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MISHIMA () The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea Now a disturbing and erotic film starring Sarah Miles and Kris Kristofferson Penguin Books The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sca Yukio Mishima was born in Tokyo in 1925. When he graduated from the Pcers’ School in 1944, he received a citation from the Emperor as the highest honour student. He graduated from the Tokyo Imperial University School of Jurisprudence in 1947, and the following year he published his first novel. He wrote eight novels, four successful plays for the Kabuki Theatre, and a travel book. He was the author of more than fifty short stories, ten one-act plays, and several volumes of essays. Among his books published in England are After the Banquet, Confessions of a Mask, Death in Midsummer and other stories, and The Thirst for Love. The Sound of Waves, published in Japan under the title of Shiosai, won the 1954 Shinchosha literary prize. Immediately after the Second World War, Yukio Mishima went to the United States as a guest of the State Department and of Partisan Review. In his spare time he was a devotee of weight-lifting and body-building exercises, Mishima firmly upheld the traditions of Japan’s imperial past, which he believed were being swiftly eroded by Western materialism. In 1970 he astonished the world when he and a colleague committed ritual suicide, or hara-kirt, by disembowelment. Yukio Mishima The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea Translated from the Japanese by John Nathan Penguin Books in association with Martin Secker & Warburg

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