Yukio Mishima’s The Temple of Dawn is the third
novel in his masterful tetralogy, The Sea of Fertility. Here,
Shigekuni Honda continues his pursuit of the successive reincarnations
of Kiyoaki Matsugae, his childhood friend.
 
Travelling
in Thailand in the early 1940s, Shigekuni Honda, now a brilliant
lawyer, is granted an audience with a young Thai princess—an
encounter that radically alters the course of his life. In spite of all
reason, he is convinced she is the reincarnated spirit of his friend
Kiyoaki. As Honda goes to great lengths to discover for certain if his
theory is correct, The Temple of Dawn becomes the story of
one man’s obsessive pursuit of a beautiful woman and his equally
passionate search for enlightenment.