"EVEN IN THE TRIVIALITY OF A SINGLE PLAYING CARD MISSING FROM A DECK, THE WORLD'S ORDER IS INEVITABLY TURNED AWRY"

MISHIMA, Yukio. Spring Snow. WITH: Runaway Horses. WITH: The Temple of Dawn. WITH: The Decay of the Angel. London: Secker & Warburg, (1972-1974). Four volumes. Octavo, original green, black, brown and orange textured paper boards, original dust jackets. $1700.

Scarce first English editions of Mishima’s masterwork, the Sea of Fertility tetralogy, one of the major literary achievements of postwar Japan.

Yukio Mishima (born Kimitake Hiraoka), one of Japan's most acclaimed—and most controversial—authors, sent the last pages of the Sea of Fertility sequence to his publisher on the morning of the day he committed seppuku in 1970. His final work, an epic four-volume masterpiece set from 1912 through 1975, forms a "saga of 20th-century Japan: a story of national decline that nonetheless proposes redemption through the endurance of a certain soul, forceful enough to be reborn ad infinitum" (Guardian). Originally published in Japanese from 1965 through 1971; Spring Snow and Runaway Horses were translated into English by Michael Gallagher, Temple of Dawn by E. Dale Saunders and Cecilia Segawa Seigle, and Decay of the Angel by Edward G. Seidensticker. These first U.K. editions followed very closely on the heels of the first U.S. editions, published in the same years.

Books in fine condition, in near-fine dust jackets.