Thirst for Love

About

After her philandering husband's death, Etsuko moves into her father-in-law's house, where she submits to the old man's advances with numb indifference. Then she falls obsessively in love with the young servant Saburo — a man whose indifference to her is genuine where hers to the old man was performed. The passion that follows is possessive, desperate, and headed somewhere dark. Yukio Mishima writes about desire as a form of violence — something that consumes the desirer and leaves the desired untouched. Etsuko's love for Saburo is not romantic; it is a claim, and the novel follows that claim to its inevitable conclusion. A short, savage novel about wanting someone so completely that the wanting itself becomes the catastrophe.