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Rating: 
Summary: Very impressive
Review: A lot of this was pretty confusing too understand but he wrote one really great story dealing with Buddhism.He definitely has a gift for details and dialouge.
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Summary: Wipe Off the Dust
Review: I bought this book for 25 cents at a book sale hosted by the University of Georgia's History Department. By the hand writing inside I can tell that it had belonged to the man who taught Chinese History. I read the title story back then, but put the book down to read others. I finally picked up the book again withing the last couple of days and was blown away by Mishima's billiance. I have to agree with an earlier Reviewer that Seidensticker's translation do not go as smoothly as Keene's Morris's and Sargent's, but were good nonetheless. This book has a wide range of storire from the title story which deals with a young woman who loses her sister in law and two children at the beach. The children drown the sister in law has a heart attack when she sees the bobbing body of one of the dead children. The young mother not only suffers this great los, but as time heals the scars she feels great fear and sorrow that the memories of her children are slipping away. There are also a couple of strange stories. Thermos Bottles deals with a man who while in San Francisco runs into a former geisha who he had been intimate with. He had left the woman when she said that she was pregnant with his child, but he doesn't believe her. I won't go into more detail lets just say it is strange. The most disturbing story in this book to me is Patriotism. In which Mishima writes of a young officer commiting seppuku two days after the feb 26 incident. Mishima goes into vivid detail of the excruciating suicide. Good but disturbing stuff.
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Summary: temples of prose
Review: Mishima writes very stark stories of spiritual emptiness. My favorite is the story Ten Yen about a young couple who must resort to desperate economic measures, the young woman must prostitute herself to earn them money. Mishimas ascetic style is not necessarily uplifting but it does make for an interesting aesthetic intensity. These short stories are each very uniquely populated but that single focus is never lost. They feel quickly executed but perfect like ink drawing, an art where you get one chance only to make a perfect gesture. Existentialism as practiced in the orient. For Mishima authenticity was ritually sought after but the world he wanted to live in was one relegated to the past. Art was no substitute for his imagined and longed for spiritual kingdom though he tried to live as though it was, at least for awhile.
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Summary: Piercing Clarity
Review: Mishima writes with amazing clarity of thought. His sentences are among the clearest I have ever read. I feel at a loss of words, a "poverty of emotion," as Mishima might call it, in trying to write about Death in Midsummer. The only thing I can say - to even try to do him and his book justice - is READ IT!!!
Rating:
Summary: Piercing Clarity
Review: Mishima writes with amazing clarity of thought. His sentences are among the clearest I have ever read. I feel at a loss of words, a "poverty of emotion," as Mishima might call it, in trying to write about Death in Midsummer. The only thing I can say - to even try to do him and his book justice - is READ IT!!!
Rating: 
Summary: ten short stories by Mishima Yukio
Review: Ten stories by Mishima Yukio; three of which are translated by Edward Seidensticker, two by Ivan Morris, three by Donald Keene, and two by Geoffrey Sargent.Personally, I don't care for Seidensticker's style -- his translations always seem so lifeless -- and reading through his three stories [including the "Death in Midsummer" of the title] was nearly torturous. My favorites of this set of short stories were "The Seven Bridges" [Keene, trans.] and "Patriotism" [Sargent, trans.], a look at the last days of a soldier and his wife. Mishima's stories often lack a traditional plot, focusing instead upon the slow development of a single scene, or on emerging human emotions and motives. Death is a recurring theme in all of his work, and is portrayed with a terrible beauty and admiration. Recommended.
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Summary: mishima at his best
Review: this personally selected collection of short stories shows mishima at his best. from a surreal no play to gentle stories of mourning and loss, this is all great stuff which translated beautifully. my only reservation would be the story "patriotism", which details the ritual suicide of a young couple- ick. compelling, but not for the weak stomached.
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Summary: His talent
Review: Yukio Mishima was many things in his life; an author was only one of them. In general, I have more respect for him as a personality than I do for his individual books. I could go on all day about the man himself, but my praise of this or that novel is usually conditional, and when I find myself thinking of books to re-read just for enjoyment's sake, he usually isn't near the top of my list. I think that these stories are some of his highest-quality work, though, and I can recommend them without any reservations, not just to enthusiasts of Japanese culture or the sort of magnificently sick aesthetic that Mishima represents. The title story, although as coldly inhuman as much of Mishima's work, still seems pyschologically accurate. The second story, Three Thousand Yen, is disarmingly and uncharacteristically sweet, but tempered by a more characteristic ending. Patriotism is probably the standout of this standout, with flawless prose, again backing Mishima's vision with a realistic setting. 'Pearl' is clever, and 'Onegata' is another very polished story, a good candidate for anthologization. 'Swaddling Clothes' is a personal favorite, wickedly barbed and haunting. The greatest strength of this collection is that Mishima never seems to be repeating himself - he explores his central themes from different angles, in a variety of styles, and provides something of outstanding artistic merit.
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