<div><p>Yukio Mishima (b. 1925) was a brilliant writer and intellectual whose relentless obsession with beauty, purity, and patriotism ended in his astonishing self-disembowelment and decapitation in downtown Tokyo in 1970. Nominated for the Nobel Prize, Mishima was the best-known novelist of his time (works like <I>Confessions of a Mask</I> and <I>The Temple of the Golden Pavilion</I> are still in print in English), and his legacy—his <I>persona</I>—is still honored and puzzled over.</P> <p>Who was Yukio Mishima really? This, the first full biography to appear in English in almost forty years, traces Mishima's trajectory from a sickly boy named Kimitake Hiraoka to a hard-bodied student of martial arts. In detail it examines his family life, the wartime years, and his emergence, then fame, as a writer and advocate for traditional values. Revealed here are all the personalities and conflicts and sometimes petty backbiting that shaped the culture of postwar literary Japan.</P> <p>Working entirely from primary sources and material unavailable to other biographers, author Naoki Inose and translator Hiroaki Sato together have produced a monumental work that covers much new ground in unprecedented depth. Using interviews, social and psychological analysis, and close reading of novels and essays, <I>Persona</I> removes the mask that Mishima so artfully created to disguise his true self.</P> <p><B>Naoki Inose</B>, currently vice governor of Tokyo, has also written biographies of writers Kikuchi Kan and Osamu Dazai.</P> <p>New York–based <B>Hiroaki Sato</B> is an award-winning translator of classical and modern Japanese poetry, and also translated Mishima's novel <I>Silk and Insight</I>.</P><BR></DIV>