Mishima or the Vision of Emptiness

On 25 November 1970, Japan's most renowned post-war novelist, Yukio Mishima, shocked the world by committing seppuku, the famous Japanese ritual of suicide traditionally reserved for the warrior class.

In this book, Marguerite Yourcenar, an attentive reader of Mishima and a scholar of the cultural roles of fiction, explores the author's life and politics: his affinity for Western culture, his family and his homosexuality, his writings and his death, which he carefully planned.