Culture warrior

Yukio Mishima and the friction of past and present

Featured in

  • Published 20250506
  • ISBN: 978-1-923213-07-4
  • Extent: 196 pp
  • Paperback, ebook, PDF

THERE IS A scene in the novella Star by Yukio Mishima wherein the eponymous celeb fantasises about the mass execution of his fans.

I was exhausted. The girls could scream like hell for all I cared – their shrill voices splashed over me like rancid oil. I could line them up and march them all into the mouth of an incinerator. Except they’d probably crawl out of the ashes gawking at me, so I’d have to pluck their eyes out first. 

Already a subscriber? Sign in here

If you are an educator or student wishing to access content for study purposes please contact us at griffithreview@griffith.edu.au

Share article

More from author

Tokyo driftless

I attempt to read a Murakami book, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. I have only read Norwegian Wood because people who are into Murakami tend to be annoying. The book is about an unemployed househusband to whom strange things happen. I stop reading it. Since moving to Japan with my husband for his job, I have mostly read Australian fiction and Dickens. The most celebrated Japanese novels available in English tend to be about alienated people with mental health issues.

More from this edition

Scrolling to the end

IntroductionOur contemporary content malaise feels very recent, yet the twentieth-century media scholars Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman predicted our technological capture decades before Mark Zuckerberg and his college roommates devised a neat way for their fellow Harvard students to connect online.

The accidental film school

Non-fictionThe DVD format – the Digital Versatile Disc – was invented in 1995 and reached the peak of its popularity in Australia in the 2000s, before the rise of streaming platforms in the 2010s. During those salad days, Australian entertainment companies started producing and selling DVDs at a rapid rate, building a library of local and international films. The Melbourne-based company Madman Entertainment were competitive players... The extras on their DVDs – making-of documentaries, deleted scenes, audio commentaries – allowed producers to have an active role in the historicisation of film; audio commentaries typically featured directors and actors rewatching and reminiscing together. But companies like Madman (and Criterion in the US), which distributed ‘art-house’ cinema, were more likely to invite film theorists and historians to provide an analytical reading of the film as it played.

Hidden tracks

Non-fictionYoung and Kucyk are as good at tracking down hard-to-find people as they are at tracking down hard-to-find music, although sometimes they do reach dead ends. Their methods aren’t particularly advanced and are often helped by luck. Sometimes they’ll raid the White Pages. Sometimes they’ll search for relatives of musicians online. Sometimes – as in the case of another song on Someone Like Me – they’ll scour through five years’ worth of archived weekly newsletters from a Seventh Day Adventist Church in the UK and Ireland and spot a tiny article that contains the full name of a mysterious musician they’re trying to find.

Stay up to date with the latest, news, articles and special offers from Griffith Review.