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  • Published: 6 October 2000
  • ISBN: 9780099282891
  • Imprint: Vintage Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 432
  • RRP: $35.00

Runaway Horses




The second novel in Mishima's masterful Sea of Fertility tetraology

Read this classic exploration of political violence, traditional samurai values and right wing nihilism.

Isao is a young, engaging patriot, and a fanatical believer in the ancient samurai ethos. He turns terrorist, organising a violent plot against the new industrialists, who he believes are threatening the integrity of Japan and usurping the Emperor's rightful power. As the conspiracy unfolds and unravels, Mishima brilliantly chronicles the conflicts of a decade that saw the fabric of Japanese life torn apart.

  • Published: 6 October 2000
  • ISBN: 9780099282891
  • Imprint: Vintage Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 432
  • RRP: $35.00

About the author

Yukio Mishima

Yukio Mishima was born in 1925 in Tokyo, and is considered one of the Japan's most important writers. His books broke social boundaries and taboos at a time when Japan found itself in a state of rapid social change. His interests, besides writing, included body-building, acting and practising as a Samurai. In 1970 he attempted to start a military coup, which failed. Upon realizing this, Mishima performed seppuku, a ritual suicide, upon himself. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature three times.

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Praise for Runaway Horses

In Runaway Horses Mishima writes of a desire to destroy or subvert beauty at its height, thus strengthening its appeal and preventing its slow decay

New York Times

One of the great writers of the twentieth century

Los Angeles Times

Mishima's novels exude a monstrous and compulsive weirdness, and seem to take place in a kind of purgatory for the depraved

Angela Carter

This tetralogy is considered one of Yukio Mishima's greatest works. It could also be considered a catalogue of Mishima's obsessions with death, sexuality and the samurai ethic. Spanning much of the 20th century, the tetralogy begins in 1912 when Shigekuni Honda is a young man and ends in the 1960s with Honda old and unable to distinguish reality from illusion. En route, the books chronicle the changes in Japan that meant the devaluation of the samurai tradition and the waning of the aristocracy

Washington Post

Mishima succeeded, unlike any other writer before him, in creating a glittering alloy of Eastern and Western traditions, classical and contemporary forms

New York Times

Japan's foremost man of letters

Spectator

This tetralogy is considered one of Yukio Mishima's greatest works. It could also be considered a catalogue of Mishima's obsessions with death, sexuality and the samurai ethic. Spanning much of the 20th century, the tetralogy begins in 1912 when Shigekuni Honda is a young man and ends in the 1960s with Honda old and unable to distinguish reality from illusion. En route, the books chronicle the changes in Japan that meant the devaluation of the samurai tradition and the waning of the aristocracy

Washington Post

Mishima's novels exude a monstrous and compulsive weirdness, and seem to take place in a kind of purgatory for the depraved

Angela Carter

Japan's foremost man of letters

Spectator

Mishima succeeded, unlike any other writer before him, in creating a glittering alloy of Eastern and Western traditions, classical and contemporary forms

New York Times

One of the great writers of the twentieth century

Los Angeles Times

In Runaway Horses Mishima writes of a desire to destroy or subvert beauty at its height, thus strengthening its appeal and preventing its slow decay

New York Times