Beautiful Star is a heartfelt call for peace, and a meditation on family and alienation. Mishima’s beautiful novel is about a Japanese family who wake up one day convinced that they are each aliens from a different planet inhabiting human bodies, and that it is their sacred duty to bring peace to humanity to save them from the insanity of nuclear Armageddon. Beautiful Star is a gorgeous, haunting novel, one clearly written in the shadow of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the dread of nuclear destruction that shaped the Cold War era. Death blossomed from the beautiful vegetable fields bathed in sunlight, from pastures hemmed in by streams and green woods, from landscapes overflowing with flowers and honeybees.”Ĭelebrated Japanese literary author Yukio Mishima considered Beautiful Star to be his masterpiece, yet it has only just now been translated into English for the first time. Bones generally go unnoticed until death, but now they were singing out even in life, like trumpets.
Death’s eventual resting place within human bones spoke loud and clear of an unperishable core within the body of living people. Tiny flecks of death on a tireless journey, weaving their way through the structures of radiant flora and fauna in the fields of the Earth, in search of some dark abode. This springtime poison, scattered throughout the highest reaches of the sky, was falling to Earth, passing through vegetables and milk, and finally lodging itself deep within human bones. The high crimson and violet banks glowing in the evening sky were all toxic. “Death now enveloped earthlings in the form of beautiful clouds.
Yukio Mishima – Beautiful Star (1962, translated by Stephen Dodd 2022)
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