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Mishima Yukio

Spring Snow

Vintage

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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.
Confessions of a Mask

New Directions

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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."
The Temple of the Golden Pavilion

Tuttle Publishing

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Description

Mizoguchi has been mentally troubled since he witnessed his mother's infidelity in the presence of his dying father. Mizoguchi feels utterly abandoned and alone until he becomes a pdest at Kinka-kuji, a famous Buddhist temple in Kyoto. Failing in his quest to find the warmth of human companionship in the temple, the young man, tormented by the temple's exquisite beauty, decides to destroy himself and all he loves. He feels he cannot live in peace as long as the temple exists. Mizoguchi, like many other troubled Mishima heroes, becomes obsessed with unattainable ideals.

The Temple of the Golden Pavilion reflects Mishima's preoccupations with beauty and death in a clear and unmistakable manner. It is also an excellent example of a theme that frequently arises in Mishima's work: the resentment of the obj ect of desire. Because this novel, arguably Mishima's best, reflects the author's suicidal tendencies, it also offers us insight into one of the twentieth century's greatest and most complex literary icons.
The Temple of the Golden Pavilion (Everyman's Library Classics & Contemporary Classics)

Everyman's Library

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(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)

In The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, celebrated Japanese novelist Yukio Mishima creates a haunting portrait of a young man’s obsession with idealized beauty and his destructive quest to possess it fully.

Mizoguchi, an ostracized stutterer, develops a childhood fascination with Kyoto’s famous Golden Temple. While an acolyte at the temple, he fixates on the structure’s aesthetic perfection and it becomes his one and only object of desire. But as Mizoguchi begins to perceive flaws in the temple, he determines that the only true path to beauty lies in an act of horrific violence. Based on a real incident that occurred in 1950, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion brilliantly portrays the passions and agonies of a young man in postwar Japan, bringing to the subject the erotic imagination and instinct for the dramatic moment that marked Mishima as one of the towering makers of modern fiction.


Introduction by Donald Keene; Translated from the Japanese by Ivan Morris
The Sound of Waves

Vintage

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Set in a remote fishing village in Japan, The Sound of Waves is a timeless story of first love. A young fisherman is entranced at the sight of the beautiful daughter of the wealthiest man in the village. They fall in love, but must then endure the calumny and gossip of the villagers.
The Sailor Who Fell From Grace with the Sea

Vintage

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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.

Mishima Yukio News




China outraged as Japan's sabre rattl...
Times Online - Aug 22, 2009
China outraged as Japan's sabre rattl... China outraged as Japan's sabre rattler calls for nuclear armsThe veteran has been taken up by the Yukio Mishima study group, which venerates a novelist who killed himself by hara-kiri in a despairing gesture over

Japan's election Railing against the ...
Economist - Aug 20, 2009
Japan's election Railing against the ... Japan's election Railing against the wrong enemyBut it might just as easily have been 1960, when Yukio Mishima, one of Japan's greatest novelists, published “Utage No Ato” (“After The Banquet”), and more »

Warning Signs Before the Wreck
New York Times - Aug 01, 2009
(Subtitled “An Occidental Noh Play,” Williams's piece reflects that traditional style of Japanese theater, and is dedicated to the writer Yukio Mishima,

Contention over the tenno system
The Japan Times - Aug 08, 2009
What the writer Yukio Mishima (1925-1970) called the "marshal (bu)" role of Hirohito as tenno was increasingly downplayed in favor of his "literary (bun)" and more »

VIZ MEDIA PUBLISHES INCINDIARY NOVELS...
Active Anime (press release) - Aug 19, 2009
VIZ MEDIA PUBLISHES INCINDIARY NOVELS MISSIN' AND MISSIN' 2: KASAKONovala Takemoto was born in Kyoto and was a candidate for the Yukio Mishima Prize for Literature two years in a row with EMILY in 2003 and LOLITA in 2004.