'Mishima's greatest novel, and one of the greatest of the past century' The Times

A band of savage thirteen-year-old boys reject the adult world as illusory, hypocritical, and sentimental, and train themselves in a brutal callousness they call 'objectivity'. When the mother of one of them begins an affair with a ship's officer, he and his friends idealise the man at first; but it is not long before they conclude that he is in fact soft and romantic.

They regard this disillusionment as an act of betrayal on his part - and the retribution is deliberate and horrifying.

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