Speaking of the "Unspeakable". Messages hidden in the Work and in the Life of Mishima Yukio

1 Summary My dissertation focuses on Mishima Yukio and the way the author, who strongly occupied himself with reflections on the imperfection of human language during the last decade of his life, conveyed the things that he was not able to or did not want to express explicitly. The dissertation is based on the metaphor of four rivers flowing into the Sea of Fertility, one of the arid lunar maria, that the writer used for his 'inconsistent' life shortly before his death. The four rivers that merged in Mishima's final work, the grandiose tetralogy The Sea of Fertility, represented four areas of the author's life. Each of them allowed him to express his ideas and feelings in a slightly different way. The River of Writing represented his fiction, the River of Theater showed his plays and his acting, the River of Body emphasized the role of bodybuilding and other sports in his life and finally, the River of Action revealed how the effeminate writer had transformed himself into a 'man of action'. The first section of my dissertation deals with Mishima's view on verbal communication. Although Mishima was a renowned writer and playwright who for the most part led a hardworking life and poured most of his energy into his writing, his attitude towards words was rather ambivalent. On the one hand, Mishima loved..