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Runaway Horses

The Sea of Fertility, 2

Part of Vintage International

Author Yukio Mishima
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Paperback
$18.00 US
Knopf | Vintage
On sale Apr 14, 1990 | 432 Pages | 9780679722403
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The second novel of Mishima’s landmark tetralogy, The Sea of Fertility, Runaway Horses is the chronicle of a conspiracy, a novel about the roots and nature of Japanese fanaticism in the years that led to war−an era marked by depression, the upheaval of radical social change, political violence, and assassination.

Isao is the young driven hero whose father instills in him the ancient samurai ethos. Isao organizes a violent plot against the new industrialists who he believes are usurping the power of the Emperor and the intergrity of Japan. Mishima brilliantly dramatizes the conflicts of a decade that saw the fabric of Japanese life torn apart.

Translated from the Japanese by Michael Gallagher.

“A modern masterpiece.”  —The Baltimore Sun
 
“Mishima is like Stendhal in his precise psychological analyses, like Dostoevsky in his explorations of darkly destructive personalities.” —Christian Science Monitor
Yukio Mishima was born in Tokyo in 1925. He graduated from Tokyo Imperial University’s School of Jurisprudence in 1947. His first published book, The Forest in Full Bloom, appeared in 1944, and he established himself as a major author with Confessions of a Mask (1949). From then until his death, he continued to publish novels, short stories, and plays each year. His crowning achievement, The Sea of Fertility tetralogy—which contains the novels Spring Snow (1969), Runaway Horses (1969), The Temple of Dawn (1970), and The Decay of the Angel (1971)—is considered one of the definitive works of twentieth-century Japanese fiction. In 1970, at the age of forty-five and the day after completing the last novel in the Fertility series, Mishima committed seppuku (ritual suicide)—a spectacular death that attracted worldwide attention. View titles by Yukio Mishima

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The second novel of Mishima’s landmark tetralogy, The Sea of Fertility, Runaway Horses is the chronicle of a conspiracy, a novel about the roots and nature of Japanese fanaticism in the years that led to war−an era marked by depression, the upheaval of radical social change, political violence, and assassination.

Isao is the young driven hero whose father instills in him the ancient samurai ethos. Isao organizes a violent plot against the new industrialists who he believes are usurping the power of the Emperor and the intergrity of Japan. Mishima brilliantly dramatizes the conflicts of a decade that saw the fabric of Japanese life torn apart.

Translated from the Japanese by Michael Gallagher.

“A modern masterpiece.”  —The Baltimore Sun
 
“Mishima is like Stendhal in his precise psychological analyses, like Dostoevsky in his explorations of darkly destructive personalities.” —Christian Science Monitor

Author

Yukio Mishima was born in Tokyo in 1925. He graduated from Tokyo Imperial University’s School of Jurisprudence in 1947. His first published book, The Forest in Full Bloom, appeared in 1944, and he established himself as a major author with Confessions of a Mask (1949). From then until his death, he continued to publish novels, short stories, and plays each year. His crowning achievement, The Sea of Fertility tetralogy—which contains the novels Spring Snow (1969), Runaway Horses (1969), The Temple of Dawn (1970), and The Decay of the Angel (1971)—is considered one of the definitive works of twentieth-century Japanese fiction. In 1970, at the age of forty-five and the day after completing the last novel in the Fertility series, Mishima committed seppuku (ritual suicide)—a spectacular death that attracted worldwide attention. View titles by Yukio Mishima

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