Sun and Steel

This is the personal testament of Japan's greatest novelist; written shorty before his public suicide in 1970. Through Mishima's finely wrought and emphatic prose; the mind and motivation behind his agonized search for personal identity is revealed. In this fascinating document; one of Japan's best known-and controversial-writers created what might be termed a new literary form. It is new because it combines elements of many existing types of writing; yet in the end fits into none of them. At one level; it may be read as an account of how a puny; bookish boy discovered the importance