In the decadent West people often get together and have all kinds of pointless, speculative conversations. The current political climate being what it is, one subject that frequently comes up, at least amongst my friends, is whether you would be prepared to die for a cause, or an ideal. During th...
Yukio Mishima felt the Japanese government needed to return to a system based on the samurai code. He was descended from samarais and believed that this code, advocating complete command of one's body and soul combined with a complete loyalty to the emperor, was necessary for Japan to return to p...
When I started reading the Sea of Fertility Tetralogy a friend writing her dissertation on Mishima warned me that the closer to the moment of his suicide the books got(Mishima famously finished the Decay of the Angel, the last book of the series, on the day he killed himself), the more his style ...