After the Banquet

About

Kazu has run her fashionable Tokyo restaurant for years with a combination of charm, shrewdness, and an appetite for life that fills every room she enters. Then she falls in love with Noguchi — an aristocratic retired politician, elegant and principled and completely unprepared for a woman like her. She sells the restaurant. They marry. And almost immediately, Kazu discovers that being someone's wife and being herself are incompatible projects. Mishima wrote After the Banquet as a comedy of manners that slowly reveals itself as a tragedy — the collision between a woman's vitality and the institutions designed to contain it. The novel caused a landmark privacy lawsuit in Japan when a real politician recognized himself in the story. This is Mishima's warmest, most human novel — and its heroine is magnificent.