'Ordinary people harbour the grandest (and most terrible) thoughts in a cosmological fable as disconcerting as it is funny: behind the simplest actions lie visions of worlds in collision' - The Times

'One of the greatest avant-garde Japanese writers of the twentieth century' - New Yorker

Beautiful Star is a 1962 tale of family, love, nuclear war and UFOs, and was the novel Mishima considered to be his masterpiece.

Translated into English for the first time, this atmospheric black comedy tells the story of the Osugi family, who come to the sudden realization that each of them hails from a different planet: Father from Mars, mother from Jupiter, son from Mercury and daughter from Venus. This extra-terrestrial knowledge brings them closer together, and convinces them that they have a mission: to find others of their kind, and save humanity from the imminent threat of the atomic bomb...