The day of the opening of the trial, June twenty-fifth, was fair. The heat was intense.

The patrol wagon carrying the defendants passed by the moat surrounding the Imperial Palace, its waters glittering in the sunlight, and entered the confines of the red brick Courthouse through the rear gate. The Tokyo District Court was on the first floor. Isao came into the courtroom wearing a white splashed-pattern kimono and hakama, which had been brought to the prison for him. The amber luster of the judges’ bench struck his eyes. When the guard removed his handcuffs at the door, he made Isao turn, out of kindness, so that he had a momentary look in the direction of the spectators. There sat his father and mother, whom he had not seen for half a year. When his eyes met his mother’s, she covered her mouth with a handkerchief. She seemed to be choking back sobs. Makiko was nowhere to be seen.

The defendants formed a single line, their backs to the spectators. Thus arrayed with his comrades, Isao felt his courage mounting.

Yukio Mishima, Runaway Horses

And just announced: Exquisite Nothingness: The Novels of Yukio Mishima, a new critical volume due September 30th from David Vernon, who has written widely on Nabokov, Shakespeare, Mahler, Wagner and Beethoven. (And apparently his next book will focus on Clarice Lispector.) Maybe we’ll finally get a reading of Runaway Horses that does more than dovetail neatly into Mishima’s suicidal nationalism!

Jon Karel from The Number Twelve Looks Like You once had an incredible video of him playing along to Philip Glass’s score to Paul Schrader’s A Life In Four Chapters which sadly appears to have been taken down, so here he is shredding some tango instead: