Spring Snow

No, not a weather report, just a title that comes to mind when I look out the window and realize, ruefully, that today is the first day of Spring.

Yukio Mishima was one of Japan's most gifted novelists. Spring Snow is the first novel in a tetralogy Mishima called Sea of Fertility. As the Christian Science Monitor said, "Mishima is like Stendhal in his precise psychological analyses, like Dostoevsky in his explorations of darkly destructive personalities." If writing can be delicate and muscular at the same time, that is Mishima.

I hope that I don't look out the window three months from now and think about a certain mystery novel, one of the best of 2006--by Rebecca Pawel--wait for it, here comes the punch line .... yes, it's Summer Snow.