Book description
A band of savage thirteen-year-old boys reject the adult world as
illusory, hypocritical, and sentimental, and train themselves in a
brutal callousness they call 'objectivity'. When the mother of one of
them begins an affair with a ship's officer, he and his friends idealise
the man at first; but it is not long before they conclude that he is in
fact soft and romantic. They regard this disallusionment as an act of
betrayal on his part - and the retribution is deliberate and horrifying.
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.
