/lit/ - Literature

>I suspect that my generation will be the last that truly understands the Japanese language. After us, there will be no one who carries within them the words of the Japanese classics. All that lies ahead is internationalism, a type of abstractionism...In the future the whole world, the capitalist nations, at least, will face exactly the same problems. People will still speak different languages, but they will all have the same mentality, the same feelings about life. That day is coming and inevitably so. For we are the last humans [saigo no ningen], and there is nothing any of us can do about it.
>In the passage quoted above, "saigo no ningen", Mishima's Japanese rendering of Neitzsche's "der letzte Mensch", he announces the death of his nation's culture[...] Indeed, the Japan of today has become more Western in that the ideal citizen is he who becomes a docile white-collar worker (salaryman) or she who becomes an "office-lady".

Is Mishima a respected author outside of /lit/ or will the ignorant masses laugh at me for reading him?

Picture related: Mishima before chudification.

What is his best short story?

>does nothing as a teenager but read books
>tries to live out his teenage fantasies for the rest of his life

>I suspect that my generation will be the last that truly understands the Japanese language. After us, there will be no one who carries within them the words of the Japanese classics. All that lies ahead is internationalism, a type of abstractionism...In the future the whole world, the capitalist nations, at least, will face exactly the same problems. People will still speak different languages, but they will all have the same mentality, the same feelings about life. That day is coming and inevitably so. For we are the last humans [saigo no ningen], and there is nothing any of us can do about it.
>In the passage quoted above, "saigo no ningen", Mishima's Japanese rendering of Neitzsche's "der letzte Mensch", he announces the death of his nation's culture[...] Indeed, the Japan of today has become more Western in that the ideal citizen is he who becomes a docile white-collar worker (salaryman) or she who becomes an "office-lady".

Mishima had a pretty specific brand of beauty but him.

Kawabata's Snow Country as well I think had the theme of decaying beauty.