Sun and Steel

This is the personal testament of Japan's greatest novelist, written shorty before his public suicide in 1970.

Through Mishima's finely wrought and emphatic prose, the mind and motivation behind his agonized search for personal identity is revealed.

In this fascinating document, one of Japan's best known-and controversial-writers created what might be termed a new literary form.

It is new because it combines elements of many existing types of writing, yet in the end fits into none of them. At one level, it may be read as an account of how a puny, bookish boy discovered the importance