar Japan, describes his efforts to conceal his homosexuality and his fascination with death and male beauty behind a conventional social persona. The "mask" of the title is both the narrator's public self and the novel's own relationship to autobiography. Mishima wrote it at twenty-four, and it remains one of the most psychologically precise novels of concealment in any language.

Star (1960) is a short novella about a young film actor who arrives on set to shoot a movie about suicide while contemplating the real thing. Translated by Sam Bett for New Directions, it sits at the midpoint of Mishima's career, between the early psychological novels and the later works that fused art with physical discipline. The novella is compressed, claustrophobic, and unmistakably autobiographical.

Sun and Steel (1968) is the confessional essay that explains the turn. Mishima describes how bodybuilding, kendo, and the formation of his private militia replaced literature as the center of his life. The essay is his intellectual preparation for the act that followed two years later: the attempt to incite a military coup and the ritual suicide on the balcony of the Ichigaya barracks. Reading the three books in sequence reveals the logic of a life that looked, to outsiders, like madness.

About This Edition

Author: Yukio Mishima
Publishers: New Directions, Lyle Stuart
Format: Three-volume paperback set