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
Tetsuji Takechi censorship message in the film, and did not wish to be provoked into another embarrassing public confrontation with the outspoken director. Though he had won his court case, Takechi had become known as a risky and dangerous entity in the film world. Newspapers refused to advertise his films, and Takechi spent the next decade concentrating on writing projects. After his friend, the writer Yukio Mishima, committed "hara-kiri" in 1970, Takechi wrote "The Head Of Yukio Mishima", a best-selling, fictionalized version of the incident. In 1972, he again appeared in an acting role for director Kaneto Shindō in his Art Theatre