Acts of worship : seven stories
Here are seven stories of psychological insight and eroticism from Yukio Mishima.
After the banquet
For years Kazu has run her fashionable restaurant with a combination of charm and shrewdness. But when the she falls in love with one of her clients, an aristocratic retired politician, she renounces her business in order to become his wife.
Forbidden Colors
In Tokyo, a young man with homosexual tendencies is paid by a famous writer to humiliate three women who have made the writer unhappy.
Patriotism
“Was it death he was now waiting for? Or a wild ecstasy of the senses?” For the young army officer of Yukio Mishima’s seminal story, “Patriotism,” death and ecstasy become intertwined. With his unique rigor and passion, Mishima hones in on the body as the great tragic stage for all …
Runaway horses
The chronicle of a conspiracy and a novel about the roots and nature of Japanese fanaticism in the years that led to war, an era marked by depression, social change and political violence.
Spring snow
Kiyoaki Matsugae’s passionate and ill-fated love for the betrothed daughter of a Tokyo aristocrat brings him into disfavor at the Imperial Court.
Sun & steel.
This is the personal testament of Japan’s greatest novelist, written shorty before his public suicide in 1970. Through Mishima’s finely wrought and emphatic prose, the mind and motivation behind his agonized search for personal identity is revealed.
The decay of the angel
During the last years of his life, Honda adopts an orphaned boy and teaches him about Japanese society and tradition.
The sailor who fell from grace with the sea
Explores an adolescent’s response to his mother’s love affair with a handsome visitor to Yokohama.
The sound of waves
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 …
The temple of dawn
A young man expends his spirit in the obsessive pursuit of a beautiful woman and a passionate search for mystical enlightement.
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