Good to compare to Veronica.

Comparison to Great Expectations:
This dark tale, full of twists and turns, is the story of a successful 60 year old novelist who decides to seek revenge on the women who have betrayed him in love over the years. He selects as his weapon a beautiful young gay man. Whereas this sounds somewhat like Miss Havisham's revenge on males through the beautiful Estella in Charles Dicken's Great Expectations, Yuichi is far more vacant and far less a noble character than Estella. Estella recognized that she had been reared to be a beautiful monster and thus spurns Pip, the man she loves, and marries a monstrosity of a bully rich boy. Yuichi on the other hand marries a 19 year old girl and makes her life miserable by his nightly cruising in the underground Japanese gay scene. The attraction of age to beauty, the very defenselessness of humans in the face of overwhelming male beauty, the power of eros to undermine reason and wisdom, resonated with Thomas Mann's Death in Venice. The jungle dog-eat-dog world of the underground gay nightlife in Tokyo reminded me of the unsavory bitchy queens in Jean Genet's Our Lady of the Flowers, which fully describes the post-war gay underground in Paris. The book was full of homophobia, especially self destructive internalized homophobia. Gay characters are miseable, catty, competitive, and self-destructive. However Mishima makes his heterosexual characters just as miserable when faced with beauty that they cannot obtain. Mishima's writing style is unique, his use of language superb and shocking at times. However, as I finished page 400, I decided that the book could be shortened to 200 pages and possibly be an improved work of art. Even though the plot line shows how beauty is used as a weapon, the philosophical discussions throughout the book would indicate that it is in human nature to lose reason when faced with overwhelming beauty. The novelist in the story never achieved this kind of beauty in his work, but he certainly knows how to manipulate this beauty to seek revenge. The women on whom he seeks revenge however are totally unsympathetic, as is almost every character in the story except Yuichi's young wife, Yasuko. The characters are trapped together in a vast web of relationships and bonds, appearing more and more pathetic and vapid with each destructive incident, yet fully illustrating how Eros makes fools of us all. ( )