Overview

The first novel in Mishima's masterful Sea of Fertility tetraology 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 political and social 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, observed from the sidelines by his devoted friend Honda. When Satoko is engaged to a royal prince, Kiyoaki realises the magnitude of his passion.

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

[a] beautiful and austere tale… written in lush, languid prose, filled with beautiful sentences and turns of phrase, this is one of the most enjoyable books I have read this year * Reading Matters * Romantic obsession and sexual intrigue meet in the sumptuous historical melodrama * Variety * An austere love story, probably my favourite of his novels -- David Mitchell * Independent on Sunday * 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 *

This is the first of four correlative books delivered to his publisher before Mishima's striking suicide, far more gravid with various transcultural and political and psychic implications than the young man's anticipation here of a graceful death - as a richly patterned kimono, thrown carelessly across a polished table. But then this is also much more overt and less arcane than any of the earlier Mishima novels with their stylized, ritualized schema; it is actually a very traditional work taking place in a more traditional time (1912) - a novel of a great house in the grand style albeit a westernized one (English china, table manners and billiards) which would cause some of the divisiveness in the later Mishima. Against this formal, elegant background, Kiyoaki, of an old samurai family (but not so old as that of the young woman with whom he falls in love - acknowledged by 27 generations of the Imperial family) grows up; Kiyoaki will represent the perfect synthesis between the aristocratic and the military but somehow he is unequal to his destiny. His is a contrary and fretful sensibility, diffident and dreamy, and during his late adolescent years he is not able to commit himself to Satoko, an ivory doll beauty. It will be his more composed and rationalistic friend Honda who will explain his conflict - again the conflict of the book; now that the era of glorious wars have ended, the young face a still more difficult war of emotion. During this time of irresolution, Satoko is chosen by the Imperial family to marry a Prince: this decision sharpens Kiyoaki's romantic drive toward her; they meet furtively; she becomes pregnant and finally gets herself to a nunnery. Mishima's novel begins slowly but picks up momentum in the second half along with episodes of sly humor as well as the tragedy of its finale. Mishima said of it I have put into it everything I have felt and thought about life and this world. Thus if he appears, as he always has, in the guise of his central character, it is on more explicit, representational terms than he has hitherto chosen. (Kirkus Reviews)

Romantic obsession and sexual intrigue meet in the sumptuous historical melodrama Variety An austere love story, probably my favourite of his novels -- David Mitchell Independent on Sunday 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 -- Angela Carter

Author Information

Yukio Mishima was born into a samurai family and imbued with the code of complete control over mind and body, and loyalty to the Emperor - the same code that produced the austerity and self-sacrifice of Zen. He wrote countless stories and thirty-three plays, in some of which he performed. Several films have been made from his novels, including The Sound of Waves, Enjo which was based on The Temple of the Golden Pavilion and The Sailor Who Fell From Grace with the Sea. Among his other works are the novels Confessions of a Mask and Thirst for Love and the short story collections Death in Midsummer and Acts of Worship. The Sea of Fertility tetralogy, however, is his masterpiece. After Mishima conceived the idea of The Sea of Fertility in 1964, he frequently said he would die when it was completed. On 25 November 1970, the day he completed The Decay of the Angel, the last novel of the cycle, Mishima committed seppuku (ritual suicide) at the age of forty-five.

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