Rating: 
Summary: Fantastic!
Review: I'll keep it short here. This is a wonderful book like nothing I've ever read before. I recommend it to anyone who loves a good, non-mainstream classic. Specifically, the characterization in this book is wonderfully done.
Rating:
Summary: Read at once.
Review: I've only read two Mishima books so far, am reading a third now, and intend to get through 'em all. Alas, I fear that none will be as good as the first one I read - Spring Snow. I really didn't think people could still write like this in the 20th century. I mean, star-crossed, tragic love was an old subject by the time Shakespeare got to it - what made Mishima think he could write something new about it hundreds of years later? But something did, and I'm glad it did. For while there is a [very interesting] historical context to Spring Snow (tell me, what other book paints such a visceral portrait of early 20th century Japan?), the focus is on the love story. And no one writes love stories like Yukio Mishima. Somehow, it manages to avoid the gaping pitfalls of sentimentalism and melodrama, creating instead a world of great beauty and fragility that I was loath to leave when the book drew to its close.If you read a biography of Mishima, you will likely find mountains of speculation concerning his various eccentricities (and that word is putting is nicely, methinks). Some will accuse him of right-wingery, others will rant about his "nationalism," etc. etc. etc. But I think that none of that applies. He was in no way a political person, just a hopelessly deluded romantic who still believed that romantic ideals had any place in modern society. This he applied to politics as well as to everything else. Spring Snow, fortunately, contains no politics, concentrating instead on romantic ideals as applied to the personal. The result is something that, while being Japanese through and through, is accessible to anyone. This book is worth reading for the marvelously poetic descriptions alone. I shan't say that it will "change your life," since that's cliche and more often than not utterly wrong, but I daresay that you will have an indelible impression made upon your mind. At first, you may not notice it, but as time passes, you will find that you remember large parts of Spring Snow on countless occasions, and you will find yourself recalling parts of it as examples of great beauty and purity, and reflexively applying them to your own life. And then you will cheer Mishima as quite possibly the last romantic on Earth. That is exactly what happened to me.
Rating:
Summary: Quietly Disturbing
Review: Mishima has the ability to get underneath the skin of his readers. What seems like an innocent and harmless story of adolescence gradually becomes one of fundamental importance. In my view, this is the most brilliant of the three Mishima novels I have read. It is a masterpiece which leaves a bitter taste in the mouth. None of Mishima's characters seem happy and even the 'heroes' are ambiguous, despite the fact that many of them are perfect in physical terms. We have to judge the character for ourselves without help, rather like a film without background music. There is a strong homo-erotic undercurrent in Mishima's work, even though the central relationship in this novel is heterosexual. The focal character, Kiyoaki, seems to be massochistic and derives a form of pleasure from his own destruction. I would strongly recommend anyone who is interested in the complexities of relationships and the specific cultural life of Japan to read this novel. Above all, it should be read for the intricacy and skill of its literature.
Rating:
Summary: Magnificent
Review: Mishima is one of the most descriptive writers of modern Japan. His texts tell the stories of the upper class, nevertheless, you will not find a better description of a Japanese garden or house. "The trees that encircled the now-darken garden, the tiled roofs of the mansion itself beyond, even the maple hill-the reflection of all this, and more, had been fixed in jagged outline, compressed into the circle of water that was defined by the rim of the basin." Approaching some of Mishima's greatest senteces is equivalent to appraiching a Michelangelo, Picasso, or Rembrandt painting. That is what makes his writing so captivating and tantalizing.
