Vintage Classics Spring Snow

Such a beautifully constructed and executed story. Spring Snow quickly became one of my favorite novels that I have read so far.

The novel starts out slow but quickly picks up pace. Mishima’s poetic writing style lends itself to vivid descriptions. I am looking forward to starting Runaway Horses!

I Loved the book, a nice romance story of Mishima. The printing on the other hand, was not that great.... some characters are faded and there are pages in which the text is lighter the than normal.

In the past year, I've come to know and read comprehensively the work of two of modern Japan's most treasured writers, Natsume Soseki (whose face adorned the 1000yen note for many years) and Yasunari Kawabata. Yukio Mishima was a friend and admired colleague of Kawabata. I've long considered reading Mishima, and now having read Spring Snow, the first novel of his tetrology, The Sea of Fertility, I have found my new literary love in Yukio Mishima.Spring Snow follows the fate of two aristocratic families in 1912 Tokyo, most closely the dissolute, gorgeous young man, Kiyoaki Matsugae, and his friend from childhood, the equally stunning Satoko Ayakura. Whereas in the work of Kawabata and Soseki, intrigues of family and society, questions of tradition and discipline would be intensely explored within a chaste, philosophical frame, Mishima is unabashed in his making the arena more redolent of pure sexuality.Elegance is a quality assiduously pursued by our young man, inhabited wholly by Satoko, and it's the tightrope between dispassionate Elegance and untethered Eros that is the engine of the novel.There is a richness to the atmosphere, descriptive, intuitive and insightful. Every scene is satiety, every view is breathtaking, every description, like Mishima's evocation of waves on the shore, is indelible and definitive, each moment a work of art. It is because of this sensual plethora that one feels immediately immersed, subsumed, by the universe Mishima has created every time one rejoins the narrative. With no other writer have I ever experienced this feeling of suddenly, without preamble or momentary re-acclimation, entering this rich universe as if one had never left.I had to read through the last 100 pages at one sitting last night. Usually late night reading is a prelude to slumber. Not so, Spring Snow. I finished reading the book at 2a this morning, just as the Friday the 13th Harvest Moon, a phenomenon not to be repeated for another 30 years, rose in the night sky. Auspicious and commemorative; I look forward to obsessively devouring Mishima's complete works.

Mishima's "Spring Snow", the first book in the Sea of Fertility tetralogy, is an absorbing, luxuriant tale of love, friendship, power, jealousy, and betrayal in the post-Meiji era Japan. While Kiyoaki, the tragic, melancholy hero, heedless in his pursuit of beauty, and obsessed with the power of dreams and fantasies, represents the consuming darkness of passion; his friend, Honda, calm and sensible and rational, wary of the trappings of emotions and sentiments, represents the guiding light of reason. The clash between the two conflicting values is also symbolic of Death and regeneration, of the dying of the old, traditional Japanese values reminiscent of the Meji era, and welcoming the new, Western outlook of the Taishō period.