The Temple of Dawn by Yukio Mishima, E. Dale Saunders (Translator)

About the Book

Yukio Mishima’s The Temple of Dawn is the third novel in his masterful tetralogy, The Sea of Fertility. Here, Shigekuni Honda continues his pursuit of the successive reincarnations of Kiyoaki Matsugae, his childhood friend.

Travelling in Thailand in the early 1940s, Shigekuni Honda, now a brilliant lawyer is granted an audience with a young Thai princess—an encounter that radically alters the course of his life. In spite of all reasons, he is convinced she is the reincarnated spirit of his friend Kiyoaki. As Honda goes to great lengths to discover for certain if his theory is correct, The Temple of Dawn becomes the story of one man’s obsessive pursuit of a beautiful woman and his equally passionate search for enlightenment.

Editorial Reviews

The four novels remain one of 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

Surpassingly chilling, subtle, and original― New York Times

Japan's foremost man of letters ― Spectator

Tremendous...evocative and poetic― Los Angeles Times

About the Author

Yukio Mishima

Yukio Mishima (三島 由紀夫) 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.