"The Buddhist doctrine of rebirth provides the underlying structure of the first half of Yukio Mishima's tetralogy, "The Sea of Fertility." In fact, the second volume, "Runaway Horses," is the reincarnation of the first, "Spring Snow." To the Buddhist, of course, reincarnation does not mean the continued existence of the same old soul in the new skin but rather the taking up of a previously unrelieved moral burden. And so the second book is the consequence, not the repetition, of the first." (New York Times).