April's review
The Sound of Waves
by Yukio Mishima
April's review
The Sound of Waves by Yukio Mishima
April's review
rating:
As unabashedly delicious and pervy as one of those really good/bad Aussie teen soaps from the early ‘90s, but written by a literary and philosophical genius.
I love how Mishima just dashed off all these pulp novellas throughout his career, in between his masterworks, but didn’t accord them any less respect, attention, or craft. It’s like if Tolstoy, between "Anna Karenina" and "The Death of Ivan Ilyich," decided to write steamy young adult fiction or gay soldier stories, and you could buy them at the drug store for 10¢. It’s a deceptively simple and universal love story, and told with such fluidity and gentleness, but of course there are the typical Mishima undertones of the hollow corruption created by Western influence, the repressive class structure of Japan, the sacrifice of the individual at the altars of family and tradition, etc.
But you sort of have to let the poetry and politics here wash over you, I think this is one to be read quickly and ...more
I love how Mishima just dashed off all these pulp novellas throughout his career, in between his masterworks, but didn’t accord them any less respect, attention, or craft. It’s like if Tolstoy, between "Anna Karenina" and "The Death of Ivan Ilyich," decided to write steamy young adult fiction or gay soldier stories, and you could buy them at the drug store for 10¢. It’s a deceptively simple and universal love story, and told with such fluidity and gentleness, but of course there are the typical Mishima undertones of the hollow corruption created by Western influence, the repressive class structure of Japan, the sacrifice of the individual at the altars of family and tradition, etc.
But you sort of have to let the poetry and politics here wash over you, I think this is one to be read quickly and ...more
