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
Go Mishima Go Mishima Tsuyoshi Yoshida (1924 – January 5, 1988), known by the pen name , was a Japanese homoerotic fetish artist and founder of the magazine . He is noted for his illustrations of "macho-type" men, often with yakuza-inspired "irezumi" tattoos. Mishima, along with Tatsuji Okawa, Sanshi Funayama, and Go Hirano, is regarded by artist and historian Gengoroh Tagame as a central figure in the first wave of contemporary gay artists in Japan. Mishima was born in 1924 in Yokosuka, Kanagawa Prefecture. At 18, he was drafted into the Imperial Japanese Army, where he had his first homosexual experience with