Beautiful Star

Description

The novel Mishima considered to be his masterpiece- a tale of family, nuclear war, love and UFOs. The Osugi family have come to a realization. Each of them hails from a different planet. Father from Mars, mother from Jupiter, son from Mercury and daughter from Venus. Already seen as oddballs in their small Japanese town in the 1960s, this extra-terrestrial knowledge brings them closer together; they climb mountains to wait for UFOs, study at home together and regard their human neighbours with a kindly benevolence. But Father, Juichiro, is worried about the bomb. He writes letters to Khrushchev, trying to warn everyone he can of the terrible threat. After all, humans may be terribly flawed, but aren't they worth saving? He sends out a coded message in the newspaper to find other aliens. But there are other extra-terrestrials out there, ones who do not look so kindly on the flaws and foibles of humans. And a charming young man, who claims to be from Venus too, tempts daughter Akiko away from the family. . .

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 -- Simon Ings * 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 -- Sam Leith * 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 -- Bryan Karetnyk * 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 -- Lisa Tuttle * 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 -- Eric Margolis * 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 -- Vanora Bennett * TLS * A marvellously strange tragicomedy of manners, written with such sympathetic insight into the struggles of humans to understand and endure reality * Morning Star *