Tim's Reviews > Star

"For a star, being seen is everything. But the powers that be are well aware that being seen is no more than a symptom of the gaze. They know that the reality everyone thinks they see and feel draws from the spring of artifice that you and I are guarding. To keep the public pacified, the spring must always be shielded from the world of masks. And these masks are worn by stars.

But the real world is always waiting for its stars to die. If you never cycle out the masks, you run the risk of poisoning the well. The demand for new masks is insatiable."

This is an absolutely fascinating shorter work from Mishima. It follows a young actor who is filming a yakuza film. There's not much of a plot, more like an examination of what it means to be a celebrity, how people view him/how he views others and how the film industry worked in Japan at the time. This is all the more fascinating as Mishima himself wrote it right after acting in a film titled "Afraid to Die" in which he played, you guessed it, a yakuza. It makes for an interesting parallel with his own life and several of the topics that seemed to dominate it.

This may be an unpopular opinion, but I think this may be my favorite book by Mishima. I said in my review of The Sailor Who Fell From the Grace of the Sea a few months back that it was my current favorite, I will now revise that opinion to the best written of his books that I've read. I do believe the other is a "better" book, but there's something about Star that really worked for me. As I said, there's little in terms of plot, and it's extremely short, but there's an urgency to it… as if he needs to express something and can't quite put it to words that I find fascinating. A rare 5/5 stars