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Feature Four Frames

The manipulated manipulator: Mika Ninagawa’s No Longer Human

No Longer Human (Ningen shikkaku, 2019) has the same title as a famous novel by the Japanese writer Osamu Dazai (1904-1948). Several adaptations of this novel first published in 1948 have been produced for both the big and the small screen. However, despite its title, Mika Ninagawa’s film is not another adaptation of the novel […]

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Feature Four Frames

Manhood and political nostalgia in Yukio Mishima’s Yukoku

On 25 November 1970, the Japanese writer Yukio Mishima (1925-1970) committed seppuku (ritual suicide by disembowelment; in the Western world better known as hara-kiri) after a failed coup d’état. Together with four young members of the Tatenokai (Shield Society), the private militia he had founded in 1968, Mishima had entered and occupied the headquarters of […]