Star

About

A famous young actor arrives in a rural village to shoot a film, and the town's careful rhythms crack open under the pressure of his celebrity. The locals project their desires and resentments onto him; he, in turn, performs a version of himself that may have consumed the original. Written in 1960 but appearing in English for the first time, Star is Mishima at his most incisive about surfaces — the ones we polish for others and the ones we mistake for depth. The novella reads like a parable about fame that predicts the anxieties of our own image-saturated moment. Brief, razor-sharp, and unsettlingly prescient about what happens when being watched becomes indistinguishable from being alive.