Monira Al Qadiri on Yukio Mishima
By Monira Al Qadiri
A portrait of YUKIO MISHIMA in 1955. Photo by Ken Domon. Image via Wikicommons.
As a Japan-obsessed teen growing up in 1990s Kuwait, I was hooked on Yukio Mishima’s novels, which I continuously read and re-read at every waking moment. There was something about the hyper-masculine yet homoerotic and deeply sensitive yet gruesomely violent composition of Mishima’s inner world that I just couldn’t get enough of. Exquisite descriptions of the look and feel of blades of grass and tiny delicate plants were coupled with brutal fantasies about seppuku (ritual suicide) and hellscapes of temples set ablaze by arsonists. Somehow, these strange books provided a window through which to escape the extremely conservative society I was in, especially while trying to deal with a genuine case of gender dysphoria.
