Acts of Worship

Acts of Worship: Seven Stories by Yukio Mishima, translated by John Bester, 205 pages

The modern tendency to focus on the biographies of writers rather than their works is certainly on full display with the man who wrote under the name Yukio Mishima, who is better known for his spectacular suicide than for anything he wrote.  Acts of Worship, a collection of seven short stories first published in Japan in the '60s, forms an interesting counterpoint to this tendency, suggesting that identities are crafted, consciously or unconsciously, rather than discovered.  Most of the stories center on young adults as they struggle to build themselves in the face of the gaze of their peers, with the exception being the title story, which forms an elaborate capstone through its depiction of a celebrated poet and his middle-aged housekeeper as they, too, manufacture their identities in the twilight of life.