The botched hara-kiri of a Nobel nominee

Mishima’s Sword, by Christopher Ross, Fourth Estate, €21.90.

When 47-year-old Yukio Mishima slipped the armour-piercing knife into his guts, he ended a literary career that had seen him nominated for the Nobel prize three times.

He had written 40 novels, hundreds of short stories and many plays. But this man, who had invested so much in the strength of Japanese tradition, made a shambles of his seppuku, the ritual suicide better known to ...