The real Saint Mishima now on sale
Mishima stuff to be auctioned
July 2, 2009 – StraitsTimes.com
TOKYO – A Japanese bookseller will on Sunday auction off letters and photos of the nationalist author and poet Yukio Mishima, famous for his writings and his public samurai-style suicide in 1970…
….The 1967 and 1970 letters, addressed to his American friend Jan von Adlmann, an art museum director, hint at a possibly intimate relationship between them…
…Mishima in both letters spoke of Saint Sebastian, a third-century Roman martyr and an oft cited symbolic figure of homosexuality…Mishima enclosed black-and-white photos showing himself posing naked as Saint Sebastian, with his wrists tied up over his head and bleeding with arrows piercing his body…more...
Although the news reports about this don’t make it clear, the photo above of Mishima as Saint Sebastian seems to be, “One of the photos was made public for the first time,” according to antiquarian bookseller Shigeru Natsume, who went on to say that, “I suppose it was not allowed to be published as it shows his naked lower body, although Mishima seemed to have liked it better.”
That photo is certainly more-over-the-top than the “standard” Saint Sebastian photo that Mishima’s estate had released years ago (below).
- 
