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
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
The Eternal Present
Many months later, besieged by thoughts of an all-too-foreseeable future as an engineer, which I did not want, I went out one winter for a walk in the snow.… More
Romantic Realism
That dinner party is etched in my memory for many reasons: the discussion during soup of the American embargo on Cuba; the recital during entrées by Bill Styron,… 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
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
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
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
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
Dark Realities: What Can’t Be Said in Children’s Books
The PEN Children's Book Committee is a group of professionals who volunteer their time to advance children's literature and protect freedom of expression: the right of children's authors to… More
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