![]() ![]() Shunsuké is every bit as viscous and malign as the Marquise de Merteuil in the Laclos novel, but at least she possessed the virtue of devising amusing escapades. ![]() Shunsuké promises to make these money problems go away if the young man, Yuichi, will work with him to actively break the hearts of Yasuko, and many other women to whom he has in the past fruitlessly pledged his troth. There are budget struggles in the home of the young man’s ailing mother. A beautiful young man, who is both gay and the boyfriend of the old writer’s current dalliance, Yasuko, is actively ensnared in a plan to jilt her. ![]() As in the Laclos’s novel, this is undertaken through a number of elaborately feigned love affairs. In it an ugly old man, a Japanese writer of some standing, who’s taken to falling in love with very young women, finds a way to exact a horrible revenge. Mishima’s second novel, it was originally published in two parts in Japan, in 19, when he was 25 and 27. In its heartless cruelty it reminds me of Choderlos de Laclos’s Les Liaisons Dangereuses. He might have subtitled this one The Big Book if Misogyny. ![]() And the moment he frees himself of it, the prose awakens and moves, often sinuously as in the early pages here. It’s too bad though that he ever heard of philosophy. ![]()
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May 2023
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