"It was the sea that made me begin thinking secretly about love more than anything else; you know, a love worth dying for, or a love that consumes you. To a man locked up in a steel ship all the time, the sea is too much like a woman... Things like her lulls and storms, or her caprice... are all obvious." The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea tells the tale of a band of savage thirteen-year-old boys who reject the adult world as illusory, hypocritical and sentimental, and train themselves in a brutal callousness they call "objectivity." When the mother of one of them begins an affair with a ship's officer, he and his friends idealize the man at first; but it is not long before they conclude that he is in fact soft and romantic. They regard their disappointment in him as an act of betrayal on his part, and react violently.

All eyes are upon Rikio. And he likes it, mostly. His fans cheer from a roped-off section, screaming and yelling to attract his attention—they would kill for a moment alone with him. Finally the director sets up the shot, the camera begins to roll, someone yells “action”; Rikio, for a moment, transforms into another being, a hardened young yakuza, but as soon as the shot is finished, he slumps back into his own anxieties and obsessions. Being a star, constantly performing, being watched and scrutinized as if under a microscope, is often a drag. But so is life. Written shortly after Yukio Mishima himself had acted in the film “Afraid to Die,” this novella is a rich and unflinching psychological portrait of a celebrity coming apart at the seams. With exquisite, vivid prose, Star begs the question: is there any escape from how we are seen by others?

Translated into English for the first time, a gripping short novel about an affair gone wrong, from the acclaimed Japanese author, Yukio Mishima. Set in rural Japan shortly after World War II, The Frolic of the Beasts tells the story of a strange and utterly absorbing love triangle between a former university student, Kōji; his would-be mentor, the eminent literary critic Ippei Kusakado; and Ippei's beautiful, enigmatic wife, Yūko. When brought face-to-face with one of Ippei's many marital indiscretions, Kōji finds his growing desire for Yūko compels him to action in a way that changes all three of their lives profoundly. Originally published in 1961 and now available in English for the first time, The Frolic of the Beasts is a haunting examination of the various guises we assume throughout our lives, and a tale of psychological self-entrapment, seduction, and murder.

“A propulsive, madcap story” (The New York Times) about a salaryman who decides to put his life up for sale in the classifieds section of a Tokyo newspaper after a botched suicide attempt. • "An outstanding writer not only of Japan, but of the world." —The Atlantic After salaryman Hanio Yamada puts his life up for sale, interested parties quickly come calling with increasingly bizarre requests. What follows is a madcap comedy of errors, involving a jealous husband, a drug-addled heiress, poisoned carrots—even a vampire. For someone who just wants to die, Hanio can't seem to catch a break, as he finds himself enmeshed in a continent-wide conspiracy that puts him in the cross hairs of both his own government and a powerful organized-crime syndicate. By turns wildly inventive, darkly comedic, and deeply surreal, in Life for Sale Yukio Mishima stunningly uses satire to explore the same dark themes that preoccupied him throughout his lifetime.

Consists of a series of essays

Acclaimed Japanese novelist Yukio Mishima (1925-1970) was also a prolific playwright, penning more than sixty plays, nearly all of which were produced in his lifetime. Hiroaki Sato is the first to translate these plays into English. For this collection he has selected five major plays and three essays Mishima wrote about drama. The title play is a satire that follows the breakdown of friendship between Adolf Hitler and two Nazi officials who were ultimately assassinated under orders from Hitler.

'Was it death he was now waiting for? Or a wild ecstasy of the senses?' For the young army officer of Yukio Mishima's seminal story, 'Patriotism, ' death and ecstasy become elementally intertwined. With his unique rigor and passion, Mishima hones in on the body as the great tragic stage for all we call social, ritual, political.

The stories in this collection explore the complex worlds of lovers, poets, lawyers, immigrants, students, and murderers. They tell of corporate betrayals and lost opportunities, and of the obsessions, hopes, fears, and vagaries of desire.

When Kayu Saitoh wakes up, she is in an unfamiliar place. Taken to a snowy mountainside, she was left there by her family and her village according to the tradition of sacrificing the lives of the elderly for the benefit of the young. Kayu was supposed to have passed quickly into the afterlife. Instead, she finds herself in Dendera, a utopian community built over decades by old women who, like her, were abandoned. Together, they must now face a new threat: a hungry mother bear. “Dendera is riveting, hilarious, dark, gory, and absolutely brilliant...it’s as if Elena Ferrante and Stephen King collided on a Japanese mountaintop.” —Jami Attenberg, New York Times best-selling author of The Middlesteins -- VIZ Media

A New York Times bestselling author—and “a mythmaker for the millennium, a wiseacre wiseman” (New York Times Book Review)—delivers a surreal and elaborate quest that takes readers from Tokyo to the remote mountains of northern Japan, where the unnamed protagonist has a surprising confrontation with his demons. An advertising executive receives a postcard from a friend and casually appropriates the image for an advertisement. What he doesn’t realize is that included in the scene is a mutant sheep with a star on its back, and in using this photo he has unwittingly captured the attention of a man who offers a menacing ultimatum: find the sheep or face dire consequences.