Changes

I had read a previous book by Ross, [[''Tunnel Visions: Journeys of an Underground Philosopher]] '' about the sixteen months he spent working and observing at Oxford Circus tube station and loved it. He's such a trainspotter. It seems to me that it is this obsessive, internalised type of person who is most attracted to those elements of the east that require deep introspection, such as the martial arts and the challenging work of writers such as Mishima. Most angsty adolescents go through a Mishima period, I certainly did. Most leave him behind again fairly quickly though, as I did. Maturity and experience tends to blur the "nobility" of the suicide. Mishima becomes a closeted, married gay man who obsessively fantasises about death and sex and allies himself with pretty dodgy politics. One also realises that his precise and arcane writing is the ultimate piece of lost in translation if one isn't prepared to put in years of kenji study, and one moves on.