Editions

Runaway Horses

  • Imprint: Vintage Classics

  • ISBN: 9780099282891

  • Length: 432  Pages

  • Dimensions: 198mm x 27mm x 129mm

  • Weight: 298g

  • RRP: £9.99

Runaway Horses

Read this classic exploration of political violence, traditional samurai values and right wing nihilism.

Isao is a young, engaging patriot, and a fanatical believer in the ancient samurai ethos. He turns terrorist, organising a violent plot against the new industrialists, who he believes are threatening the integrity of Japan and usurping the Emperor's rightful power. As the conspiracy unfolds and unravels, Mishima brilliantly chronicles the conflicts of a decade that saw the fabric of Japanese life torn apart.

  • Imprint: Vintage Classics

  • ISBN: 9780099282891

  • Length: 432  Pages

  • Dimensions: 198mm x 27mm x 129mm

  • Weight: 298g

  • RRP: £9.99

Reviews

  • In Runaway Horses Mishima writes of a desire to destroy or subvert beauty at its height, thus strengthening its appeal and preventing its slow decay

    New York Times

  • One of the great writers of the twentieth century

    Los Angeles Times

  • Mishima's novels exude a monstrous and compulsive weirdness, and seem to take place in a kind of purgatory for the depraved

    Angela Carter

  • This tetralogy is considered one of Yukio Mishima's greatest works. It could also be considered a catalogue of Mishima's obsessions with death, sexuality and the samurai ethic. Spanning much of the 20th century, the tetralogy begins in 1912 when Shigekuni Honda is a young man and ends in the 1960s with Honda old and unable to distinguish reality from illusion. En route, the books chronicle the changes in Japan that meant the devaluation of the samurai tradition and the waning of the aristocracy

    Washington Post

  • Mishima succeeded, unlike any other writer before him, in creating a glittering alloy of Eastern and Western traditions, classical and contemporary forms

    New York Times

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About the Author

Yukio Mishima

Yukio Mishima was born in 1925 in Tokyo, and is considered one of the Japan's most important writers. His books broke social boundaries and taboos at a time when Japan found itself in a state of rapid social change. His interests, besides writing, included body-building, acting and practising as a Samurai. In 1970 he attempted to start a military coup, which failed. Upon realizing this, Mishima performed seppuku, a ritual suicide, upon himself. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize for literature three times.

Yukio Mishima

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