Sun and Steel (essay)

First published in 1965 by Hihyō, a magazine founded by Takeshi Maramatsu, the essay was published in book form by Kodansha in 1968. An English translation by John Bester followed in 1970, less than a year before the author's death. In 1972, the American fiction writer Hortense Calisher billed the book as "a classic of self-revelation" and Mishima as "a mind of the utmost subtlety, broadly educated". Calisher wrote, "To paraphrase him in words not his, [...] is to try to build a china pagoda with a peck of nails. [...] only the frivolous will not empathize with what is going on here; this is a being for whom life—and death too—must be exigeant."