Yukio Mishima

Beautiful Star is a 1962 tale of family, love, nuclear war and UFOs, and was considered by Mishima to be one of his very best books. 

Translated into English for the first time, this atmospheric black comedy tells the story of the Osugi family, who come to the sudden realization that each of them hails from a different planet: Father from Mars, mother from Jupiter, son from Mercury and daughter from Venus. This extra-terrestrial knowledge brings them closer together, and convinces them that they have a mission: to find others of their kind, and save humanity from the imminent threat of the atomic bomb...

Beautiful Star

lily lily 

Death now enveloped earthlings in the form of beautiful clouds. The high crimson and violet banks glowing in the evening sky were all toxic. An incessant seepage of invisible death. 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. 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. Death’s eventual resting place within human bones spoke loud and clear of an unperishable core within the body of living people. Bones generally go unnoticed until death, but now they were singing out even in life, like trumpets. 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. Picnickers felt the bones in their bodies resonate with a death intimately woven into nature. In humans, only their bones are imperishable. Deadly fallout may destroy the flesh, but the beautifully desiccated, modest structure of bones will never be lost. A gentle duet was striking up between fallout and bones in their victory over nature … There was the song now.

Yet how could it possibly be that his own body felt no pain? If the suffering of an individual writhing in their death throes produced not the slightest ripple on the rest of mankind, how could anyone make sense of that? Confronted by the bald fact that physical suffering never extended beyond the experience of a single person, Jūichirō was plunged once more into deep despair. Why should even the fearful agony of the atomic bomb be reduced to individual suffering? Could it really be categorized simply as a physical experience? He thought he knew exactly why the person who dropped the bomb went mad. That man had lacked the ability to feel the tiniest bit of pain, not even an itch, and this must have driven him crazy.

All these things pricked his fingers like thorns in a bouquet of roses that he could not resist picking up.

During the earlier, inactive phase of his life, he was the sort of person who could not stop wondering why, for example, the top branches of garden trees were slenderer than their trunks, and why these branches shorn of leaves became so delicately embedded into the blue sky. The structure of giant elms in wintertime reminded him of fine river tributaries on a map. It was as if the wellspring of the trees was hidden away somewhere in the heavens, and numerous treetop branches, cascading down from the watershed in the blue above, forged together into black trunks and suddenly melded into the shape of a tree. Perhaps it was precisely because trees were delicate streams pouring down from the heavens in crystallized form that their abundant branches and leaves also stretched upwards, struggling to find their way back to the celestial realm.

Beautiful Star

Reviews

Highlights