After The Banquet
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: No dust jacket
Pages: Good
Condition remarks: Condition as shown in image
In postwar Tokyo, a world of elegance, ambition, and barely concealed desire collides in Yukio Mishima's razor-sharp novel After the Banquet — a story centred on Kazu, a forceful and self-made woman who runs one of the city's most celebrated restaurants, and whose passionate marriage to a reserved, aging diplomat pulls her irresistibly into the turbulent arena of Japanese politics. When Kazu throws her considerable energy and resources behind her husband's campaign for political office, she discovers that the line between love and power, sacrifice and betrayal, is devastatingly thin. Mishima chronicles her journey with a cool, surgical precision that transforms a tale of middle-aged romance into a searching meditation on ambition, identity, and the performance of social roles in modern Japan. Drawing on the real-life scandal that inspired it — and which ultimately led to a landmark privacy lawsuit — After the Banquet stands as one of Mishima's most politically engaged and psychologically acute works, written with the crystalline prose and ironic detachment that earned him comparisons to Camus, Gide, and Dostoevsky. The novel illuminates the tension between the private self and the public mask, between the untameable appetites of the individual and the rigid conventions of Japanese society. Translated with supple elegance, it remains a work of arresting vitality — one that leaves the reader asking whether Kazu's greatest act was an expression of love, or simply the most audacious power play of all.
Author: Yukio Mishima
Format: Paperback
Genre: Modern fiction
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: No dust jacket
Pages: Good
Condition remarks: Condition as shown in image
In postwar Tokyo, a world of elegance, ambition, and barely concealed desire collides in Yukio Mishima's razor-sharp novel After the Banquet — a story centred on Kazu, a forceful and self-made woman who runs one of the city's most celebrated restaurants, and whose passionate marriage to a reserved, aging diplomat pulls her irresistibly into the turbulent arena of Japanese politics. When Kazu throws her considerable energy and resources behind her husband's campaign for political office, she discovers that the line between love and power, sacrifice and betrayal, is devastatingly thin. Mishima chronicles her journey with a cool, surgical precision that transforms a tale of middle-aged romance into a searching meditation on ambition, identity, and the performance of social roles in modern Japan. Drawing on the real-life scandal that inspired it — and which ultimately led to a landmark privacy lawsuit — After the Banquet stands as one of Mishima's most politically engaged and psychologically acute works, written with the crystalline prose and ironic detachment that earned him comparisons to Camus, Gide, and Dostoevsky. The novel illuminates the tension between the private self and the public mask, between the untameable appetites of the individual and the rigid conventions of Japanese society. Translated with supple elegance, it remains a work of arresting vitality — one that leaves the reader asking whether Kazu's greatest act was an expression of love, or simply the most audacious power play of all.