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Acts of Worship: Seven Stories is a collection of Yukio Mishima's short stories, translated by John Bester, published in 1989. Kimitake Hiraoka, or better known as Yukio Mishima was a one of Japan's most famous authors. In addition, he is also known as being one of the greatest writers of the 20th century due to both his fictional and non-fictional works. His work, Acts of Worship: Seven Stories took him most of Yukio Mishima's career to complete. Act of Worship: Seven Stories consists of seven stories titles "Fountains in the Rain" (雨のなかの噴水, Ame no nakano Funsui), "Raisin Bread" (葡萄パン, Budou pan), "Sword" (剣, Ken), "Sea and Sunset" (海と夕焼, Umi to Yuyake), "Cigarette" (煙草, Tabako), "Martydom" (殉教, Junkyo), and finally "Act of Worship" (三熊野詣, Mikumano Moude). The story titled "Sword" may be the most typical one out of the seven.
The title story is the tale of a professor's visit to three Kumano shrines, accompanied by his shy and submissive middle-aged housekeeper, and his reasons for doing so. The collection was translated into English by John Bester, whose work was praised for rendering "Mishima's complex Japanese into fluent and faithful English", and received the inaugural Noma Prize for Translation. The contents were selected by Bester from stories published by Mishima spanning from the 1940s to the mid 1960s.
This collection of short stories relates back to Mishima's personal life in different ways. Most of them are anecdotes from his own life that contains a lot of underlying meanings of life, love, power, violence, homosexuality, and religion.
