is still searching for meaning behind his brother’s death in the Mishima incident. The brothers’ ideologies were polar opposites. In Osamu’s career in politics, he had been a staunch ...

You’re reading The New Yorker’s daily newsletter, a guide to our top stories, featuring exclusive insights from our writers and editors. Sign up to receive it in your in-box. Yukio Mishima was ...

I once owned a photograph of Yukio Mishima squatting in the snow, dressed in nothing but a skimpy white loincloth, brandishing a long samurai sword. Mishima’s torso is buffed from years of ...

The catalogue of 20th-century writers who committed suicide is long and sad: Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf, Ernest ...