Richard Appignanesi interesting and Mr. Appignanesi's descriptive skills are considerable." Almost two decades later Appignanesi published "Yukio Mishima’s Report to the Emperor", a fictional autobiography of the Japanese poet, novelist, playwright, film director, actor and bodybuilder Yukio Mishima (1925 - 1970), one of the most important Japanese literary and artistic figures of the 20th century as well as an extreme-right activist. Appignanesi's novel is set predominantly in post-World War II reconstruction Japan and in Benares, India. Its narrative builds up to Mishima's horrific ritual suicide by seppuku that accompanied his failed right-wing coup against the Japanese government. The novel explores some of
Brett Whiteley elements and on 18 wood panels 203 cm x 1615 cm x 9 cm. Reading from left to right, it begins with an exploding sun from a portrait of Yukio Mishima that Whiteley had started but never completed. The famed author Mishima had committed seppuku in 1970 and the literary mythology that arose of his apparent final vision of enlightenment in the form of the exploding sun, as he pressed the knife into his body, inspired and became the basis for this work. In terms of media, it used everything from feathers and part of a bird's nest to a