I keep running into Yukio Mishima

 

Yukio Mishima in 1955. Public domain photo by Ken Domon. 

If you are a serious reader, you have probably heard of the Japanese writer Yukio Mishima, who died in 1970, age 45, in a ritual suicide after a failed coup attempt. 

For years, I didn't consider reading him, in spite of his literary fame, as I assumed he was the sort of ultranationalist, far right wing nut who could be safely ignored. Lately, though, I have wondered if he falls into the Ezra Pound category, i.e. a person with terrible politics who is nonetheless worth reading. I keep running into references to him by people who have nothing to do with Mishima's  political views.

I am a fan of the surrealist American poet Charles Henri Ford (1908-2002) and when I read one of his anthologies, I noticed a poem about Mishima (titled "Mishima," as part of "Four Elegies.") It's not entirely flattering ("Actually you were more attracted to power than to people or to art") but the fact that Ford bothered to write about him at all interested me.

I don't know what Robert Anton Wilson thought about Mishima, but Robert Shea was a fan. Here's an interview with Shea is Science Fiction Review:

SFR: What contemporary authors do you get the most out of reading?

SHEA: The list is continually undergoing revision as my taste changes and my reasons for reading change, but John Fowles, Romain Gary, Norman Mailer, Yukio Mishima, Vladimir Nabokov, George Orwell, Thomas Pynchon, J.R.R. Tolkien and Robert Penn Warren seem to have taken up permanent residence in my literary pantheon.

I am currently reading Kumano Kodo: Pilgrimage to Powerspots (about an old pilgrimage trail in Japan) by J. Christian Greer and Michelle K. Oing, and it relates a short story by Mishima.

So: Should I read Mishima?