Yukio Mishima Books In Order

Spring Snow

The first novel of Mishima’s landmark tetralogy, The Sea of fertility

Spring Snow is set in Tokyo in 1912, when the hermetic world of the ancient aristocracy is being breached for the first time by outsiders rich provincial families unburdened by tradition, whose money and vitality make them formidable contenders for social and political power.

Among this rising new elite are the ambitious Matsugae, whose son has been raised in a family of the waning aristocracy, the elegant and attenuated Ayakura. Coming of age, he is caught up in the tensions between old and new fiercely loving and hating the exquisite, spirited Ayakura Satoko. He suffers in psychic paralysis until the shock of her engagement to a royal prince shows him the magnitude of his passion, and leads to a love affair that is as doomed as it was inevitable.

‘Mishima is like Stendhal in his precise psychological analyses, like Dostoevsky in his explorations of darkly destructive personalities.’

Christian Science Monitor

‘ The Sea of Fertility is a literary legacy on the scale of Proust’s.’

National Review

Translated from the Japanese by Michael Gallagher

Runaway Horses

Isao is a young, engaging patriot, and a fanatical believer in the ancient samurai ethos. He turns terrorist, organising a violent plot against the new industrialists, who he believes are threatening the integrity of Japan and usurping the Emperor’s rightful power. As the conspiracy unfolds and unravels, Mishima brilliantly chronicles the conflicts of a decade that saw the fabric of Japanese life torn apart.

The Temple of Dawn

Honda, a brilliant lawyer and man of reason, is called to Bangkok on legal business, where he is granted an audience with a young Thai princess an encounter that radically alters the course of his life. He is convinced she is a reincarnated spirit, and undertakes a long, arduous pilgrimage to the holy places of India, where, in the climatic scene, he encounters her once more, only to have his newfound beliefs shattered and his life bereft of all meaning.

The Decay of the Angel

The dramatic climax of ‘The Sea of Fertility’ tetraology takes place in the late 1960s. Honda, now an aged and wealthy man, discovers and adopts a sixteen year old orphan, Toru, as his heir, identifying him with the tragic protagonists of the three previous novels, each of whom died at the age of twenty. Honda raises and educates the boy, yet watches him, waiting.

Confessions of a Mask

One of the classics of modern Japanese fiction. Confessions of a Mask is the story of an adolescent who must learn to live with the painful fact that he is unlike other young men. Mishima’s protagonist discovers that he is becoming a homosexual in polite, post war Japan. To survive, he must live behind a mask of propriety. Christopher Isherwood comments ‘One might say, ‘Here is a Japanese Gide,’…
. But no, Mishima is himself a very Japanese Mishima; lucid in the midst of emotional confusion, funny in the midst of despair, quite without pomposity, sentimentality or self pity. His book, like no other, has made me understand a little of how it feels to be Japanese. I think it is greatly superior, as art and as a human document to his deservedly praised novel, The Sound of Waves.’ .

Thirst for Love

After the early death of her philandering husband, Etsuko moves into her father in law’s house, where she numbly submits to the old man’s advances. But soon she finds herself in love with the young servant Saburo. Tormented by his indifference, yet invigorated by her desire, she makes her move, with catastrophic consequences.

Forbidden Colours

Shunsuke’s novels are serene, romantic and pure. His life, however, is another matter. Embittered by three broken marriages and unsatisfactory affairs, his abiding passion is revenge. His only pleasure is derived from witnessing the suffering of womankind.

The Sound of Waves

Set in a remote fishing village in Japan, this is a story of first love. Shinji is entranced at the sight of Hatsue in the twilight on the beach, upon her return from another island, where she had been training to be a pearl diver. They fall in love, but then endure the calumny and gossip of the villagers.

The Temple of the Golden Pavilion

Because of the boyhood trauma of seeing his mother make love to another man in the presence of his dying father, Mizoguchi becomes a hopeless stutterer. Taunted by his schoolmates, he feels utterly alone untill he becomes an acolyte at a famous temple in Kyoto, where he develops an all consuming obsession with the temple’s beauty. This powerful story of dedication and sacrifice brings together Mishima’s preoccupations with violence, desire, religion and national history to dazzling effect.

After the Banquet

When the shrewd and charming Kazu falls in love with one of her clients, an aristocratic retired politician, she renounces her fashionable restaurant in order to become his wife. But soon she determines to hunch him back into office, with results that will force her to choose between her marriage and the demands of her irrepressible vitality.

The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea

A band of savage thirteen year old boys reject the adult world as illusory, hypocritical, and sentimental, and train themselves in a brutal callousness they call ‘objectivity’. When the mother of one of them begins an affair with a ship’s officer, he and his friends idealise the man at first; but it is not long before they conclude that he is in fact soft and romantic. They regard this disallusionment as an act of betrayal on his part and the retribution is deliberate and horrifying.

Silk and Insight

This is a tale based on the strike which took place in the mid 1950s at Omi Kenshi, a silk manufacturer not far from Tokyo. The events described reflect the management / labour tensions of the period and is a piece of social commentary on the transformation of Japanese business. /Content /EditorialReview EditorialReview Source Amazon. com Review /Source Content A labor strike in a Japanese silk factory may not seem like a promising premise for a novel, but Yukio Mishima manages to turn an historical event into a fictional exploration of Japan’s old paternalistic system of labor management. The strike Mishima writes about occurred in the 1950s, and the outcome changed the face of business forever, as factories moved from an ancient, almost feudal way of dealing with workers to the modern method of worker participation. Mishima faithfully chronicles the conditions that plagued the factory workers censored mail, internal spies, poor pay that was nevertheless just enough to keep discontent at bay and the coalescence of the labor movement that eventually changed them.

