Le soleil et l'acier

Biographie de Yukio Mishima

YUKIO MISHIMA, born in Tokyo on january 14, 1925, was probably the most spectacularly talented young Japanese writer to emerge after World War II. Mishima's first novel was published in 1948, shortly after he graduated from Japan's prestigious University of Tokyo School of Jurisprudence. Upon leaving the university, he secured a highly coveted position in the Ministry of Finance, but he resigned after just nine months to devote himself fully to his writing.
From the time he put pen to paper until his widely publicized death in 1970, he was a very prolific writer, producing some two dozen novels, more than 40 plays, over 90 short stories, several poetry and travel volumes, and hundreds of essays. His mastery won him many top literary awards, among them the 1954 Shinchosha Literary Prize for his novel The Sound of Waves. Although critics are naturally divided on which of his many works is the ultimate masterpiece, Mishima himself regarded The Sea of Fertility to be his finest effort.
He completed his last volume, The Decay of the Angel, on the day of his death by ritual suicide on November 25, 1970. Mishima's writings have been compared to those of Proust, Gide, and Sartre, and his obsession with courage mirrors Ernest Hemingway's. Today, more than 40 decades since his death, Yukio Mishima remains one of the pivotal figures of modern Japanese literature.