Spring Snow

Description

A love story set in Tokyo in 1912, when the supremacy of the ancient aristocracy is being challenged for the first time by rich provincial families whose wealth make them formidable contenders for political power.

Reviews

"Mishima is like Stendhal in his precise psychological analyses, like Dostoevsky in his explorations of darkly destructive personalities."
-- Christian Science Monitor
"[The Sea of Fertility] is a literary legacy on the scale of Proust's."
-- National Review
Translated from the Japanese by Michael Gallagher

Author description

Yukio Mishima was born in Tokyo in 1925. He graduated from Tokyo Imperial University's School of Jurisprudence in 1947. His first published book, "The Forest in Full Bloom," appeared in 1944 and he established himself as a major author with "Confessions of a Mask "(1949). From then until his death he continued to publish novels, short stories, and plays each year. His crowning achievement, "The Sea of Fertility" tetralogy--which contains the novels "Spring Snow" (1969), "Runaway Horses" (1969), "The Temple of Dawn" (1970), and "The Decay of the Angel "(1971)--is considered one of the definitive works of twentieth century Japanese fiction. In 1970, at the age of 45 and the day after completing the last novel in the "Fertility" series, Mishima committed "seppuku" (ritual suicide)--a spectacular death that attracted worldwide attention.