There may be no writer more autobiographical than Yukio Mishima. Everything he wrote was about himself. The film Mishima is a portrait of the writer Mishima, and the music of Mishima is meant to add a further dimension to the film. With the Mishima material I used my total immersion strategy, reading every book in English I could find. I was very impressed with his writing. It was passionate, it was modern. In his life he had arrived at a transcendent experience that was at the core of what motivated him to be a writer. For all the writers I personally know, writing is a way of accommodating themselves to the world, of making the world a bearable place in which to live. Mishima became a writer in order to make the world understandable to himself.

Philip Glass

Glass, Philip. Words Without Music. New York: Liverwright Publishing, 2015.