Spring Snow

by Yukio Mishima Book 1 in the The Sea of Fertility series.

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4.2(25,968)

Tokyo, 1912. Eighteen-year-old Kiyoaki Matsugae belongs to a newly ennobled family whose wealth cannot give him the inherited ease of the Ayakuras, among whom he was raised. He is drawn to Satoko Ayakura yet treats her with coldness until her engagement to Prince Toin turns his indecision into urgency. His school friend Shigekuni Honda watches as Kiyoaki and Satoko begin a secret affair that threatens both families and the proposed imperial marriage.

Set at the beginning of the Taishō era, the novel places its doomed romance within a contest between the declining court aristocracy and an ambitious new elite created by Meiji modernisation. Satoko’s pregnancy forces choices involving abortion, religious retreat and social honour, while Kiyoaki’s pursuit of her establishes the themes of beauty, desire, death and reincarnation that shape the tetralogy.