Life magazine once called Yukio Mishima "the Japanese Hemingway," while Japan's first Nobel laureate, Yasunari Kawabata, "declared that a `writer of his caliber appears only once every 200 or 300 years,'" as reported in the Economist. Mishima was a writer, poet, playwright, librettist, actor, bodybuilder, and right-wing political activist renowned for his flamboyant personality, eccentric political beliefs, and spectacular ritual suicide in 1970. At the time of his death at age forty-five, Mishima "was perhaps the most famous private citizen in Japan," according to James Fallows writing in the Atlantic. Fallows went on to note that Mishima's suicide "is often described as the most disturbing event of the postwar years [in Japan], since it was the most direct challenge to the modern religion of GNP."

Despite this public persona, Mishima is nevertheless best remembered for his contributions to Japanese literature, including novels such as Confessions of a Mask and The...