Spring Snow

It is 1912, and Japan stands at the edge of the modern world. Kiyoaki Matsugae — the beautiful, melancholy son of a powerful aristocratic family — and Satoko Ayakura, his childhood companion, are caught in a love as exquisite as it is impossible. Satoko has been promised in marriage to an imperial prince. The world of obligation, rank, and duty that surrounds them is absolute. And yet.

Opening the Sea of Fertility tetralogy that many consider the greatest achievement of twentieth-century Japanese literature, Spring Snow is a novel of heartbreaking beauty. Mishima renders the dying Meiji world — its ceremonies, its silences, its particular quality of sorrow — with a precision that feels almost photographic, and at the centre of it places two young people whose love cannot exist in the world as it is.

This is a love story, but it is also something more: a meditation on the nature of desire, on what it means to choose the beauty of the absolute over the compromises of ordinary happiness. Translated by Michael Gallagher with luminous delicacy. If you read one Japanese novel, read this one. Published by Vintage.