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Lectures - Spring 2007

In search of Mishima's Sword.

Speaker: Christopher Ross
28th April

Yukio Mishima was perhaps twentieth century Japan's greatest writer. Three times nominated for the Nobel Prize for literature, he still found time to act in movies, set up his own militia and mentor many other artists. Yet Mishima eventually felt compelled to commit suicide, aged 45 and in a most spectacular manner. Deploring the decline in the spiritual values of the nation, he disembowelled himself after a failed coup d'etat. Christopher Ross tells how he went in search of the antique sword Mishima used – and what his quest taught him of the struggle between modernism and the inability of a traditional culture to resist the onslaughts of technological change.

Christopher Ross travelled to Japan in 1991 to visit a friend for a brief holiday and ended up staying for nearly five years. In this time he studied Japanese language and contemporary literature, and took up aikido, attending one of Japan's most severe traditional martial arts schools, the Yoshinkan Honbu dojo. He gained a black belt within 15 months of daily obsessive training, an adventurous period written up by Ross’s friend and Tokyo flatmate, the writer Robert Twigger, in his award winning Angry White Pyjamas. In Tokyo, Ross worked as an English teacher, model and television actor appearing in numerous commercials, and in a popular Japanese historical soap opera produced by Fuji Sankei. He also found time to manage Tokyo's largest second-hand English language bookshop. He now lives and writes in Paris. His debut work, Tunnel Visions – Journeys of an Underground Philosopher, was a Sunday Times top ten non-fiction bestseller. His second book, Mishima's Sword – Travels in Search of a Samurai Legend , has just been published in paperback.