After the Banquet

Product Description

In
After the Banquet, Mishima draws a portrait of a marriage in which lofty principles clash fatally with appetite and ambition. For years Kazu has run her fashionable restaurant with a combination of charm and shrewdness. But when the middle-aged entrepreneur falls in love with one of her clients, an aristocratic retired politician, she renounces her business in order to become his wife. In time, however, Kazu decides to resurrect her husband’s political career. She embarks on a series of compromises and evasions that will force her to choose between her marriage and the demands of her irrepressible vitality.
 
“Kazu is the biggest and the most profound thing Mishima has done so far in an already distinguished career.”—The New Yorker

From Library Journal

Published in the United States during the 1960s but written years earlier, this Mishima trio, while vastly different in plot, all sport the common theme of idealism destroyed by reality. Nearly three decades after his death, Mishima continues to be a compelling novelist. (LJ 1/15/63, LJ 3/15/68, LJ 9/1/69)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About the Author

Yukio Mishima 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. 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.