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
Kimiyo Mishima Kimiyo Mishima Kimiyo Mishima (born 1932) is a contemporary Japanese artist, best known for creating highly realistic versions of "breakable printed matter" in ceramic such as newspapers, comic books and boxes out of clay. Mishima began her artistic career as a painter in the early 1960s, then started working in ceramics in 1971. At this time, she began to use the silk screen technique to print newspaper and ad poster images onto clay. Kimiyo Mishima was born in 1932 in Osaka, Japan. She graduated in 1951 from the Ohgimachi Public High School in Osaka. In 1986/87, she studied in New