Voices of the Fallen Heroes

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. Jeffrey Angles is a professor of Japanese literature at Western Michigan University and an award-winning translator of Japanese. His own book of Japanese poetry won the Yomiuri Prize in 2017. Juliet Winters Carpenter is an award-winning translator of Japanese writing. She has translated dozens of works, including fiction, poetry and philosphy, as well as three novels by Kobo Abe. Sam Bett is a fiction writer and Japanese translator. A winner of the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission Prize, he has translated work by Osamu Dazai, Izumi Suzuki, Yukio Mishima, Ryuichi Sakamoto, and Mieko Kawakami, including books shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction and the International Booker Prize. As the translator of The Night of Baba Yaga by Akira Otani, he was awarded a CWA Dagger for Crime Fiction in Translation. Sam is also a recipient of the Commissioner for Cultural Affairs Award from the Japanese Agency for Cultural Affairs.

Arresting ... Here, in brutal, brilliant prose, we see a vivid manifestation of Mishima’s obsession with slaughter as a form of art, one that distils his hallmark preoccupations of death and beauty into a singularly intense poetic expression ... what this fine collection consistently demonstrates is how fundamentally, disturbingly, enduringly relevant Mishima’s writing remains