Saint Mishima's 'lyricism of brutality'

[Taro Toporific]

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Mishima stuff to be auctioned
July 2, 2009 - StraitsTimes.com
TOKYO -A Japanese bookseller will on Sunday auction off letters and photos of the nationalist author and poet Yukio Mishima, famous for his writings and his public samurai-style suicide in 1970....
This weekend the antique book auction house Meiji Kotenkai will offer two letters and several photos that were discovered at a store in the United States and taken to a Tokyo antiquarian bookseller late last year.
The 1967 and 1970 letters, addressed to his American friend Jan von Adlmann, an art museum director, hint at a possibly intimate relationship between them, while a series of pictures foreshadow Mishima's suicide.
Mishima in both letters spoke of Saint Sebastian, a third-century Roman martyr and an oft cited symbolic figure of homosexuality.
In one letter, he thanked Adlmann for a gift, presumably an art book on Saint Sebastian, praising its 'lyricism of brutality.' In the other letter, Mishima enclosed black-and-white photos showing himself posing naked as Saint Sebastian, with his wrists tied up over his head and bleeding with arrows piercing his body.
'One of the photos was made public for the first time,' said antiquarian bookseller Shigeru Natsume...more...

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[Taro Toporific]

Mo' betta cosplay...

Yukio Mishima’s Tatenokai (Shield Society) photographed by Kishin Shinoyama c. 1969.

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