Richard Appignanesi interesting and Mr. Appignanesi's descriptive skills are considerable." Almost two decades later Appignanesi published "Yukio Mishima’s Report to the Emperor", a fictional autobiography of the Japanese poet, novelist, playwright, film director, actor and bodybuilder Yukio Mishima (1925 - 1970), one of the most important Japanese literary and artistic figures of the 20th century as well as an extreme-right activist. Appignanesi's novel is set predominantly in post-World War II reconstruction Japan and in Benares, India. Its narrative builds up to Mishima's horrific ritual suicide by seppuku that accompanied his failed right-wing coup against the Japanese government. The novel explores some of
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