The tumult of the waves

Japan. A fishing village. Remote. First love. Shinji, a young fisherman. Hatsue, the daughter of the richest man in the village. Shinji sees her on the beach. They fall in love.

There are several versions of "First Love" in literature. It is worth reading several of them. For example, Turgenev's, and then Mishima's. Both first. Loves.

Writer, playwright, model, martial arts master and leader of a failed coup d'état that ended with his death by seppuku.

Mishima 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.

Luxurious vocabulary, decadent metaphors. Incandescent, it fuses traditional Japanese and modern Western literary styles. It leaves us with an intransigence: beauty, eroticism and death are one and the same.

This, like "Confessions of a Woman" (Tanizaki, out of print), burned me with tears in my hands. 

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. He maintained, until the end, a total intransigence and obsession with the unity between beauty, eroticism and death.

 «Luxurious vocabulary, decadent metaphors, which fuse traditional Japanese and modern Western literary styles»