SPRING SNOW RUNAWAY HORSES THE TEMPLE OF DAWN THE DECAY OF THE ANGEL <i> by Yukio Mishima (Vintage: $10.95 each)</i>

On the morning of Nov. 25, 1970, the day of his flamboyant suicide, Yukio Mishima wrote the last lines of the “Sea of Fertility” tetralogy and sent it to his publisher, believing he had completed his masterpiece. Twenty years later, the four novels remain one of the outstanding works of 20th-Century literature and a summary of the author’s life and work.

The series begins in 1912, with the ill-fated passion of Kioyaki, the son of a wealthy parvenu, for Satoko, the daughter of a waning noble clan. Honda, Kioyaki’s blandly passive friend, witnesses the inevitably tragic conclusion of their romance: Satoko enters a convent; Kioyaki dies, promising his confidant that they will meet again “beneath the falls.” The purposeless Honda dedicates his life to pursuing his friend’s restless spirit.

Twenty years later, Honda finds Kioyaki reincarnated as the kendo champion Isao. Handsome, athletic and fanatically dedicated to samurai ideals, Isao is Mishima’s idealized vision of a hero. His ritual suicide after a failed attempt to restore the absolute power of the emperor recalls Mishima’s own death.

In “The Temple of Dawn,” Honda rediscovers Kioyaki, this time in the person of Ying Chan, a lovely Thai princess. Honda’s carnal desires and longing for enlightenment are mirrored in his visit to the squalid yet holy city of Benares. Mishima’s epic climaxes in the “The Decay of the Angel,” when Kioyaki reappears as the thuggish Toru. Like the angel in the Noh play, “The Robe of Feathers,” the spirit’s divine nature is devolving into a baser form: a powerful metaphor for the corruption of traditional Japanese culture.

In a final, desperate attempt to comprehend the unhappy mysteries he has witnessed, Honda visits Satoko, now a holy abbess, only to have the reality of Kioyaki’s incarnations--and his own existence--called into question: There is no comfort to be had in a debased world. The series ends with a chilling vision that evokes the real Sea of Fertility, a barren area of the moon.

Like “The Divine Comedy” and “Remembrance of Things Past,” “The Sea of Fertility” gives the reader the sensation of being carried to a great height. But Dante and Proust conclude with the reassurance that anyone can scale the summit, through divine love or the redeeming power of art. Mishima abandons the reader at the edge of the precipice, revealing the abyss beneath the degraded life of the post-war world.

When Honda confronts the uncertainty of his own existence (“perhaps there has been no I”), Buddhist theology merges with existential philosophy, and a tiny sunlit garden expands into an all-encompassing void.