Frolic of the Beasts

The gripping story of an affair gone horribly wrong, from one of Japan's greatest twentieth-century writers

Koji, a young student, has fallen hopelessly in love with the beautiful, enigmatic Yuko. But she is married to the literary critic and serial philanderer Ippei. Tormented by desire and anger, Koji is driven to an act of violence that will bind this strange, terrible love triangle together for the rest of their lives. A starkly compelling story of lust, guilt and punishment, The Frolic of the Beasts explores the masks we wear in life, and what happens when they slip.

'One of the greatest avant-garde Japanese writers of the twentieth century' New Yorker

Review: This morose little gem boasts its share of sensuous depravity * Wall Street Journal *

Mishima was one of literature's great romantics, a tragedian with a heroic sensibility, an intellectual, an esthete, a man steeped in Western letters who toward the end of his life became a militant Japanese nationalist * New York Times *

Mishima is the Japanese Hemingway * Life Magazine *

A writer of immense energy and ability * Time Out *

A sexually and psychologically complex novel... in a honed translation by Andrew Clare

-- Damian Flanagan * TLS *