The Sailor Who Fell from Grace With the Sea (Vintage Classics Japanese Series)

Description

VINTAGE JAPANESE CLASSICS - following on from the success of Vintage Russian Classics and European Classics, these are covetable new editions of the best Japanese writers on the Vintage list 'Mishima's greatest novel, and one of the greatest of the past century' The Times 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 disillusionment as an act of betrayal on his part - and the retribution is deliberate and horrifying. VINTAGE JAPANESE CLASSICS - five masterpieces of Japanese fiction in gorgeous new gift editions.

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.

Mishima's greatest novel, and one of the greatest of the past century * The Times * Explores the viciousness that lies beneath what we imagine to be innocence * Independent * Told with Mishima's fierce attention to naturalistic detail, the grisly tale becomes painfully convincing and yields a richness of psychological and mythic truth * Sunday Times * Coolly exact with his characters and their honourable motives. His aim is to make the destruction of the sailor by his love seem as inevitable as the ocean * Guardian *