This morose little gem boasts its share of sensuous depravity

Mishima was one of literature's great romantics, a tragedian with a heroic sensibility, an intellectual, an esthete, a man steeped in Western letters who toward the end of his life became a militant Japanese nationalist

Mishima is the Japanese Hemingway

A writer of immense energy and ability

A sexually and psychologically complex novel... in a honed translation by Andrew Clare

Thomas has spoken to more than 100 fashion insiders to put together a portrait of an era dominated, in her account, by these two uncontrollable and wild talents... Thomas's narrative flits deftly between the "parallel professional journeys" of two men with a similar rebellious streak

Conjures up the particular madness of the fashion treadmill, with its constant quest for newness and the inevitability that a triumph would be followed by a fall

Occasionally titillating and ultimately poignant