Von Thronsthal also has a track titled, “through sun and steel” which can currently be heard on their MySpace page.
A video using clips of Mishima. The music is “Imperium Internum” by the band Von Thronstahl.
An interesting article in Japan Times citing the example of Mishima when discussing “democratic pretension vs. airs of entitlement” and comparing Japan’s monarchy and the more ‘royal’ aspects of the American presidency.
Some commentary about the death of suspected homosexual Austrian right winger Jorg Haider, mentioning Mishima and Nazis.
I wasn’t aware that David Bowie was at one time a Yukio Mishima fan, but this blog cites the following quote from Thomas Newton Howard, accomanied by the image above.
THOMAS NEWTON SEABROOK: “Bowie now read and enthused – in typically vociferous fashion – about art, literature, and classical music; painting, previously an intermittent distraction, became a full-time hobby. Many of his own artworks – which included a giant expressionist portrait of the Japanese author and nihilist Yukio Mishima – hung from the walls of his Berlin apartment.”
Ken Ogata, the actor who played Yukio Mishima in Paul Schrader’s film Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985)
Japan Times Online - “Screen great Ken Ogata dead at 71″
Hollywood Reporter - “Ken Ogata dies at 71, Japanese actor was Shohei Imamura’s leading man”
“Was this seppuku?–he was thinking. It was a sensation of utter chaos, as if the sky had fallen on his head and the world was reeling drunkenly. His will power and courage, which had seemed so robust before he made the incision, had now dwindled to something like a single hairlike thread of steel, and he was assailed by the uneasy feeling that he must advance along this thread, clinging to it with desperation.”
- Yukio Mishima, Patriotism
Note: One has to wonder if Mishima recalled these lines, or perhaps a similar sentiment, as a source of inspiration when he was clinging to the thread of his own will, with his own knife deep in his own stomach.
“Reiko too was gazing intently at her husband, so soon to die, and she thought that never in this world had she seen anything so beautiful. The lieutenant always looked well in uniform, but now, as he contemplated death with severe brows and firmly closed lips, he revealed what was perhaps masculine beauty at its most superb.”
<p style=”text-align: right;”>- Yukio Mishima, <em> Patriotism
