ABSTRACT
There are, or were, two Mishimas. One is the stylish man of letters, often photographed in his studio with books piled high
on his work desk. This is the amazingly successful author who turned out a hundred novels, plays, and other works before his death at the age of forty-five. This is the sought-after samurai poet of international society, the man with an eye cocked for the Nobel Prize, the stylist who could display charm and wit in English or Japanese. This is the man whom Life magazine called “a kind of god, the last emperor of the Japanese aesthetic tradition, beauty’s final desperate kamikaze pilot.” The words were written a few years before Mishima died.
