![]() Yet none has confounded more than Mishima. They’re a reminder that the traces of the dead linger on unexpectedly, sometimes even by the design of those who have left us behind. Their acts raise the question of how people can fashion and curate their own self-image – in life and in death. I’m currently at work on a book titled “Scripting Suicide in Modern Japan” that explores dozens of Japanese writers who, like Mishima, scripted their suicides into their work – from a 16-year-old university prep student who etched a final philosophical poem, “ Thoughts at the Precipice,” into a tree at the head of a waterfall before leaping to his death in 1903, to the cult manga artist Yamada Hanako, who eerily prefigured her own leap from the roof of a Tokyo high-rise apartment in 1992 in a comic panel. ![]() Made by Kishin Shinoyama, one of Japan’s leading photographers since the 1960s, and choreographed by Mishima in the months leading up to his death, the photos depict the now long-dead Mishima dying over and over again. ![]() No less puzzling or haunting is a newly published photo collection, which has appeared in English as “ Yukio Mishima: The Death of a Man” and in Japanese as “ Otoko No Shi.” ![]() A half-century later, Yukio Mishima’s dramatic final act continues to puzzle and haunt. ![]()
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