Yasunari Kawabata had Parkinson's disease), a possible illicit love affair, or the shock caused by the suicide of his friend Yukio Mishima in 1970. Unlike Mishima, Kawabata left no note, and since (again unlike Mishima) he had not discussed significantly in his writings the topic of taking his own life, his motives remain unclear. However, his Japanese biographer, Takeo Okuno, has related how he had nightmares about Mishima for two or three hundred nights in a row, and was incessantly haunted by the specter of Mishima. In a persistently depressed state of mind, he would tell friends during his last years that
Persona: A Biography of Yukio Mishima stimulated to go back and read, or re-read, what Yukio Mishima has left us." Allan Massie, writing for "The Wall Street Journal", said, "Mr. Inose doesn't attempt to explain Mishima's grisly end—it may be that the Japanese reader needs no such explanation—but does show him to have been an extraordinary man, in many respects a sympathetic one, and a writer of extraordinary range." Persona: A Biography of Yukio Mishima Persona: A Biography of Yukio Mishima is a 2012 biography of Yukio Mishima written by Naoki Inose with Hiroaki Sato, and published by Stone Bridge Press. It is an expanded adaptation