Sad endings

Practically every nation on earth has produced exponents of the short story. Sadly, though, their lives have often ended tragically. From Ernest Heminway who, at his Ketchum, Idaho home in the early hours of 2 June, 1961, shot himself in the head with his favourite double-barrel Boss shotgun, to Japan’s beloved Yukio Mishima who, on 25 November 1970, committed seppuku, disemboweling himself as he knelt on the ground of a military camp at Shinjuku, Tokyo, while proclaiming his loyalty to Emperor Hirohito. Novelist, journalist and war correspondent, Hemingway was suffering from and being treated for depression fueled by his experiences from World War I and the Spanish Civil War; Mishima, an accomplished playwright, essayist and poet, was seeking an honourable end to his life – Samurai-style – after his failed coup designed to restore Japan’s pre-war codes, including the divine status of the emperor. Among Mishima’s short-story anthologies is Death in Midsummer and Other Stories (a 1966 collection of English translations), while Hemingway’s wealth of short stories have been posthumously compiled in The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway: The Finca Vigía Edition, (Scribner’s, 1987). This compilation contains the classic First Forty-Nine Stories as well as 21 others. Hemingway was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954. Mishima was nominated for the prize on no fewer than five occasions in the 1960s. Mishima died age 45, Hemmingway died age 61.