Acclaimed Japanese novelist Yukio Mishima (1925-1970) was also a prolific playwright, penning more than sixty plays, nearly all of which were produced in his lifetime. Hiroaki Sato is the first to translate these plays into English. For this collection he has selected five major plays and three essays Mishima wrote about drama. The title play is a satire that follows the breakdown of friendship between Adolf Hitler and two Nazi officials who were ultimately assassinated under orders from Hitler.
Yukio Mishima is widely celebrated as one of the most talented Japanese writers of the twentieth century. A proponent of bushido, the samurai code, and an interpreter of Western style, Mishima drew from both modern and ancient literary and dramatic styles to inspire his writing. Three times nominated for the Nobel Prize, Yukio Mishima published numerous poems, essays, short stories, and novels. He is most famous for his tetralogy Sea of Fertility that was completed the day he performed seppuku, a ritualistic samurai suicide, in 1970.Hiroaki Sato has won prizes for Breeze Through Bamboo: Kanshi of Ema Saiko (Columbia, 1997) and, with Burton Watson, for From the Country of Eight Islands: An Anthology of Japanese Poetry (Columbia, 1986). Among his forthcoming books is White Dew, Dreams, & This World: An Anthology of Japanese Women Poets from Ancient to Modern Times.
Mishima is as comfortable with the Western genres of tragic, historical, and naturalistic domestic drama [as he is with] a Kabuki play. Booklist Mishima's brilliant plays are unknown outside Japan, something this scholarly yet fluid English-language anthology attempts to change. Library Journal In this anthology, Hiroaki Sato translates the brilliance and richness of Yukio Mishima's writing into the English language. Rafu Shimpo
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