Product Description
About the Book: After The Banquet
An acute psychological portrait of a marriage where lofty traditions clash with appetite and ambition
For years Kazu has run her fashionable restaurant with acombination of charm and shrewdness. But when the she falls in lovewith one of her clients, an aristocratic retired politician, sherenounces her business in order to become his wife. But it is notso easy to renounce her independent spirit, and eventually Kazumust choose between her marriage and the demands of herirrepressible vitality. After the Banquet is a magnificent portraitof political and domestic warfare.
About Author: Yukio Mishima
Yukio Mishima was born into a samurai family and imbued with thecode of complete control over mind and body, and loyalty to theEmperor - the same code that produced the austerity andself-sacrifice of Zen. He wrote countless stories and thirty-threeplays, in some of which he performed. Several films have been madefrom his novels, including The Sound of Waves, Enjo which was basedon The Temple of the Golden Pavilion and The Sailor Who Fell FromGrace with the Sea. Among his other works are the novelsConfessions of a Mask and Thirst for Love and the short storycollections Death in Midsummer and Acts of Worship. The Sea ofFertility tetralogy, however, is his masterpiece. After Mishimaconceived the idea of The Sea of Fertility in 1964, he frequentlysaid he would die when it was completed. On 25 November 1970, theday he completed The Decay of the Angel, the last novel of thecycle, Mishima committed seppuku (ritual suicide) at the age offorty-five.
Reviews
Kazu is the biggest and most profound thing Mishima has done sofar in an already distinguished career - New Yorker
His most novelistic work, with a degree of earthiness and warmthrare in his fiction- New York Times
Japans foremost man of letters - Spectator
Direct yet allusive, poetic...an amazing feat - Atlantic