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  • Published: 1 June 2001
  • ISBN: 9780099282792
  • Imprint: Vintage Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 336
  • RRP: $35.00

The Temple of Dawn




The third novel in Mishima's masterful tetralogy

Mishima’s literary powers are on full display in his penultimate novel that is a meditation on reincarnation and Buddhist philosophy.

Honda, a brilliant lawyer and man of reason, is called to Bangkok on legal business, where he is granted an audience with a young Thai princess - an encounter that radically alters the course of his life. He is convinced she is a reincarnated spirit, and undertakes a long, arduous pilgrimage to the holy places of India, where, in the climactic scene, he encounters her once more, only to have his newfound beliefs shattered and his life bereft of all meaning.

  • Published: 1 June 2001
  • ISBN: 9780099282792
  • Imprint: Vintage Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 336
  • 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 The Temple of Dawn

The four novels remain one of the outstanding works of 20th-Century literature and a summary of the author's life and work... Like the Divine Comedy and Remembrance of Things Past, "The Sea of Fertility" gives the reader the sensation of being carried to a great height...but Mishima abandons the reader at the edge of the precipice, revealing the abyss beneath the degraded life of the post-war world

Los Angeles Times

Japan's foremost man of letters

Spectator

Tremendous...evocative and poetic

Los Angeles Times

Surpassingly chilling, subtle, and original

New York Times

Japan's foremost man of letters

Spectator

Tremendous...evocative and poetic

Los Angeles Times

The four novels remain one of the outstanding works of 20th-Century literature and a summary of the author's life and work... Like the Divine Comedy and Remembrance of Things Past, "The Sea of Fertility" gives the reader the sensation of being carried to a great height...but Mishima abandons the reader at the edge of the precipice, revealing the abyss beneath the degraded life of the post-war world

Los Angeles Times