Sun and Steel

Sun and Steel can be read as an account of how a frail, bookish young man discovered the importance of his own physical being; the “sun and steel” of the title are themselves symbols of the cult of the outdoors and the weights used in bodybuilding, respectively. It is also a reflection on the relationship between action and art, and in particular on his own art.

On a more personal level, it is an account of the search for identity and integration, demonstrating how an intensely individual preoccupation can be developed until it becomes a philosophy of life.

Confession and self-analysis, philosophy and poetry combine, in the end, to create something that is, in itself, perfect and self-sufficient, a literary work as carefully constructed as Mishima’s novels and which, at the same time, provides an indispensable key to understanding those novels as art.

The book also serves as a precursor to Mishima’s dramatic suicide in 1970, mirroring his belief in tragic fulfillment and the warrior ethos.

His life and work frequently confront concepts such as honour, rebellion, and the interaction between eroticism and violence.

Mishima, Writer, playwright, model, martial arts master, and leader of a failed coup d’état that ended with his death, in public, by seppuku. He was the most important stylist of the post-war Japanese language. Nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature five times in the 1960s. He never received it. Until the end, he maintained a total intransigence and obsession with the unity of beauty, eroticism, and death.

 “Luxurious vocabulary, decadent metaphors, blending traditional Japanese and modern Western literary styles”