{"product_id":"2026200015720-secondhand-after-the-banquet","title":"After The Banquet","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eCondition remarks:\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBook: Good\u003cbr\u003eJacket: No dust jacket\u003cbr\u003ePages: Good\u003cbr\u003eCondition remarks: Condition as shown in image\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn 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.\n\nDrawing 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.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Secondhand Stock","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":49203257606363,"sku":"2026200015720-SECONDHAND","price":10.0,"currency_code":"AUD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0523\/7646\/9701\/files\/9e320d47-c4ab-4ca9-ae85-b37988ae7506.png?v=1788146601","url":"https:\/\/bookgrocer.com\/products\/2026200015720-secondhand-after-the-banquet","provider":"Book Grocer","version":"1.0","type":"link"}