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...

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...

Set in a remote fishing village in Japan, The Sound of Waves is a timeless story of first love. It tells of Shinji, a young fisherman and Hatsue, the beautiful daughter of the wealthiest man in the village. Shinji is entranced at the...

Yukio Mishima's The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea explores the vicious nature of youth that is sometimes mistaken for innocence. Thirteen-year-old Noboru is a member of a gang of highly philosophical teenage boys who reject the...

Yukio Mishima's The Temple of Dawn is the third novel in his masterful tetralogy, The Sea of Fertility. Here, Shigekuni Honda continues his pursuit of the successive reincarnations of Kiyoaki Matsugae, his childhood friend. Travelling in...

'Life for sale. Use me as you wish. I am a twenty-seven-year-old male. Discretion guaranteed. Will cause no bother at all.'When Hanio Yamada realises the future holds little of worth to him, he puts his life for sale in a Tokyo...

Sexual torment, jealousy, and impossible-to-resolve longing, Mishima's Thirst for Love is a portrait of the corrosive power of frustrated desire. The protaganist is Etsuko, a young widow whose philandering husband died horribly from...

Irresistible to women, the beautiful, young Yuichi embarks on a loveless marriage while he enters a homosexual underworld during postwar Japan. von Mishima, Yukio

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...