Star is rendered in exacting contemporary prose. The sentences are generally short and declarative, and the word choice is refreshingly mundane. This linguistic spareness allows the heated subject matter of Star to emanate through the cracks of the sentences ... This complex, psychological portrait of celebrity is a propulsive, enduring narrative that eerily predicts our contemporary digital tensions of the self ... In this way, though written nearly sixty years ago, far before the advent of social media celebrity culture, Star speaks to our modern contradictions of the inner and outer self masterfully. It also accomplishes a fascinating and singular interrogation of power, and how, whether by wealth or physical attractiveness or fame, people are able to build a delusional world for themselves in which they believe they share nothing, including death, with the rest of humanity.
The 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.
Star is short even for a novella, but quite effective as (self-)portrait of a pop star—one that feels strikingly current and familiar, too, despite having been first published more than fifty years ago ... Mishima nicely captures this alter-world of stardom, his observations convincing ... Star is a compact, short tale, but Mishima presents a full and convincing character- (and condition-) portrait in this sharp little novella.
[Mishima's] slim novella—smoothly translated into English for the first time by prize-winning Sam Bett—is a raw, scathing examination of fame: 'The very thing that makes a star worth watching is the same thing that strikes him from the world at large and makes him an outsider.'
... locates [Mishima] in a closet full of fire-and-brimstone. In many of his books, he fills this closet with an awareness of his Japanese heritage, but here he fills it with largely surface-level thoughts about his immediate surroundings. The surface, luckily, is a beautiful one ... Mishima melds his own writerly analytical skill with Rikio’s experience, elucidating aspects of the film world one rarely sees in literature ... an efficient, economical book in which ordinary life concerns are muted in favor of fashionable appearances ... The translator, Sam Bett, manages to preserve a difficult balance of precision and lyricism that captures Mishima’s coldly ecstatic voice ... unusually lucid in its encapsulation of the experience of this rarest occupation. We can only hope to be so unlucky.
...ethereal ... Mishima is a master of the psychological: he blurs distinctions between Rikio’s identity and the characters he plays in disorienting but never jarring transitions between movie scenes and reality. Even decades after its original publication, this nimble novella about the costs and delusions of constant public attention will resonate with readers.
If Mizuno’s problems are of his making, Mishima’s stance seems merely ill-tempered, and the weightless story is mercifully brief. A minor work by Mishima[.]
