4/5 stars
I’m not convinced that Mishima really works in translation, as it’s all about the beauty of the language he uses rather than the narrative. For this book in particular, with the concept of beauty at its heart, this is especially the case, and this translation was at times a little too clunky to work. In places terrible, in fact.
That said, I enjoyed it. The introduction compares it to Dostoyevsky, and that’s a fair one – strong hints of Turgenev as well.
The book sums itself up nicely, though again this would likely work better in the original Japanese (I mean, “adumbrated”? Really, translator?):
“If one examined the beauty of each individual detail… the beauty was never completed in any single detail… for each detail adumbrated the beauty of the succeeding detail. The beauty of the individual detail itself was always filled with uneasiness. It dreamed of perfection, but it knew no completion and was invariably lured on to the next beauty… Such adumbrations were signs of nothingness. Nothingness was the very structure of this beauty”