After the Banquet

Mishima's 1960 novel is a portrait of love and marriage in later life and features his best female character - the irrepressible Kazu. For years Kazu has run her fashionable restaurant with a combination of charm and shrewdness - then she falls in love. The man is one of her clients, an aristocratic retired politician, and she renounces her business in order to become his wife. But it is not so easy to renounce her independent spirit. Eventually Kazu must choose between her marriage and the demands of her irrepressible vitality. Is a magnificent portrait of political and domestic warfare and love in later life. 'An exquisitely paced high comedy at once characterized by humor and restraint...features a magnificently ebullient heroine as she embarks upon one more adventure in love'
‘[Mishima's] most novelistic work, with a degree of earthiness and warmth rare in his fiction’