Runaway Horses

by Yukio Mishima Book 2 in the The Sea of Fertility series.

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4.3(10,179)

Osaka and Nara, 1932. Judge Shigekuni Honda meets nineteen-year-old kendo prodigy Isao Iinuma and becomes convinced that the young man’s birthmarks identify him as Kiyoaki reincarnated. Isao worships samurai self-sacrifice and the Shinpūren rebels of 1876. With a circle of fellow students, he plans to assassinate financiers and industrialists, restore wealth and authority to the emperor, and then die by seppuku.

The conspiracy unfolds amid rural distress, political assassination and hostility to parliamentary capitalism in early Shōwa Japan. Honda uses the courts and his personal influence to save Isao, but protection conflicts with the youth’s pursuit of pure action. The novel examines how idealised history, emperor worship and disgust with modernity can turn moral seriousness into terrorism and self-destruction.