Beastly Games

A self-satisfied literary luminary, utterly devoid of conscience and any sense of proportion; his worn, proud wife, whom he brings only suffering; and a young man who is in love with her and ends up right at the center of an endless, hopeless family drama. A triangle is the most solid of figures and, at the same time, the most dangerous. Love and jealousy, manipulation and duty, vices and stubborn—though futile—desire to become better: these are the bestial games of those whom fate leads. Everyone will get their share—there is no way out, and none will appear; you cannot hide from what has been ordained. After you, only a legend will remain, which the head of a village temple will retell at your grave to some chance folklorist.

Yukio Mishima (1925–1970) is one of the leading stars of 20th-century literature, the world’s most widely read Japanese writer, a rare talent whose reputation rests on both the breadth of his work (novels, plays, stories, essays) and a astonishing biography (an enthusiasm for bodybuilding, extremely far-right views, and seppuku after a failed attempt at a monarchist coup). “The Games of the Beasts” is a novel from his mature period: a tense psychological, at times bitterly satirical rethinking of a classic nō theater plot—an account of how wounded souls draw together, and of the impossibility of breaking the vicious circle of love and violence.

First time in Russian!