The story of one man expending his spirit between obsessive pursuit of a beautiful woman and an equally passionate search for mystical enlightenment, The Temple of Dawn powerfully dramatizes the Japanese experience from the eve of World War II through the degradation of the postwar era. Third in The Sea of Fertility tetralogy.
Yukio Mishima's The Temple of Dawn is the third novel in his masterful tetralogy, The Sea of Fertility. Here, Shigekuni Honda continues his pursuit of the successive reincarnations of Kiyoaki Matsugae, his childhood friend.

Travelling in Thailand in the early 1940s, Shigekuni Honda, now a brilliant lawyer, is granted an audience with a young Thai princess--an encounter that radically alters the course of his life. In spite of all reason, he is convinced she is the reincarnated spirit of his friend Kiyoaki. As Honda goes to great lengths to discover for certain if his theory is correct, The Temple of Dawn becomes the story of one man's obsessive pursuit of a beautiful woman and his equally passionate search for enlightenment.