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Thirst for Love

Author Yukio Mishima
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Paperback
$15.00 US
Knopf | Vintage
On sale Feb 22, 1999 | 208 Pages | 978-0-375-70507-6
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Sexual torment, jealousy, and impossible-to-resolve longing, Mishima's Thirst for Love is a portrait of the corrosive power of frustrated desire.  The protaganist is Etsuko, a young widow whose philandering husband died horribly from typhoid.  After moving into the house of her father-in-law, her misery deepens as she numbly submits to the old man's advances.  But soon Etsuko falls in love with the young servant, Saburo.  Tormented by his indifference yet invigorated by her anguish, she makes one last, catastrophic, bid for his attentions.

Praise for Yukio Mishima:

"One of the outstanding writers of the world." —The New York Times

"Like his Western counterparts—Mann, Joyce, Pound, Elliot, and Yeats—Mishima manages in his art to attain the laughter of the gods." —San Francisco Examiner

"Extremely poetic and affecting. . . . Mishima's writing is simple but sensitive." —The Atlantic
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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Sexual torment, jealousy, and impossible-to-resolve longing, Mishima's Thirst for Love is a portrait of the corrosive power of frustrated desire.  The protaganist is Etsuko, a young widow whose philandering husband died horribly from typhoid.  After moving into the house of her father-in-law, her misery deepens as she numbly submits to the old man's advances.  But soon Etsuko falls in love with the young servant, Saburo.  Tormented by his indifference yet invigorated by her anguish, she makes one last, catastrophic, bid for his attentions.

Praise for Yukio Mishima:

"One of the outstanding writers of the world." —The New York Times

"Like his Western counterparts—Mann, Joyce, Pound, Elliot, and Yeats—Mishima manages in his art to attain the laughter of the gods." —San Francisco Examiner

"Extremely poetic and affecting. . . . Mishima's writing is simple but sensitive." —The Atlantic

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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