I've read a lot of Mishima's works, though it was many many years ago. Not all of his works are (or were) available, but his best are. Some are definitely better than others, but most are interesting. Pretty much all his novels are stylish and very introspective (it's some of his trademarks, a certain narcissism too), so as you like that in Spring Snow, it's worth trying the others. Start with the other three novels in the tetralogy. These were his last novels before his suicide.

Kinkakuji (I don't remember the English title, it was Le Pavillon d'Or in French, so maybe The Golden Pavilion) is one of his must-reads. The Sounds of Waves is another good works. Forbidden Colours is too, if you don't get too annoyed with the main character and the misogyny.

I never read his play, but they reputedly require a good background in Noh to fully appreciate their brilliance.

One of the downsides of Mishima to some people is that he obsessed massively over the same themes. After a few novels for some readers it start feeling like "yet another novel about death", and yet another novel about his repressed homosexuality, yet another book about nationalism, yet another ritual suicide etc. Mishima's nihilism bothers some readers too.

His non-fiction is more for his hardcore fans.




Mishima was one of the most obsessive writers there is about translation. The shifts and loss in meaning fascinated him because they totally freaked him out (another of his pet peeves was the habit of westerners to leave many daily life words in Japanese, artificially creating exotism and a distance between the foreign reader and the text) . The only western language he could read was English, so he got involved with the translations, has revised and approved several of them and tweaked the text when the Japanese didn't translate to his satisfaction, and afterward he has forbidden direct translation of these novels from the Japanese to any other western language. Western translators have to work from the approved English text.