jetjaguar124 's review for:

Persona: A Biography of Yukio Mishima by Naoki Inose

4.5

challenging dark emotional informative slow-paced

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A winding, twisting epic detailing in thorough detail seemingly every significant moment of Mishima's life. As seemingly the only Japanese-language biography of Mishima published in English, and one written by the wonderful Naoki Inose no less, this is an extremely valuable overview of the author's life, containing within it thorough analysis of the cultural context of the post-war Japanese era, a detailed reading of history, and even borderline breathtaking analysis and detail of Mishima's entire family tree and his family history going back centuries. If there's a failure here, it's that the book can sometimes spend too much time on tangents, running through essays on Japanese culture and history for dozens of pages before returning to Mishima's life, and so it can read in a perhaps somewhat disjointed way. Inose also never personally had a strong relationship with Mishima, and so this biography lacks some of the more intimate details that can be found in the John Nathan or Henry Scott Stokes attempts. 

Nevertheless, this is by far the most fully fleshed biography of Mishima available in English, covering in detail everything found in the other two biographies, along with even more details gleaned from interviews and exclusive access to documents. Likely due to translation, the writing is not as silky smooth as John Nathan's, yet this biography still manages to feel like a long, winding, tragic and poetic journey by it's end.