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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.
This is the second volume of Mishima's tetralogy (cf. Spring Snow, 1972) - his most ambitious if intellectually unadventurous work - representative not only of Japan but also of Mishima's burnished samurai code. Here, as throughout his life and as in the earlier book, he is more than half in love with that easeful death which he ennobles - With death, all is purified while suicide becomes something bright and luxurious. How final it may be becomes conjectural since the handsome young man of Spring Snow who died at its close is now reincarnated, 18 years later, in the impetuous idealist Isao (although this work is supposed to convey many of the religious and philosophic concepts of the East, we are given relatively little, on a superficial level). The story too is equally simple and accessible dealing with Isao's small group of youthful insurgents who will attempt to bring back a Meiji Restoration government (these are the '30's), each killing a prominent figure at this time when the military and the politicians are debasing and exploiting the country. Most evil of all is Kurahara who has perhaps backed his father's Academy of Patriotism and at the close, after the initial attempt has been aborted by Isao's father's betrayal, Isao goes on alone to effect his killing since To know and not to act is not yet to know. As a novel, this still has to bear the burden of its old-fashioned explicitness and sentimental self-indulgence; one reads it not as an imaginative experience but as a replica of a society through the eyes of one of its supreme elitists. (Kirkus Reviews)
