Leonard Schrader and Weisman's experience with Brazil led them to develop "Kiss of the Spider Woman" together. Schrader's screenplay adaptation, based on the avant-garde novel by Argentinian Manuel Puig, earned him an Academy Award nomination in 1986. (It also earned William Hurt an Academy Award for Best Actor.) Schrader met renowned Japanese novelist Yukio Mishima while living in Japan. For a decade after the author's ritual suicide in 1970, Schrader pursued the rights to Mishima's life, and working with his wife Chieko and brother Paul, he co-wrote the Japanese-language bio-pic "" executive-produced in 1984 by George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola, and
Yukio Mishima author Michizō Tachihara (1914–39), which in turn created an appreciation for classical Japanese poetry form of "waka". Mishima's first published works included "waka" poetry, before he turned his attention to prose. He was invited to write a short story for the Gakushūin literary magazine and submitted , a story in which the narrator describes the feeling that his ancestors somehow still live within him. Mishima's teachers were so impressed that they recommended the story to the prestigious literary magazine "Bungei-Bunka". The story makes use of the metaphors and aphorisms that later became his trademarks and was published in book form