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Beauty’s Kamikaze
Just before noon, he stepped out on the balcony and delivered a short speech, appealing to the soldiers to join him and his men in death as true men… More
We Have the Right to Love Autumn
And we, too, have the right to love the last days of autumn and ask:/ Is there room in the field for a new autumn, so we may lie… More
Socialist Realism
I’ll begin by quoting the first paragraph of my review of One Hundred Years of Solitude when the book was first published in the United States thirty-two years ago.… More
Inverted Realism
I remember when I published my first, very unsuccessful novel, a science-fiction novel, which, to the despair of my publishers, I keep telling people not to read. A friend… More
Subject Matter
I am Eikoh Hosoe, a photographer from Tokyo. It is a great honor for me to speak on this special occasion about my collection of photographs of Ba-ra-kei, or… 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 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
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
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