The photo on Amazon/B&N doesn’t do it justice. Here’s a link to the publisher, Duncan Baird. Even that doesn’t quite show how nice it is for the money.

http://www.dbp.co.uk/book_preview.asp?b_id=559#

“…there is no discipline so easy to speak of and so difficult to perform as the Combined Way of the Warrior and the Scholar. I decided that nothing else could offer me the excuse to live my life as an artist. This realization, too, I owe to Hagakure.”

- Yukio Mishima, Mishima on Hagakure

- Yukio Mishima, Mishima on Hagakure

“Although one may judge the purity of an action by the action itself, Jōchō realizes that the purity of righteousness must be measured differently.

- Yukio Mishima, Mishima on Hagakure

“…the samurai ethic is a political science of the heart, designed to control such discouragement and fatigue in order to avoid showing them to others. It was thought more important to look healthy than to be healthy, and more important to seem bold and daring than to be so. This view of morality, since it is physiologically based on the special vanity peculiar to men, is perhaps the supreme male view of morality.”

- Yukio Mishima, Mishima on Hagakure

Comment: This is an especially frank portrayal of the traditional concept of honor.

“Especially today, with the decline in the father’s authority, the ‘mother’s darling’ has become increasingly more common and there has been a dramatic rise in the number of what the Americans call the ‘domineering mother type’ [in English]. The father is ostracized, and the strict samurai instruction that is supposed to be handed down from father to son is completely neglected (indeed, there is no longer anything to hand down), and even for the child the father is reduced to a machine that brings home a pay-checque. There is no spiritual bond between them. The feminization of men is a common object of criticism today. But one should realize that the weakening of the father’s role is proceeding at an alarming rate.”

- Yukio Mishima, Mishima on Hagakure

“But what Hagakure has to say here about ideal human, or rather manly, beauty – ‘reverent yet stern, self collected’ – is still one kind of aesthetic for manly appearance. ‘Reverent’ requires a humility that inspires trust in others, while ’sternness’ hints at an air of austerity and aloofness. What is needed to reconcile and bind together these two opposite elements is a serene, unflappable calm.”

- Yukio Mishima, Mishima on Hagakure

“It is our common error to believe in the existence of heart or mind, conscience, thought, and abstract ideas, even when they are not directly revealed in conduct.”

“Cowardly words make the heart itself cowardly, and being regarded as a coward by others is the same as being a coward. The slightest flaw in word or deed causes the collapse of one’s philosophy of life. This can be a hard truth to bear.”

- Yukio Mishima, Mishima on Hagakure

“…a samurai is a total human being, whereas a man who is completely absorbed in his technical skill has degenerated into a ‘function’, one cog in a machine.”

“…a total person does not need a skill. He represents spirit, he represents action, and he represents the ideal principles on which his realm is founded.”

- Yukio Mishima, Mishima on Hagakure