Mishima's first novel, published when he was twenty-four, tells of a young man who discovers that his erotic desires are for men and for death. The narrator constructs an elaborate mask of normality to survive in postwar Japan. The prose is feverish and precise, the self-analysis relentless. Mishima would spend his life exploring the themes announced here: beauty, death, the body, the tension between art and action. He orchestrated his own spectacular suicide in 1970. This novel reveals the origins of that obsession.