Spring Snow

[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

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

Perfect beauty…. A classic of Japanese literature

Chicago Sun-Times

Mishima was one of literature’s great romantics, a tragedian with a heroic sensibility, an intellectual, an esthete, a man steeped in Western letters who toward the end of his life became a militant Japanese nationalist

New York Times

We read Spring Snow for its marvelous incidentals, graphic and philosophic, and for its scene-gazing, in whose emotional alliance with nature...Mishima remains most consistently Japanese

New York Times

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

[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