to: Claudio Ascii
In November 1970, Italian newspapers gave the news of the puzzling death of Yukio Mishima, writer famous at home but unknown in Europe (actually already in Italy five of his novels were translated, and was in proportion to the Nobel Prize), commander of a group variously called neo-fascist or neo-Nazi, the "Company of the shields" committed suicide by "harakiri" (because it took years to learn that journalists do not write well, and indeed the condition was suppuku right) in front of the cameras that pick up after the armed occupation of a police station in Tokyo. For us boys the news was stunning: the authors used the Italians, the greater-strength or post-strength, pampered and spoiled by adults, the idea of \u200b\u200bsuicide was shocking: yes it did Cesare Pavese, as they said in a low voice, and Ernst Hemingway, but both were considered a bit 'strange, and it even seemed that a fascist Mishima, with his private army, a true samurai, one who had harangued the soldiers in the name of the Tenno?
With our group of friends discussed it a bit ', and for some it was the beginning of a long fidelity. My friend C. bought a poster that depicted him, and put in a Mussolini in the Piazza Venezia and Senator Wallace, who fell victim to an attack. By the time we bought Midsummer Death (Simon and Schuster, 1971), with the introduction of Moravia raving, reading it carefully, collected writings in the sixties, which brought us back to a Japan known only through the films of Kurosawa and the stories made parents about Nipponese allies who had fought with us against the Yankees (and still enough to hear Patriot Act hardening of the writing of those who wanted to be in the midst of the fire, and you are not), and we got the voice of the waves (1956), the first book published in Italy by Feltrinelli in 1961, the tender love story between the young fisherman Shinji and the beautiful Hatsu, discovering one of the variations of the writer, the poet of love, heterosexual and homosexual, linked to a Platonic view of beauty and youth that still inspires more of a thrill for the veiled eroticism and the delicacy with which it comes.
But what we read was not a drop in what he called the "four great rivers" of his life: theater, drama, body, action. As the Years went by, the picture was complete, the texts and Mishima began to come out. In the eighties, the writer ideological veto over the "fascist" it was available to the reader a large mass: sign of a consumption of ontological great Japanese writer, like all due literary successes (and specifically those consequences: for example, Italian Guido Morselli), or a feeling of superficiality Italian experience, which opened in the decade after the massacre in Bologna divided his vulgar taste among the "new writers" Italians and the ancient samurai?
Theatre, then, as my friend Hitler (1968, Bloomsbury Publishing, 1983) un'amarissima comedy that was to investigate the history of Rohm and Strasser, right and left of the Nazi party, removed from the SS and that went a back cover that makes you laugh reread hours (there was talk of market saturation, the ideological rejection, we support this contention with the quote from a reader of the infamous magazine Frigidaire, not even if it was the search for '), prose, and the list could be endless, touching all areas of Japan's traditional and the modern literature: from stories to novels, stories of love A virtue as shaky (1957, Einaudi, 2010), which reconstructs the fifties in Japan the story of Emma Bovary as a science fiction UFO wonderful Stella (1957, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2010), the beautiful Golden Pavilion (1959, Feltrinelli, 1983), considered one of the masterpieces of Mishima, which tells how the monaco Mizoguchi ignite the Kyoto Zen temple to destroy all trace of beauty , playing on impermanence and emptiness of form, drawing a very long discussion that would be a lesson in aesthetics, ending with the tetralogy of The Sea of \u200b\u200bFertility, output between 1969 and 1970, under the titles of Spring Snow, Horses on the run, The temple of dawn, The Mirror of Deception (Simon and Schuster, varied and, in novels and short stories, vol. II, Mondadori, 2006), an extraordinarily fresco in Japan that goes from 1912 to 1970 (first then concluded of suppuku) to end in 1975, in which they move and meet, in later incarnations, and Honda Shigekuni Kyioaki Matsugae, in a complex game of recognitions and losses, false recognitions, representations in the round of extraordinary characters.
And then the body, karate, kendo, exercises with the Tate-no-Kai, the Society of Shields, Sun and Steel (Ciarrapico, 1981) with the introduction of Marcello Veneziani, and Pierre Pascal, who mocked Moravia, a spiritual testament, one following the idea of \u200b\u200bcultural and youth of the body, even the transformed culture (then called it) in a metaphysical, establishing that body, and words were more united than the literature he did not believe, and finally action, designed and advocated preraffigurata and a thousand times, from The Way of the Samurai (Simon and Schuster, 1983)), eighteenth-century commentary on a text, the Hagakure of Yamamoto Joch, samurai and then Monaco, Spiritual Lessons for young samurai (SE, 1988), a posthumous collection of articles and pieces that end with the proclamation read before suppuku; the formation of the Tate-No-Kai, exercises with the militants, and until just that day in November 1970. Meanwhile, critics had begun to bear fruit. We read Mishima and integral culture (Sannokai, 1980) by Joseph Fino, which reported a sense of adventure mishimiana to his true being, co-belonging to a mythical world now that after Hiroshima and Nagasaki had ceased to exist; Life and Death of Yukio Mishima (1974, Feltrinelli, 1985) a comprehensive biography of Henry Scott Stokes' semi-official "to whom he was close enough to try to understand it, but to no avail because of a flawed 'Western background, and the vision of the void or Mishima (1980, Feltrinelli, 1982) by Marguerite Yourcenar instead indulged the idea of \u200b\u200ban "empty metaphysical" unbridgeable, but not by Westerners but by reading Mishima (so to speak) from Orientalist, it was difficult to find out where the gap is not what we call anything or nothing. We read the conference proceedings, Mishima: the sword, the pen, the blood (RAID, 2001) that re-welding between the spiritual and material life, words and body, art and politics, and The Wounded Angel (Liguori, 2007) by Emanuele Ciccarelli, an in-depth analysis, especially literary translators and one of the most knowledgeable of ' by Mishima, to date the text offers a broader survey of his work, and there were the films directed by Paul Schrader, Mishima (1985), written with his brother Leonard, who combines biography and fragments of his works, Hollywood film and very little "feel".
Forty years have passed since then, from those days of 1970. Quietly in the seventies, Mishima was a surge in Eighties and nineties are still running out of his unpublished works and reprints. Even at times when I was in, from political point of view, at positions further away from the traditional Mishima (but maybe that was a way to search a tradition), I could not help but andarmi to read every now and then something of what had written. Had a few pages of a novel, essay, article, as we re-read every now and then a fragment of Plato, the Bhagavad Gita, or Homer to Nietzsche, looking for inspiration than late. Forty
, but the media seems not to have noticed it, almost nobody talked about Mishima, have not been edited new book of criticism. Paradoxically, it came out a novel SF, Lazarus (Urania Mondadori) by Alberto Cola, in which the writer comes back to life in Japan in the future, that Japan's post-cyberpunk imagery drawn years, a sign of un'americanizzazione feared has come true, interesting novel, but definitely that would destroy a myth, if certain myths were destroyed. Forty years and my friend C. and I are not two more high school students, but two vintage men lords, but still we wonder about Mishima, looking at me all the days of a sticker bearing the words "... and among men the samurai "and some old photographs yellowed by time and demand of the young postulant at the Great Master: When you kill, sensei?
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