Noburu is going through an awkward phase. His mother is falling in love with a sailor shore-leaved in Yokohama and he’s the ‘number three’ in a secret club of adolescent intelligentsia. While he's alternating between awe and disturbing envy for his mother's new man, his little club is growing particularly extreme in the games and rules it invents, and it isn’t long before the lines in each of Noburu's worlds blur.
Somewhere between The Goonies and Eyes Wide Shut, this is perhaps the most accessible and well know novel from Japan’s most famous (and infamous) author, Yukio Mishima (in 1970 Mishima committed harakiri after a failed, self-launched coup d’état).
Several scenes stay with you after you’ve finished. Lot’s of big, complicated themes for so skinny a book.
192 pages
Mishima, Y. (1999). Yukio Mishima, translated by John Nathan.. Sydney: Vintage.
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