Yukio Mishima was een vooraanstaande Japanse auteur wiens werk wordt gekenmerkt door een intense verkenning van schoonheid, dood en de vergankelijkheid van het menselijk bestaan. Zijn proza, vaak gestileerd en rijk aan zintuiglijke details, duikt in de diepten van de menselijke psyche en onderzoekt de spanning tussen lichamelijke verlangens en spirituele zoektocht. Mishima behandelde regelmatig thema's als esthetiek, homoseksualiteit, verraad, geweld en de zoektocht naar betekenis in de moderne wereld. Zijn unieke stijl en provocerende onderwerpen maakten hem tot een van de meest significante en controversiële figuren in de 20e-eeuwse Japanse literatuur.
Door een Japanse leerling-priester wordt de onmacht om in ware gemeenschap met anderen te leven ervaren als de macht die het heiligdom, waarin hij dienst doet, over hem uitoefent, een macht die hij tenslotte tracht te breken door de tempel in brand te steken.
Yukio Mishima’s Runaway Horses is the second novel in his masterful tetralogy, The Sea of Fertility. Again we encounter Shigekuni Honda, who narrates this epic tale of what he believes are the successive reincarnations of his childhood friend Kiyoaki Matsugae. In 1932, Shigeuki Honda has become a judge in Osaka. Convinced that a young rightist revolutionary, Isao, is the reincarnation of his friend Kiyoaki, Honda commits himself to saving the youth from an untimely death. Isao, driven to patriotic fanaticism by a father who instilled in him the ethos of the ancient samurai, organizes a violent plot against the new industrialists who he believes are usurping the Emperor’s rightful power and threatening the very integrity of the nation. Runaway Horses is the chronicle of a conspiracy — a novel about the roots and nature of Japanese fanaticism in the years that led to war.
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.
Yukio Mishima’s The Decay of the Angel is the final novel in his masterful tetralogy, The Sea of Fertility. It is the last installment of Shigekuni Honda’s pursuit of the successive reincarnations of his childhood friend Kiyoaki Matsugae. It is the late 1960s and Honda, now an aged and wealthy man, once more encounters a person he believes to be a reincarnation of his friend, Kiyoaki — this time restored to life as a teenage orphan, Tōru. Adopting the boy as his heir, Honda quickly finds that Tōru is a force to be reckoned with. The final novel of this celebrated tetralogy weaves together the dominant themes of the previous three novels in the series: the decay of Japan’s courtly tradition; the essence and value of Buddhist philosophy and aesthetics; and, underlying all, Mishima’s apocalyptic vision of the modern era.
One of the most powerful short stories ever written, this work discusses the dynamics of patriotism and honor, love and suicide.
A great, ancient art form, brought right up to date by one of Japan's foremost writers
Death, homosexuality and the spiritual emptiness of post-war Japan: these are the often shocking subjects which Mishima explores. The old world meets the new in this collection of fiction and drama by one of Japan's most celebrated writers. A husband prepares to commit hara-kiri in the name of patriotism; an ascetic struggles with temptation; and a businessman meets a past love in the streets of San Francisco. Violence colours the work of Mishima, as it did his life. But there is also delicate observation, pathos, humour and irony in these beautifully crafted tales. Contents: - Death in Midsummer - Three Million Yen - Thermos Flasks - The Priest of Shiga Temple and His Love - The Seven Bridges - Patriotism - Dōjōji - Onnagata - The Pearl - Swaddling Clothes
A beautiful hardback edition of a great Japanese classic, beautiful, lyrical and deeply ominous.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 disillusionment as an act of betrayal on his part - and the retribution is deliberate and horrifying.'Mishima's greatest novel, and one of the greatest of the past century' The TimesVINTAGE QUARTERBOUND CLASSICS: Bound to be beautiful
Written when Mishima was only twentysix, Forbidden Colors is a depiction of a male homosexual relationship, in which a rich older man buys the love of a young man who is stunningly handsome but who lacks the ability to love. As in Mann's Death in Venice, the older man's longing for the beauty of youth is associated with aestheticism and death.
After witnessing his mother with another man while his father was dying, Mizoguchi becomes a stutterer and faces bullying at school. Feeling isolated, he finds solace as an acolyte at a renowned temple in Kyoto, where he becomes deeply obsessed with its beauty.
