SOURCE: Yoshida, Sanroku. “Mishima's Modernist Treatment of Time and Space in The Sea of Fertility.” World Literature Today (summer 1983): 409-11.

In the following essay, Yoshida explores Mishima's manipulation of space and time in The Sea of Fertility.

At the age of forty-five, Yukio Mishima provided his own conclusion to the drama of his life by committing seppuku, ritual disembowelment. He died on 25 November 1970, the same day that he finished his last work, the tetralogy The Sea of Fertility, comprised of the novels Spring Snow, Runaway Horses, The Temple of Dawn and The Decay of the Angel (all published in English translation by Knopf in 1972-74). There is a striking similarity between the suicide of the main character in the second novel of the series and the circumstances of the author's suicide. Literary criticism has tended to blur the line between the work and the life of its author...