YUKIO MISHIMA, one of the most spectacularly gifted writers in modern Japan, was born into a samurai family in 1925. He attended the Peers' School and Tokyo Imperial University, and for a time worked at the Ministry of Finance. His first full length novel, Confessions of a Mask, appeared in 1949, and since then he published over a dozen novels, almost all of which were translated into English and other languages during his lifetime. They include:
Thirst for Love;
Forbidden Colors;
Death in Midsummer;
The Sound of Waves;
The Temple of the Golden Pavilion;
After the Banquet;
The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea; and
Spring Snow.
Mishima's reverence for the Japanese martial arts led him to take up Kendo (a type of fencing, with wooden swords) and Karate, as well as body-building, and by 1968 he had become a Kendo master of the fifth-dan. He also organized a "private army" called the Shield Society, and in November 1970 he and his group forced their way into a Self-Defense Force headquarters in Tokyo, where Mishima, after reading out a proclamation, committed ritual suicide with a young follower in the commanding officer's room. On the morning of his death, the last volume of Mishima's tetralogy,
The Sea of Fertility (
The Spring Snow,
Runaway Horses,
The Temple of Dawn,
The Decay of the Angel) was delivered to his publisher.
He is survived by his wife and two children.
The Translator, JOHN BESTER, born and educated in England, is one of the foremost translators of Japanese fiction. Among his translations are Masuji Ibuse's
Black Rain, Kenzaburo Oe's
The Silent Cry, Fumiko Enchi's
The Waiting Years, and Junnosuke Yoshiyuki's
The Dark Room. He received the 1990 Noma Award for the Translation.
