Sun and Steel: The Last Performance of Yukio Mishima

Yukio Mishima, one of Japan’s most dazzling and disturbing postwar writers, left behind not just novels and plays but an entire life lived as performance. His book Sun and Steel is part confession, part manifesto: a story of how a frail, bookish child of the moon turned himself into a worshipper of the sun, seeking truth through the body, discipline, and finally a "glorious" death.

At the heart of the book lies a haunting question: how does the hunger for form and discipline make us more fully human—and when does that same hunger veer into something darker? Mishima’s life may have been an extreme arc, but the ache he describes is not so easily dismissed. It speaks to a universal tension we all feel at times: the pull between abstraction and embodiment, comfort and struggle, fluidity and form. Sun and Steel forces us to ask not only what Mishima saw, but also what he missed, and how that same pendulum swing plays out in our own culture.

Join us Sept 27th, @3PM at the Bingham Davis House on UK's campus. Free parking in the back. Expect lively discussion, sharp critique, and maybe even a little sympathy for Mishima’s muscle-ache for meaning. No push-ups required. Hope to see you there!