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  • Published: 1 June 2001
  • ISBN: 9780099284574
  • Imprint: Vintage Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 256
  • RRP: $29.99

The Decay of the Angel




The fourth and final book in Mishima's landmark tetralogy, The Sea of Fertility

The dramatic climax of The Sea of Fertility tetraology takes place in the late 1960s. Honda, now an aged and wealthy man, discovers and adopts a sixteen-year-old orphan, Toru, as his heir, identifying him with the tragic protagonists of the three previous novels, each of whom died at the age of twenty. Honda raises and educates the boy, yet watches him, waiting.

  • Published: 1 June 2001
  • ISBN: 9780099284574
  • Imprint: Vintage Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 256
  • RRP: $29.99

About the author

Yukio Mishima

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.

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Praise for The Decay of the Angel

A major literary creation

New York Times

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

One of the great writers of the twentieth century

Los Angeles Times

Japan's foremost man of letters

Spectator

Mishima's novels exude a monstrous and compulsive weirdness, and seem to take place in a kind of purgatory for the depraved

Angela Carter

The four novels remain one of the outstanding works of twentieth-century literature and a summary of the author's life and work

Los Angeles Times

Yukio Mishima was, in life as in death, and in fiction especially, a master of gorgeous, and perverse surprises

New York Times

A major literary creation

New York Times

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

One of the great writers of the twentieth century

Los Angeles Times

Japan's foremost man of letters

Spectator

Mishima's novels exude a monstrous and compulsive weirdness, and seem to take place in a kind of purgatory for the depraved

Angela Carter