Death in the Middle of Summer

Former lovers meet in San Francisco, far from their native Japan — what connects them, besides sad memories, and what does a thermos have to do with it? After a failed coup, an officer commits harakiri in front of his... young wife. Four women must, without saying a word, cross seven bridges in a single night of the year to make their wishes come true — a simple task, but not everyone will reach the end of the path. A family tries to survive what is impossible to endure — the death of two children, the fear for those who remain. A woman loses a pearl on her birthday, and such a trifle transforms the configurations of friendship and enmity between long-time acquaintances beyond recognition. A dancer, suddenly appearing in an antique shop, disrupts the sale of a very valuable old cabinet — I wonder why she needs the cabinet?.. Yukio Mishima (1925–1970) — a star of 20th-century literature, the most read Japanese author in the world, a holder of brilliant talent, famous for both his works of the widest range and variety of genres (novels, plays, stories, essays) and his astonishing biography (obsession with bodybuilding, extreme right political views, harakiri after a failed attempt at a monarchical coup). Mishima is an endlessly insightful and ruthless observer, and the collection of his stories "Death in the Middle of Summer" is an unpredictable, at times shocking kaleidoscope, where cruelty and passion, arrogance and vulnerability, fear and love, spiritual darkness and evanescent light alternate. Half of the stories and a play in this collection are published in Russian for the first time.