Yourcenar's novella-length essay on Mishima is largely an attempt to answer the question "why did he kill himself?" in a way that would make sense to a western reader. She gives a brief sketch of Mishima's background and upbringing, then looks in some detail at a number of his works, in particular The Golden Pavilion, the Sea of Fertility tetralogy and the 1966 film Patriotism, based on his story of the same title, in which Mishima played an officer who commits seppuku after the failed 1936 army coup. Yourcenar discusses Mishima's own "attempted coup" in quite some detail and makes it fairly clear that we should understand it as an aesthetic rather than a political gesture - from the way she describes it, Mishima can't have had any serious belief that he would be able to convince the Japanese army to mutiny and restore imperial power, but for reasons of his own, he needed to be seen making the gesture. However, she reminds us that equally quixotic acts of revolution have succeeded in overturning apparently stable governments elsewhere (at the time of writing she must have been thinking of Iran).

This often reads more as a literary work than as a critical essay - Yourcenar's instinct as a story-teller gets the better of her sometimes, and the plot-summaries of Mishima's works almost turn into full-scale re-imaginings. And she seems to have been almost as turned on as Mishima by the gruesome details of disembowelment and decapitation. In the final section she contrasts the fine Buddhist aesthetic of the closing image of the Tetralogy, the vision of the empty sky, with the physical reality of a photograph of Mishima's and Morita's detached heads. A clear and brutal reminder of the unromantic ugliness of death, but somehow I couldn't help thinking of the imagined decapitation in The Mikado, where Pooh-Bah relates that the detached head "...stood on its neck, with a smile well-bred, / And bowed three times to me." Yourcenar probably wasn't a G&S buff. ( )