Letters, photos of author Mishima to be auctioned
AFP
TOKYO - A Japanese bookseller will Sunday auction off letters and photos of the nationalist author and poet Yukio Mishima, famous for his writings and his public samurai-style suicide in 1970.
Mishima, who had a wife and children as well as several male lovers, is considered one of the most influential writers of post-World War II Japan and wrote longingly about the nation's former samurai ways.
This weekend the antique book auction house Meiji Kotenkai will offer two letters and several photos that were discovered at a store in the United States and taken to a Tokyo antiquarian bookseller late last year.
The 1967 and 1970 letters, addressed to his American friend Jan von Adlmann, an art museum director, hint at a possibly intimate relationship between them, while a series of pictures foreshadow Mishima's suicide.
Mishima in both letters spoke of Saint Sebastian, a third-century Roman martyr and an oft cited symbolic figure of homosexuality.
In one letter, he thanked Adlmann for a gift, presumably an art book on Saint Sebastian, praising its "lyricism of brutality."
In the other letter, Mishima enclosed black-and-white photos showing himself posing naked as Saint Sebastian, with his wrists tied up over his head and bleeding with arrows piercing his body.
"One of the photos was made public for the first time," said antiquarian bookseller Shigeru Natsume. "I suppose it was not allowed to be published as it shows his naked lower body, although Mishima seemed to have liked it better."
Other photos show the author acting as an imperial army lieutenant in the 1966 film "Yukoku" ("Patriotism"). The image shows the character disemboweling himself, foreshadowing Mishima's public suicide.
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