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...

The psychological and intellectual preoccupations of the modern man have never been more confounding since the arrival of Kierkegaardian Existentialism in the first half of the nineteenth century. Today, there is the global village which brings all of us together but ensures that our differences keep us apart; there is the Internet that has transformed the world into a giant family, making us believe in the idealism of “six degrees of separation,” and yet we can feel desolate among 7 billion people and hunger for intimacy; there is the freedom of being an individual, of making your decisions based on your wants and needs, but you cannot seem to work out what it is you want or need. Modern living is mined with these frustrating challenges. The purpose of this piece is to look briefly at four landmark literary works – Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice , Franz Kafka’s The Trial , J.M.G. Le Clézio’s The Interrogation , Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Wood  – and convince the reader tha...