Stranger on Earth

Beauty, sexuality, death. Any reader who opens a Yukio Mishima ( 三島 由紀夫 ) novel will inevitably encounter these abstract subjects. Known for controversial works such as The Sound of Waves, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion , and The Sea of Fertility tetralogy, Mishima was a novelist with uncompromising ethics and a stalwart belief in right-winged, nationalist ideals. His writings are sometimes considered emotionally barren and overtly intellectual, distancing the reader from the authorial voice. Forbidden Colours ( 禁色 , 1951-3) is that exception, where the reader, if he chooses to, can almost hear Mishima himself meditate on the power of absolute beauty and the bane of homosexuality in post-war Japan. The novel’s two main protagonists, Shunsuke (an aged misogynistic, heterosexual writer) and Yuichi (a guileless homosexual youth blessed with unparalleled beauty), are the driving forces behind the intriguing plot, which finds Shunsuke, towards the end of an illustrious li

Within the pages of Albert Camus’ The Fall ( La Chute , 1956), I come face to face with some of the philosophical issues that have kept me intrigued for a number of years: the meaning of innocence, the judgemental God, among other things. Composed as an unbroken internal monologue in typically opaque Camus style, The Fall is an inscrutable read even for the most seasoned of Camus readers. The challenge is to figure out what innocence has to do with it all. The narrator Clamence “speaks” to us from a bar in the seedy old heart of Amsterdam, where its “concentric canals resemble the circles of hell” (10). Clamence, a down-and-out ex-lawyer from Paris, tells us we are in the last circle of hell. Dante’s last circle of hell is reserved for traitors and betrayers. The reader is thus effectively reminded of treachery; he is literally seated in the heart of evil. Clamence’s references to the erstwhile Jewish quarter make it clear that Camus wants the reader to dredge up memories