Yukio Mishima was born in 1925 in Tokyo, and is considered one of the Japan's most important writers. His books broke social boundaries and taboos at a time when Japan found itself in a state of rapid social change. His interests, besides writing, included body-building, acting and practising as a Samurai. In 1970 he attempted to start a military coup, which failed. Upon realizing this, Mishima performed seppuku, a ritual suicide, upon himself. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature three times.
Ordinary people harbour the grandest (and most terrible) thoughts
in a cosmological fable as disconcerting as it is funny: behind the
simplest actions lie visions of worlds in collision
*The Times*
The Oscar Wilde of Japan ... one of Japan's great novelists ... his
subtlety, warmth and wit shine through
*Telegraph*
A mixture of humour, high literary seriousness and flying saucers
... remarkable
*Spectator*
Mishima is the Japanese Hemingway
*Life Magazine*
A writer of immense energy and ability
*Time Out*
One of the greatest avant-garde Japanese writers of the twentieth
century
*New Yorker*
The wunderkind of the Japanese literary world ... an extraordinary
literary talent
*The Times Literary Supplement*
Among Japan's most celebrated post-war authors
*Little White Lies*
Interplanetary, quite extraordinary ... a fusion of sci-fi and
social satire with great pathos, awash with dark humour and scenes
of intense beauty ... Mishima blends the sublime and ridiculous in
provocative and surprising ways ... a fresh and limpid
translation
*Financial Times*
Moves from vividly described scenes of ordinary human life and the
beauties of the natural world to arguments about human nature and
whether peace is possible this side of death
*Guardian Best Recent Science Fiction*
Its humour may be the book's most brilliant trait ... intense and
earnest, the novel contains plenty of Mishima's spectacular writing
... an impressive accomplishment by Dodd in conveying a sense of
import, sophistication and mastery of prose
*Japan Times*
A delightfully strange, absorbing work. Full of humour and insight.
Highly recommended
*Irenosen Okojie*
Strikingly different... Stephen Dodd's translation captures
Mishima's dark humour, succinct style and dry wit
*TLS*
A marvellously strange tragicomedy of manners, written with such
sympathetic insight into the struggles of humans to understand and
endure reality
*Morning Star*
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