Name: Patriotism
ISBN: 9780811218542

Yukio Mishima

A lieutenant in the Japanese army comes home to his wife and informs her that his closest friends have become mutineers. He and his beautiful loyal wife decide to end their lives together. In unwavering detail Mishima describes Shinji and Reiko making love for the last time and the couple's seppuku that follows.

Patriotism

'Was it death he was now waiting for? Or a wild ecstasy of the senses?' For the young army officer of Yukio Mishima's seminal story, 'Patriotism, ' death and ecstasy become elementally intertwined. With his unique rigor and passion, Mishima hones in on the body as the great tragic stage for all we call social, ritual, political.

Ryan 

it's quite difficult to subjectively rate a narrative that's paralleled to the author's own demise as he committed seppuku. reading this felt like as if he wrote an epistolary on his final day with such visceral details, particularly on the graphic, gory parts on the seppuku. it's a wonderful novella on questioning death/afterlife and the morality of whose loyality lies: his comrades or the authority he's served under.

Patriotism

Reviews