Encounter across the Pacific: Secrets of Death and Beauty of a Japanese Deciphered by an American: A Review of The Madness and Perversion of Yukio Mishima by Jerry S. Piven. Westport, CT:  Praeger, 2004.  273 pp.

It is truly a gratifying experience to find a duet of two marvelous talents: one a world-renowned Japanese writer and the other an American who, with unyielding scholarship and abundant passion, explores the mystified psychological landscapes of the novelist.

Yukio Mishima killed himself in 1970 at the age of forty-five after having created voluminous novels, plays, and essays. He was an extraordinary talent, the kind of genius that comes along perhaps once in three centuries by “venturing places few have glimpsed and forcing readers to face their own darkness” (p. 2). Mishima made his debut at the age of sixteen, and paved his career quite successfully till the end. He also exhibited himself nude for eccentric and surreal photographs, and appeared in gangster films. He was acquainted with celebrities around the world and lived in a lavish European rococo mansion. He was obsessed with physical training during the last fifteen years of his life, utterly transforming himself from anemic frailty to virile muscularity. He finally committed seppuku (ritual suicide), comprised of disemboweling himself by stabbing himself and wrenching the blade across his abdomen, after