Recognized throughout the world for his brilliance as a novelist and playwright, Yukio Mishima is also noted as a master of the short story in his native Japan, where the form is practiced as a major art.

Nine of Yukio Mishima's finest stories were selected by Mishima himself for translation in this book; they represent his extraordinary ability to depict a wide variety of human beings in moments of significance. Often his characters are sophisticated modern Japanese who turn out to be not so liberated from the past as they had thought.