"Book Music" (Notes for an essay on non-musicians who write about Music): In is powerful and now-famous story "Patriotism", Yukio Mishima (like René Crevel in France forty years earlier) preview his own suicide. In the film version made by the author, he considerably weakened (and inadvertently insulted) this detailed act by overlaying it with a soundtrack of the Love-Death from Tristan und Isolde. It can't be proved, but probably Mishima's choice of this sumptuous score to illustrate his stark subject was because of Wagner's title rather than his music.