Saturday, August 31, 2019

Yukio Mishima - or Getting From Point A to Point B

I'm very often surprised whenever I examine the path I've taken to reach point B from point A. One case in point is how I've come to read the novel I have currently on my Kindle.

A few days ago, I was watching a collection of films starring (or featuring) James Cagney. One such film was the 1931 comedy, The Millionaire in which Cagney had a brief appearance. I was unfamiliar with most of the actors in the film, and curiosity lead me to search the Internet for information about them. One of the stars of the film was Canadian-American actor, David Manners who played John Harker in the 1931 horror classic Dracula, which starred Bela Lugosi in the title role.

Learning that Manners was in Dracula led me to hunt for that film on the Internet. It had been ages since I've watched this classic movie, and luckily I was able to locate it at vimeo.com.

In 1999, Lugosi's Dracula was released for home video, with an updated soundtrack composed by Philip Glass and performed by the Kronos Quartet. I was so impressed by Glass' composition that I had to search for more work by the composer.

One of the works composed by Glass that I found on Spotify, was the film score for Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters - a film based on the life and work of Japanese writer Yukio Mishima. Of course, now I had to learn more about Yukio Mishima.

According to Wikipedia, Mishima is considered one of the most important Japanese authors of the 20th century. His tetralogy of novels, The Sea of Fertility is considered his masterpiece.

Twelve works written by Mishima are available as mobi files at archive.org. My first choice was to download all four novels from the tetralogy. After beginning the first novel, Spring Snow, I returned to archive.org to download the entire Mishima collection.

No comments: