A tale of youth and warped masculinity, this is the suspenseful, lyrical and page-turning Japanese classic.
A band of savage thirteen-year-old boys reject the adult world as illusory, hypocritical, and sentimental, and train themselves in a brutal callousness they call 'objectivity'. When the mother of one of them begins an affair with a ship's officer, he and his friends idealise the man at first; but it is not long before they conclude that he is in fact soft and romantic.
They regard this disillusionment as an act of betrayal on his part - and the retribution is deliberate and horrifying.
Mishima's greatest novel, and one of the greatest of the past century ― The Times
Explores the viciousness that lies beneath what we imagine to be innocence ― Independent
Told with Mishima's fierce attention to naturalistic detail, the grisly tale becomes painfully convincing and yields a richness of psychological and mythic truth ― Sunday Times
Coolly exact with his characters and their honourable motives. His aim is to make the destruction of the sailor by his love seem as inevitable as the ocean ― Guardian
