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The New Boy (from Landnahme)
It was the middle of September—the new school year had just begun—when Miss Nitzschke brought a new boy to our third-period class. Miss Nitzschke was our class advisor; she… More
Something Radical
In the 1970s I traveled to Cuba for an international writers’ conference. After I had read a paper to an appreciative audience, some of the organizers asked me if… More
The Weight of Words
Talking about Mishima the writer is difficult without invoking Mishima the individual and Mishima the suicide. A lot of what’s been said tonight—by me principally—is extratextual. The question is:… More
Lost in Translation
The world is invited, commanded, to brood. Place his suicide in a Western context, or in the Japanese one, or in both, where I think it most significantly belongs.… More
Restless Incarnation
Like most novelists, Mishima writes principally about himself. In each volume of his Sea of Fertility tetralogy, which shines ever more obviously as one of the great works of… More
Through Western Eyes
Mishima was a very strange Japanese. His ritual suicide, his final call to cast off Western influences and return to traditional Japanese values, including veneration of the emperor, has… More
Grace Notes
Before Langston died—long before he died—he prepared the order of his funeral service: no minister, no prayers, not even an MC. The folks invited got there, and a jazz… More
Laying It Down
This Langston riff is for that cardigan-sweater-wearin’ blues poet Raymond R. Patterson, Professor Emeritus, CCNY, author of 26 Ways of Looking at a Black Man and Elemental Blues.I found Langston behind his… More
Diverse Realities
Hearing this story, I thought to myself: This is straight out of Gabriel García Márquez. It was an epiphany for me. I suddenly saw García Márquez’s fiction on a… More
Old-Fasioned Virtues
It was the spring of 1970. I was twenty-three years old, writing and translating poems, writing essays and reviews, but also dreaming of one day being able to write… More
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