Francis King

From Middle-Class Sissy to Heroic Samurai

Mishima’s Sword

By

Fourth Estate 262pp £14.99 order from our bookshop

This odd, sometimes irritating and always fascinating book is difficult to categorise. A commonplace book driven by a single obsession? That would certainly convey the way in which it consists for the most part of a series of brief, finely chiselled passages, each often no more than a paragraph in length, with little sense of cohesion between them. But there is nothing commonplace about either the content or the style.

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