THE TEMPLE OF DAWN
by YUKIO MISHIMA
352 pages. Knopf. $7.95.
The serial publication of Yukio Mishima's last works, a tetralogy called The Sea of Fertility, has the eerie effect of making him seem the fastest and most prolific dead writer in history. A bit more than a year ago came the English translation of the first posthumous volume, Spring Snow. Last summer it was Runaway Horses. Now we have The Temple of Dawn.
Mishima sealed this literary package with his ritual suicide in 1970, when he was only 45. Unlike, say, Ernest Hemingway, who...