Mishima Yukio – Annotation
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Torrance, Richard. Mishima Yukio, The Allegorist. Barbara Stoler Miller, Columbia University, New York, 1944.
Richard Torrances article on Mishima Yukio starts off by talking about how he got started in literature and as a novelist. He describes his family life as a child, as well as where he went to school, how he achieved good grades, and how he studied law in university. The article goes on to talk about how Mishima was against the democratic elections within the country and how he supported the emperor. He thought highly of himself and believed strongly in dying for a cause, going down in glory as a hero. Mishima believed that death brought absolute happiness and that death by sacrifice and war was better than an undramatic victory. He spent his whole life trying to find something that was worth sacrificing his life for. The majority of the article talks about Mishimas obsession with how Japan changed after the war. The words that meant so much to him before like “death,” “blood,” and “glory,” became meaningless. The writer says this change in Japan is what gave Mishimas work an edge. Torrance compares two works of Yukios, The Sailor who fell from Grace with the Sea, and another book called The Temple of the Golden Pavilion. In doing so he points out that the books are very similar in the fact that Yukio incorporates his thoughts of dying for glory in both pieces. The main character in The Temple, Mizoguchi, is a slave to the beauty of the temple, much the same as Ryuji is a slave to the sea. They would die for it, to die for a purpose. It is said that Yukios writing got boring because so much of it was the same in this sense, relating to his vision of a glorious death. Lastly Torrance points out how even after Yukios death in 1970, he still has a reputation in the United States and Europe for his literary work.
Torrance did a fairly good job getting his point across, and displaying plenty of information. I appreciated getting some background information on Mishima Yukios childhood and family life before getting into the core of the article. I preferred the opening of the article to the core because it was clear, concise and easy to read. As for the core of the article, although it was dense with good information I found it really hard to read. I found too many added words that were pointless, and I thought it took a large amount of reading to finally get to the point. I found myself getting lost in the article, resulting in many readings before I fully understood the point he was trying to get across. I would have appreciated more information on Yukios death. The article talks a lot about Yukios obsession with death and glory and from my understanding that is why he killed himself. I think that this is extremely relative to the article and to his novels and should have been included in the conclusion of the article.