Tokyo, 1912. The closed world of the ancient aristocracy is being breached for the first time by outsiders - rich provincial families, a new and powerful elite.
Kiyoaki has been raised among the elegant Ayakura family – members of the waning aristocracy – but he is not one of them. Coming of age, he is caught up in the tensions between old and new, and his feelings for the exquisite, spirited Satoko. His devoted friend Honda watches from the sidelines. It is only when Satoko is engaged to a royal prince that Kiyoaki realises the magnitude of his passion.
'An austere love story, probably my favourite of his novels' David Mitchell, Independent on Sunday
'[Mishima's] best work, unnerving as it may be, still casts a spell; and I suspect it will retain its dark radiance' Guardian
Publisher: Vintage Publishing
ISBN: 9780099282990
Number of pages: 400
Weight: 283 g
Dimensions: 199 x 129 x 25 mm
Romantic obsession and sexual intrigue meet in the sumptuous historical melodrama - Variety
Mishima is the Japanese Hemingway - Life magazine
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
Mishima's novels exude a monstrous and compulsive weirdness, and seem to take place in a kind of purgatory for the depraved
Perfect beauty…. A classic of Japanese literature - Chicago Sun-Times
Mishima was one of literature’s great romantics, a tragedian with a heroic sensibility, an intellectual, an esthete, a man steeped in Western letters who toward the end of his life became a militant Japanese nationalist - New York Times
We read Spring Snow for its marvelous incidentals, graphic and philosophic, and for its scene-gazing, in whose emotional alliance with nature...Mishima remains most consistently Japanese - New York Times
‘On a warm spring day, a galloping horse was only too clearly a sweating animal of flesh and blood. But a horse racing through a snowstorm became one with the very elements; wrapped in the whirling blasts of the north... More
The master of Japanese prose embarks us on a gripping coming-of-age journey through an unforgettable love story.
Please sign in to write a review
Would you like to proceed to the App store to download the Waterstones App?