Description
Book SynopsisThe dramatic climax of The Sea of Fertility tetraology.
It is the 1960s and Honda, now an aged and wealthy man, discovers and adopts a sixteen-year-old orphan, Toru. Honda believes that the boy is the reincarnation of the tragic protagonists of the three previous novels, each of whom died at the age of twenty. Honda raises and educates the boy, he makes him his heir, and watches him, waiting. But Toru is also watching Honda...
''A surpassingly chilling, subtle and original novel'' New York Times
''Mishima''s ritualistic suicide in 1970 will always overshadow his work, but his dark saga of 20th-century Japan is mesmerising'' Guardian
Trade ReviewA major literary creation * New York Times *
This tetralogy is considered one of Yukio Mishima's greatest works. It could also be considered a catalogue of Mishima's obsessions with death, sexuality and the samurai ethic. Spanning much of the 20th century, the tetralogy begins in 1912 when Shigekuni Honda is a young man and ends in the 1960s with Honda old and unable to distinguish reality from illusion. En route, the books chronicle the changes in Japan that meant the devaluation of the samurai tradition and the waning of the aristocracy * Washington Post *
One of the great writers of the twentieth century * Los Angeles Times *
Japan's foremost man of letters * Spectator *
Mishima's novels exude a monstrous and compulsive weirdness, and seem to take place in a kind of purgatory for the depraved -- Angela Carter
