Although the work of the Japanese writer Mishima Yukio has been subject to numerous works and analyses of individual works, some of his work has remained obscure in his opus as well as in the broader context of Japanese literature. One of these works is the novel Gogo no Eikō, published in 1963, seven years prior to the author’s suicide. The novel has previously not received much attention from critics and theorists and was translated into English only once, shortly after the release of the Japanese original. In this thesis, the novel is analysed the context of post-war Japan, especially in the context of the phenomenon of post-war Japanese nationalism. The novel can be read in the theoretical and political framework of the wider nationalist discourse of the 60s and in the ideological framework, set out by Mishima in his work. The study of the novel implements an imagolocial analysis of the novel’s protagonists and reconstructs the authors view on societal and cultural changes in post-war Japan through complex dynamics between the protagonists and a cultural Other. In the foreground of the thesis is the question of the possibility of understanding the novel in this context and the potential that this reading may bring to further analyses of Mishima's work.
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