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Summary: beauty is a terrible thing
Review: Mishima, in his writing, is often preoccupied with aesthetic beauty. His characters slaver after it, long to assume it, and when apprehension is discovered to be forever out of reach, they long to remove this aesthetic beauty, this otherwordly perfection from the earth vis a vis a dramatic spectacle, which in turn becomes beauty itself. Along with this obsession with beauty is a suspicion or a questioning of the intrinsic utility of beauty. What is the purpose of perfection if such perfection is ineffectual and even inimical to the human condition apart from the fact that beauty is beauty is beauty . . . ad nauseum? In many ways Mishima uses Spring Snow as a means of inverting the sentiment of Keats' notion of "Beauty is truth, truth is beauty . . ." However, unlike the spectacle that beauty evokes in some of Mishima's other writings (and even his life), the bubble of spectacle never pops in Spring Snow, instead, beauty ferments and spreads like cancer. In this novel, Mishima's main characters, Satoka and Kiyoaki, are destroyed by their beauty, their elegance, their noble breeding. Kiyoaki is analogous to Hamlet in his diffidence and his psychic inertia. Moreover, his brilliant physical beauty compounds the aforementioned with an overly large measure of pride, which, along with noble breeding, hermetically seals him into a jar of dreams, self-doubt, anomie, and ennui. Satoka, likewise, is beautiful, perfect, and her perfection carries and transmits a self-possessed, cold, and almost painful glare to the public eye. However, to Kiyoaki, Satoka is a smoldering woman of passion, full of riddles and intrigue. Kiyoaki, inexperienced, prideful, and naïve, desires to reciprocate this passion only when it becomes taboo, and then he falls headlong into a brilliant and lavish darkness full of gauntness, full, blush moons, and supple waves. Their consummation is sweet but tinctured with doom. Had the two had a grander purpose than getting drunk off this surfeit of poisonous love, had their hearts and minds been bound to something to divert them from their egocentricity, the story would have been far different. But in the end, as Romeo and Juliet's love dies, the love of Satoka and Kiyoaki dies. However, unlike Shakespeare, Mishima denies the reader the succor of suicide. Satoka is left a tonsured, Buddhist nun, while Kiyoaki dies of pneumonia. The end of beauty is filled with emotion, but the beautiful are ineffectual, useless, and cannot ever perform substantive act that will secure their happiness or seal their fate (definitely not in the case of Kiyoaki, perhaps in the case of Satoka). However, beauty does not completely fade at the death of their love as Kiyoaki leaves his dream journal to his even-keeled, logical, and diligent friend, Honda. In this way beauty lives on, but exists not as truth but as germ or infection. Beauty dies, destroys, and spreads its seed. It is the spring snow, quiet, pure, each multi-tendriled snowflake delicate, unique, an unusual attenuation heralding the end of spring, girded by the assumption that another spring will come only for the deadly beauty of the quiet, pure spring snow to come again, to take root, and surreptitiously and gracefully destroy idle youth.
Rating:
Summary: Riveting: it makes you want more
Review: Perhaps I shouldn't review this book in light of the fact that I haven't read the whole tetralogy. However, after reading 'Spring Snow' I'm trying to plow through 'Runaway Horses' as quickly as I can so I can get to volumes III & IV to complete the whole cycle. He pays wonderful attention to detail and subtlety without it becoming tedious or overbearing. I can't begin to count the hours of sleep I lost pouring through this book. I look forward to completing the cycle so I can go to bed at a decent hour again. Mishima's writing is entrancing. Of all the supposed western "classics" that were forced on me in high school and college, this one surpasses them all. Mishima should be required reading, and I thank the wonderful college professor that introduced me to his work.
Rating:
Summary: Beautiful, moving, delicate, and unforgettable.
Review: Spring Snow is a dramatic, moving work that helps codify Mishima's tetralogy, the Sea of Fertility, as perhaps the 20th century's greatest magnum opus. Mishima writes in a delicately impressionistic style, employing similes and metaphors of subtle, almost fragile beauty, that create a vivid and harmonic unity that simply inspire awe. Like Dante, he moves the reader's spirit as his characters spirits evolve. Like Dostoyevsky, he plunges relentlessly into the dark caprices of the mind. Like Milton, his word choice was so perfect that I put down the Sea of Fertility wishing that I had written it myself.Spring Snow, the first installment of the cycle, stands very well on its own (though its ultimate meaning can only be appreciated as the tetralogy is continued). It takes place early in 20th century Japan, a time of transition in which Japan's decreased isolation leads to a Westernization that ultimately proves Spring Snow to be an elegy for the samurai tradition. It is also a wonderful and tragic love story -- far more convincing than Romeo and Juliet -- in which an impossible and doomed love threatens the young protagonists whose wealthy families adjust to the changing sociopolitical climate of Japan. The other three books in the cycle are (in order): 'Runaway Horses,' 'The Temple of Dawn,' and 'The Decay of the Angel'
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Summary: Dostoevsky meets Hesse in Japan
Review: The sheer precision of this author's psychological insight would be enough. But inclusion of the historical element as well brings it into the realm of genius. Epic in scope, grand in scale, beautiful in linguistic imagery.
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Summary: Sublime perfection in literature....
Review: This is probably the most beautifully rendered work I have ever had the pleasure to read. Mishima's sense of photographic realism in describing turn of the (last) century Japan is matched only by the precision psychological portraits he paints of his ornately drafted characters. While borrowing from western literary tradition, (Shakespeare in this one) Mishima will forever stand as a giant amongst modern authors, Japanese or no. Once Mishima's words enter your bloodstream, you will be forever haunted by his craft. More than reccomended- required.
Rating:
Summary: Mobius strip
Review: This is the beginning of the posthumous work of Mishima. You will follow the lives of four people who got reincarnated in different time and in different place with Honda. His flowing and elegant style hits the highest and psychological descriptions, that even characters did not realized themselves so well, are so elaborated and sometimes scare us. It seems like weaving beautiful tapestry and you can feel the person of genius and bliss for enjoying the output of the genius. But you may lost at the end like this story and come back to this story again and again.
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