Runaway Horses
Runaway Horses er en bok skrevet av Yukio Mishima, den kom ut i Japan i 1969 og på engelsk i 1973.
Om boken
"On the publication in 1972 of Spring Snow--The first novel in Yukio Mishima's four-book roman-fleuve expressing the Japanese experience in the twentieth century--critics everywhere recognized the opnening chords of a classic. And now, in the second, the true vision and thrust of Mishima's tetralogy, his final and most important work, becomes even more strongly apparent.
Runaway Horses is the chronicle of a patriotic conspiracy, a novel about the roots and nature of Japanese fanaticism in the years that led to war. It is set in the 1930's, in a Japan marked by depression and the confusion of changing social patterns, and responding to political rigidities with political violence and assassination.
It is a novel that stands by itself, complete and self-contained, yet linked to the preceding book by threads of history, ideas, and character. Its driven hero is Isao, young, engaging, becoming a patriot-fanatic. Isao's father, now a corrupt and compromising mouther of nationalist pieties, was, in his youth, tutor to the sheltered young protagonist of Spring Snow--trying fervently and in vain to make him a samurai. It is the samurai ideal that now possesses his son. And in its service Isao organizes a violent plot against the new industrialists who are preempting the power that must, he believes, remain vested in the Emperor lest the integrity of Japan be destroyed. As the conspiracy is planned, as Isao and his cohorts are found out, arrested, and brought to trail, Mishima brilliantly dramatizes the conflicts of a decade that saw the fabric of Japanese life torn apart. In the excitements of the trial, in its stunning climax and its fateful aftermath, the japanese mode of total commitment--a commitment reflecting Mishima's own--is made felt and understandable.
With a superb craftmanship Mishima adapted his style to his content: if the tone of Spring Snow was Athenian, it has been said, that of the present novel is Spartan. As the hero of the former novel reverberates in the memory of the narrator--Honda, the judge, who tells Isao's story--Mishima introduces the muted theme of reincarnation. In tone and overtone as well as in action, it is the triumph of Runaway Horses to encompass both the particulars of an era and a resonance, always, of the age-old, classic spirit of Japan".
