Sun and Steel (1970), inscribed to Meredith Weatherby

• Published: Kodansha International, Tokyo and Palo Alto, 1970
• Contributors: Translated by John Bester
• Edition: First English edition, issue for Japan (first edition stated)
• Binding: Hardcover, dust jacket with Japanese bellyband and original acetate protector
• Pages: 104 pp.
• Language: English
• Signature: Inscribed by Mishima to Meredith Weatherby, translator of The Sound of Waves, weeks before his death.
• Condition: Near fine in a near fine dust jacket, with a yen price sticker on the front flap as issued.

Sun and Steel is Mishima's account of his own body: how a frail, bookish boy turned in his thirties to the sun and the barbell, came to distrust words for eating away at reality, and looked to the trained body and to action to restore it. Serialised in the journal Hihyō from 1965 to 1968, it is the key to the last years of his life, and it ends with his flight in an F-104 fighter.

John Bester's translation was published in Tokyo in 1970. On 25 November that year Mishima took his own life, after a failed call to the Self-Defense Forces to rise up.

This copy is inscribed to Meredith Weatherby, who met Mishima in New York in 1952, translated The Sound of Waves (1956), the first of his novels published in America, and Confessions of a Mask (1958), and founded the publishing house Weatherhill, which published Tamotsu Yato's Young Samurai with Mishima's introduction.