So, I'm new here, but the very presence of this thread is what enticed me to sign up and start digging into this forum. In short: I believe it's Mishima's influence which veered my own sensibilities in music-making toward industrial which, in turn, is what clued me into power electronics. I certainly had some early exposure which prepped me for such a turn, but it was Mishima's militant and visceral breed of nihilism which honed my appreciation.
As a teenager, almost purely by chance (apart from my adolescent obsession with Japanese culture) I rented A Life in Four Chapters and was completely blown away. I had already developed a strong appreciation for, I guess, transgressively-themed cinema like A Clockwork Orange, Taxi Driver, Apocalypse Now, and Fight Club by that time and was also reading work like The Rebel by Alert Camus and getting into Nietzsche (as one does), so I was well-primed for the experience. It wasn't long after that that I happened upon an old paperback of Sun and Steel at a used bookstore I frequented, and while I simply read and re-read that for a long while, I eventually picked up Patriotism, Runaway Horses, The Way of the Samurai, The Sailor who Fell from Grace with the Sea, and Decay of the Angel (I believe in that order, as well as more recently listening to an audio version of The Golden Pavilion, though I still have yet to actually read it).
Still, I think it was Sun and Steel, specifically, which tipped me over the edge and drove much of the tone I set out to explore in music-making (bringing to bear, also, a lifelong preoccupation with the martial spirit for which Mishima lent no small amount of recontextualization), reigning in and vulcanizing the weird psychedelic leanings which so thoroughly saturated my earliest musical endeavors. I still haven't fully unpacked Mishima's influence over my work and tastes, but that borne of his work and legacy (largely in tandem with Nietzsche's, I would say) is at least manifest in my very flesh and bones and has occupied so much of my time and mind that I can't help but attribute to such influence the bulk of my endeavors.
