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

One of the great writers of the twentieth century

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

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

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

Japan's foremost man of letters

An epic of a novel...in some ways better than Birdsong, or at least more subtle and far ranging

This is a bold and remarkable work of imagination, particularly in its daring remastery of the 19th-century novel form and the sustained grace of its prose. To write so well for so many hundreds of pages is an amazing feat of intellectual athleticism

Faulks has woven dozens of compelling voices together to produce an extraordinary novel of magnificent scope

[S]tructurally intricate, yet intensely focused on the lives of individuals...Human Traces is replete with interesting ideas and contains some exceptionally fine topographic writing

One of the most impressive novelists of his generation