Voices of the Fallen Heroes

Arresting … Here, in brutal, brilliant prose, we see a vivid manifestation of Mishima’s obsession with slaughter as a form of art, one that distils his hallmark preoccupations of death and beauty into a singularly intense poetic expression … what this fine collection consistently demonstrates is how fundamentally, disturbingly, enduringly relevant Mishima’s writing remains – Bryan Karetnyk * Times Literary Supplement *Mesmerising… wonderfully realised in English… Each one of the stories merits its inclusion in this collection, but two in particular stand out as masterpieces. ‘The Flower Hat’ is a miracle of compressed tension and potent socio-political discourse… the title story ‘Voices of the Fallen Heroes’ presents Mishima’s art at its most mesmerising, complex and formidable – David Vernon * Spectator *In the turbulent sea of the master Yukio Mishima’s literature, these stories are waves of fury, desire and delicious cruelty, always kissed by beauty and death. The ghosts and the violence that haunted his last decade of life also offer a glimpse of post-war Japan, a country full of trauma and grief. He wrote always in a frenzy but his style is so elegant and detailed that it seems, and is, timeless. I loved every page and was shaken by the complexity and darkness of these stories – Mariana EnríquezAll of Yukio Mishima is on display in these fourteen short stories — the literary muscle of one of Japan’s greatest ever writers flushed and flexed on every page: all of his phenomenal powers of description; all of the celebrated tenderness and acuity of his writing; all of the man’s gleeful irreverence and originality. Here, too, are the signs of disturbance — of a reactionary politics and a fascination with violence that would lead to his spectacular demise. An important and timely collection of stories by a writer who casts a long shadow across the present – Diarmuid HesterMishima is the Japanese Hemingway * Life Magazine *One of the greatest avant-garde Japanese writers of the twentieth century * New Yorker *He can be funny, even hilarious, but he is also capable of plunging into the dark psychic depths achieved by Hitchcock * New York Times Book Review *

Yukio Mishima was born in 1925 in Tokyo, and is considered one of the Japan’s most important writers. His books broke social boundaries and taboos at a time when Japan found itself in a state of rapid social change. His interests, besides writing, included body-building, acting and practising as a Samurai. In 1970 he attempted to start a military coup, which failed. Upon realizing this, Mishima performed seppuku, a ritual suicide, upon himself. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature three times.

Jeffrey Angles (Translator) Jeffrey Angles is a professor of Japanese literature at Western Michigan University and an award-winning translator of Japanese. His own book of Japanese poetry won the Yomiuri Prize in 2017.

Juliet Winters Carpenter (Translator) Juliet Winters Carpenter is an award-winning translator of Japanese writing. She has translated dozens of works, including fiction, poetry and philosphy, as well as three novels by Kobo Abe.