This was definitely an impulse purchase on my birthday. As I had spent so much of the year reading through my to-read shelf, I got to replenish it on my birthday. I hadn’t had a whole lot of luck on things that I wanted to read that were newer, but was intrigued by the blurb.

Written in 1962 by Yukio Mishima, Beautiful Star is about various humans on earth, who after seeing a flying saucer, come to the realisation that they are actually aliens. It starts with one family, who realise they are from Mars, Jupiter, Mercury and Jupiter. They believe they were sent to save humanity from the potential calamity of nuclear annihilation through the atomic bomb.

For a good portion of the book, I wasn’t sure if they were all having a collective delusion, or if they were actually aliens. I’m still not entirely sure by the end, but fall more in favour of them being aliens. This is mostly due to other aliens appearing, who were from Cygnus and more in favour of annihilation of all humans on earth.

Only after reading the book did I look up Yukio Mishima. And oh my god. Safe to say, what a wikipedia article to read. You don’t find many decorated authors commit ritual seppuku. I didn’t realise he was such a right-wing nationalist, though it does come out in different ways through some of the characters in the novel.

I’m not sure I’d recommend it. I’m not sure if the translation was good or bad, or the story being a bit weird – but some of translation just felt completely incomprehensible. Also, given that it was published in the 1960s by a right wing nationalist, it has a very dim view of women. One of the main characters was perhaps treated with more respect (as she was an alien), but there were a lot of references to women essentially being sluts or dim or whatever. One of the characters was definitely supposed to come across as a misogynist but there was a flavour of it anytime there were some grand speeches.

And oh my god, the grand speeches. I’m not going to lie, there was about 20-30 pages of pure monologuing near the end and I just couldn’t read it. I skipped over most of the pages as it was just incomprehensible nonsense. Basically it was a conflict between the person who was an alien from Mars and a trio from Cygnus, who had diametrically opposite views of what to do about humanity. Did it add anything to the novel? Did I miss out a huge interesting part. Maybe. But was it also nonsensical and hard to read, also yes. I don’t think I missed much.

The other problem was that nothing really happens. There’s a lot of sitting around and talking. There’s a couple things that happen, but not in an active sense, more like descriptions. There’s one active scene where Akiko (the daughter, from Venus), goes to meet someone else she also thinks from Venus. And honestly it’s one of the only interesting, active plot things in the book.

Anyway, it was fucking weird. I think sometimes it was funny. It really did feel like the type of novel where you realise the past was like a different world. The author was a character. I’m going to read something written in the last decade next.