A beautiful hardback edition of a great Japanese classic, beautiful, lyrical and deeply ominous. 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. 'Mishima's greatest novel, and one of the greatest of the past century' The Times VINTAGE QUARTERBOUND CLASSICS: Bound to be beautiful

Explores an adolescent's response to his mother's love affair with a handsome visitor to Yokohama.

VINTAGE JAPANESE CLASSICS - five masterpieces of Japanese fiction in gorgeous new gift editions. 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.

'Unputdownable ... epitomising the great Australian novel.' Anita Heiss 'A warm and uniquely Australian story.' Herald Sun In nineteenth-century New South Wales, the name Dalhunty stood for prosperity and prestige. The family's vast station was home to more than 80 people, and each year their premium wool was shipped down the bustling Darling River to be sold in South Australia. Yet, just decades later, Dalhunty Station is on the brink of ruin . . . In the summer of 1909, eccentric Benjamin Dalhunty and his son Julian anxiously await the arrival of the Lady Matilda, the first paddle-steamer to navigate the river in more than two years. It will transport their very last wool clip to market. Twenty-year-old Julian wants more from life than the crumbling station, but as the eldest son his future has been set since birth. Until the day his mother invites a streetwise young man from Sydney into their home . . . Ethan Harris's arrival shines a light on a family at breaking point. But he also unwittingly offers Julian an escape, as the young men embark on a perilous journey down the Darling and west into untamed lands. The Last Station is a captivating story of heritage, heartbreak and hope, set during the dying days of the riverboat trade along the Darling River. 'An enthralling, gritty adventure... Bursting with pathos, humour and folklore.' Michael Burge author of Tank Water 'A captivating story... Evocative, engrossing and entertaining.' Alison Booth author of The Painting

After botching a suicide attempt, salaryman Hanio Yamada decides to put his life up for sale in the classifieds section of a Tokyo newspaper. Soon interested parties come calling with increasingly bizarre requests and what follows is a madcap comedy of errors, involving a jealous husband, a drug-addled heiress, poisoned carrots—even a vampire. For someone who just wants to die, Hanio can't seem to catch a break, as he finds himself enmeshed in a continent-wide conspiracy that puts him in the cross hairs of both his own government and a powerful organized-crime syndicate. By turns wildly inventive, darkly comedic, and deeply surreal, in Life for Sale Yukio Mishima stunningly uses satire to explore the same dark themes that preoccupied him throughout his lifetime.

For the first time in English, a glittering novella about stardom from “one of the greatest avant-garde Japanese writers of the twentieth century” (Judith Thurman, The New Yorker) All eyes are on Rikio. And he likes it, mostly. His fans cheer, screaming and yelling to attract his attention—they would kill for a moment alone with him. Finally the director sets up the shot, the camera begins to roll, someone yells “action”; Rikio, for a moment, transforms into another being, a hardened young yakuza, but as soon as the shot is finished, he slumps back into his own anxieties and obsessions. Being a star, constantly performing, being watched and scrutinized as if under a microscope, is often a drag. But so is life. Written shortly after Yukio Mishima himself had acted in the film “Afraid to Die,” this novella is a rich and unflinching psychological portrait of a celebrity coming apart at the seams. With exquisite, vivid prose, Star begs the question: is there any escape from how we are seen by others?

"A classic of Japanese literature" (Chicago Sun-Times) and the first novel in the masterful tetralogy, The Sea of Fertility, set in 1912 Tokyo, featuring an aspiring lawyer who believes he has met the successive reincarnations of his childhood friend. It is 1912 in Tokyo, and the hermetic world of the ancient aristocracy is being breached for the first time by outsiders—rich provincial families unburdened by tradition, whose money and vitality make them formidable contenders for social and political power. Shigekuni Honda, an aspiring lawyer and his childhood friend, Kiyoaki Matsugae, are the sons of two such families. As they come of age amidst the growing tensions between old and new, Kiyoaki is plagued by his simultaneous love for and loathing of the spirited young woman Ayakura Satoko. But Kiyoaki’s true feelings only become apparent when her sudden engagement to a royal prince shows him the magnitude of his passion—and leads to a love affair both doomed and inevitable.