Yukio Mishima was born in 1925 in Tokyo, and is considered one of the Japan's most important writers. His books broke social boundaries and taboos at a time when Japan found itself in a state of rapid social change. His interests, besides writing, included body-building, acting and practising as a Samurai. In 1970 he attempted to start a military coup, which failed. Upon realizing this, Mishima performed seppuku, a ritual suicide, upon himself. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize for literature three times.
Ordinary people harbour the grandest (and most terrible) thoughts in a cosmological fable as disconcerting as it is funny: behind the simplest actions lie visions of worlds in collision. -- Simon Ings * The Times * Mishima is the Japanese Hemingway * Life Magazine * A writer of immense energy and ability * Time Out * One of the greatest avant-garde Japanese writers of the twentieth century * New Yorker * The wunderkind of the Japanese literary world... an extraordinary literary talent * The Times Literary Supplement * Among Japan's most celebrated post-war authors * Little White Lies * The Oscar Wilde of Japan ... one of Japan's great novelists ... his subtlety, warmth and wit shine through * Telegraph * A mixture of humour, high literary seriousness and flying saucers ... remarkable -- Sam Leith * Spectator *