Five Modern No Plays

Japanese No drama is one of the great art forms that has fascinated people throughout the world. The late Yukio Mishima, one of Japan’s outstanding post war writers, infused new life into the form by using it for plays that preserve the style and inner spirit of No and are at the same time so modern, so direct, and intelligible that they could, as he suggested, be played on a bench in Central Park. Here are five of his No plays, stunning in their contemporary nature and relevance and finally made available again for readers to enjoy.

Death in Midsummer

Recognized throughout the world for his brilliance as a novelist and playwright, Yukio Mishima is also noted as a master of the short story in his native Japan. Here nine of his finest stories, selected by Mishima himself, represent his extraordinary ability to depict a wide variety of human beings in moments of significance. Often his characters are modern Japanese who turn out to be not so liberated from the past as they had thought.

Acts of Worship

When Mishima committed ritual suicide in November 1970, he was only forty five. He had written over thirty novels, eighteen plays, and twenty volumes of short stories. During his lifetime, he was nominated for the Nobel Prize three times and had seen almost all of his major novels appear in English. While the flamboyance of his life and the apparent fanaticism of his death have dominated the public’s perception of his achievement, Japanese and Western critics alike are in agreement that his literary gifts were prodigious. Mishima is arguably at his best in the shorter forms, and it is the flower of these that appears here for the first time in English. Each story has its own distinctive atmosphere and each is brilliantly organized, yielding deeper layers of meaning with repeated readings. The psychological observation, particularly in what it reveals of the turmoil of adolescence, is meticulous. The style, with its skillful blending of colors and surfaces, shows Mishima in top form, and no further proof is needed to remind us that he was a consummate writer whose work is an irreplaceable part of world literature.

The Peacocks

Stories in the Travelman Short Stories series take the reader to places of mystery, fantasy, horror, romance, and corners of the universe yet unexplored. In turn, readers take them on the bus or subway, slip them into briefcases and lunchboxes, and send them from Jersey to Juneau. Each classic or original short story is printed on one sheet of paper and folded like a map. This makes it simple to read while commuting, convenient to carry when not, and easy to give or send to a friend. A paper envelope is provided for mailing or gift giving, and both are packaged in a clear plastic envelope for display. The cost is not much more than a greeting card.

Patriotism

One of the most powerful short stories ever written: Yukio Mishima’s masterpiece about the erotics of Patriotism and honor, love and suicide. By now, Yukio Mishima s 1925 1970 dramatic demise through an act of seppuku after an inflammatory public speech has become the stuff of literary legend. With Patriotism, Mishima was able to give his heartwrenching patriotic idealism an immortal vessel. A lieutenant in the Japanese army comes home to his wife and informs her that his closest friends have become mutineers. He and his beautiful loyal wife decide to end their lives together. In unwavering detail Mishima describes Shinji and Reiko making love for the last time and the couple s seppuku that follows.

New Writing in Japan

First published by Penguin Books in 1972, the reissue of this volume is long overdue. The book contains 37 examples of poetry and short stories by 18 acclaimed writers, including Oe Kenzaburo, Abe Kobo, Ishihara Shintaro and Mishima himself.

Sun and Steel

In this fascinating document, one of Japan’s best known and controversial writers created what might be termed a new literary form. It is new because it combines elements of many existing types of writing, yet in the end fits into none of them. At one level, it may be read as an account of how a puny, bookish boy discovered the importance of his own physical being; the ‘Sun and Steel‘ of the title are themselves symbols respectively of the cult of the open air and the weights used in bodybuilding. At another level, it is a discussion by a major novelist of the relation between action and art, and his own highly polished art in particular. More personally, it is an account of one individual’s search for identity and self integration. Or again, the work could be seen as a demonstration of how an intensely individual preoccupation can be developed into a profound philosophy of life. All these elements are woven together by Mishima’s complex yet polished and supple style. The confession and the self analysis , the philosophy and the poetry combine in the end to create something that is in itself perfect and self sufficient. It is a piece of literature that is as carefully fashioned as Mishima’s novels, and at the same time provides an indispensable key to the understanding of them as art. The road Mishima took to salvation is a highly personal one. Yet here, ultimately, one detects the unmistakable tones of a self transcending the particular and attaining to a poetic vision of the universal. The book is therefore a moving document, and is highly significant as a pointer to the future development of one of the most interesting novelists of modern times.

Ba Ra Kei: Ordeal by Roses

Ba Ra Kei: Ordeal by Roses is a rare glimpse into the life of the great modern Japanese writer, Yukio Mishima, who ended his life in 1970 by ritual suicide. Many in Japan regarded the suicide as a sensational act. However, the publication of Mishima’s final cycle of novels, which had been conceived eight years prior to his death, revealed that his death was carefully considered a gesture of historical import in perfect accord with the morbid and esoteric aesthetic that pervades his writing. In 1961 Mishima asked Eikoh Hosoe to photograph him, giving him full artistic direction in making these surreal and alluring photographs. The props that surround the writer and the baroque interior of his home are antithetical to the pure Japanese sensibility of understatement and reveal Mishima’s dark, theatrical imagination.