The Sea of Fertility

The Sea of Fertility follows Shigekuni Honda from his youth in 1912 Tokyo to old age in postwar Japan. Across four novels, he becomes convinced that his friend Kiyoaki Matsugae returns in successive young lives: the nationalist Isao Iinuma, the Thai princess Ying Chan and the orphan Tōru Yasunaga. Each apparent reincarnation dies, vanishes or disappoints before Honda can establish what he believes he has witnessed.

Moving through Taishō aristocratic society, early-Shōwa extremism, wartime Southeast Asia and the transformed Japan of the 1960s, the tetralogy connects private obsession to the decline of courtly status, imperial ideology, Buddhist thought and modernisation. The sequence increasingly questions whether reincarnation gives history a meaningful pattern or whether Honda has constructed that pattern around desire, absence and loss.