RaveThe Los Angeles Review of BooksThe novella Star, first published in Japanese in 1961, gives an apt introduction to Mishima’s preoccupations, but should be viewed as no more than an introduction to his greatness ... All of [Mishima\'s] work is punctuated by suicide, and it is peopled with masks, with people knowing they are nothing but masks, who are aware that the center doesn’t hold because there is no center, that character is a flowing fixture, a paradoxical constancy and a definite variable, always ... like Robert Musil, Mishima imagines a man without qualities by writing a prose of such stupendous qualities that, in this case, I found myself unwittingly reading aloud in public the beautifully refined phrases, to the frowning faces of my fellow subway passengers or café companions. A moment Mishima would have cherished ... Even if Star is a relatively minor work in the pantheon of Mishima’s greatness, it is an exquisite contemplation of existence and death, and Mishima’s prose is extremely powerful and the translation finely executed.
