Yukio Mishima, born Kimitake Hiraoka, was a Japanese author, poet, playwright, actor, model, Shintoist, nationalist, and founder of the Tatenokai, an unarmed civilian militia. Mishima is considered one of the most important Japanese authors of the 20th century. He was considered for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1968, but the award went to his countryman and benefactor Yasunari Kawabata. His works include the novels Confessions of a Mask and The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, and the autobiographical essay Sun and Steel. Mishima's work is characterized by "its luxurious vocabulary and decadent metaphors, its fusion of traditional Japanese and modern Western literary styles, and its obsessive assertions of the unity of beauty, eroticism and death", according to author Andrew Rankin.
Yasunari Kawabata was a Japanese novelist and short story writer whose spare, lyrical, subtly shaded prose works won him the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1968, the first Japanese author to receive the award. His works have enjoyed broad international appeal and are still widely read.
Donald Lawrence Keene was an American-born Japanese scholar, historian, teacher, writer and translator of Japanese literature. Keene was University Professor emeritus and Shincho Professor Emeritus of Japanese Literature at Columbia University, where he taught for over fifty years. Soon after the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, he retired from Columbia, moved to Japan permanently, and acquired citizenship under the name Kīn Donarudo. This was also his poetic pen name and occasional nickname, spelled in the ateji form 鬼怒鳴門.
Ono no Komachi was a Japanese waka poet, one of the Rokkasen — the six best waka poets of the early Heian period. She was renowned for her unusual beauty, and Komachi is today a synonym for feminine beauty in Japan. She also counts among the Thirty-six Poetry Immortals.
Edward George Seidensticker was an American noted post-World War II scholar, historian, and preeminent translator of classical and contemporary Japanese literature. His English translation of the epic The Tale of Genji, published in 1976, was especially well received critically and is counted among the preferred modern translations.
After the Banquet is a 1960 novel by Yukio Mishima.
John Weil Nathan is an American translator, writer, scholar, filmmaker, and Japanologist. His translations from Japanese into English include the works of Yukio Mishima, Kenzaburō Ōe, Kōbō Abe, and Natsume Sōseki. Nathan is also an Emmy Award-winning producer, writer and director of many films about Japanese culture and society and American business. He is Professor Emeritus of Japanese Cultural Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
James Philip Gabriel is an American translator and Japanologist. He is a full professor and former department chair of the University of Arizona's Department of East Asian Studies and is one of the major translators into English of the works of the Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami.
Death in Midsummer and Other Stories is a 1966 collection of English translations of stories by Japanese writer Yukio Mishima. The book takes its name from the included short story of the same title.
Thirst for Love is a 1950 novel by the Japanese writer Yukio Mishima. The word "kawaki" literally means thirst, but has a sense of parched dryness associated with it.
Valdo H. Viglielmo was a prominent scholar and translator of Japanese literature and works of Japanese philosophy.
Acts of Worship is a 1965 short story collection by the Japanese writer Yukio Mishima. The title story is the tale of a Professor's visit to three Kumano shrines, accompanied by his shy and submissive middle-aged housekeeper, and his reasons for doing so. The collection was translated into English by John Bester, whose work was praised for rendering "Mishima's complex Japanese into fluent and faithful English", and received the inaugural Noma Prize for Translation. The contents were selected by Bester from stories published by Mishima spanning from the 1940s to the mid 1960s.
Tamotsu Yato was a Japanese photographer and occasional actor responsible for pioneering Japanese homoerotic photography and creating iconic black-and-white images of the Japanese male.
Leza Lowitz is an American expatriate writer residing in Tokyo, Japan. She has written, edited and co-translated over twenty books, many about Japan, its relationship with the US, on the changing role of Japanese women in literature, art and society, and about the lasting effect of the Second World War and the desire for reconciliation in contemporary Japanese society.
Takehiro Irokawa was a noted Japanese writer who published both serious literature and light fiction under a variety of pseudonyms including Asada Tetsuya (阿佐田哲也) and Budai Irokawa (色川武大). Many of his works were autobiographical in nature and concerned his life as a mahjong gambler.
Jeffrey Angles (ジェフリー・アングルス) is a poet who writes free verse in his second language, Japanese. He is also an American scholar of modern Japanese literature and an award-winning literary translator of modern Japanese poetry and fiction into English. He is a professor of Japanese language and Japanese literature at Western Michigan University.
The Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature was established in 1979 and is administered by the Donald Keene Center of Japanese Culture at Columbia University. It is the oldest prize for Japanese literary translation in the United States.
Noma Award for the Translation of Japanese Literature is a Japanese literary award that is part of the Noma Prize series. It is awarded annually for new translations of modern Japanese literature. It was founded in 1990.
Five Modern Nō Plays is a collection of plays written by Japanese writer Yukio Mishima. Mishima wrote these plays between 1950 and 1955 and presented them as modern plays in Tokyo. Of these five, only The Damask Drum was expressed in the traditional Nō fashion. The Lady Aoi was expressed as a Western-style opera. The plays take older Nō plots or traditional and foreign fairy tales and bring them to a modern setting.
"Star" is a short story by Yukio Mishima. It was originally published in the November 1960 issue of Gunzo, a literary magazine published by Kodansha. It was later included alongside "Patriotism" and "Hyakuman'en senbei" in the short story collection of the same name, Sutā (スタア), which was published on 30 January 1961 by Shinchosha.
