Yukio Mishima's Madame de Sade [is] a Japanese study of the enigmatic marquise who remained constant to her husband during his imprisonment and abandoned him when he was released during the Revolution. Mishima's explanation is that the lady could put up with Sade's actions, but not with his literary work which, in her view, forecast the emerging social order …

Apart from the historical snag that Sade himself proved a moderate when entrusted with revolutionary authority, this conclusion comes over as the mechanical dislocation of an exclusively schematic action. All the characters stand for some abstract quality: law and order, religion, carnal desire, female guile, &c. The Marquise herself represents marital devotion and, as such, cannot change her mind without doing violence to the play's structure. As the work of a Japanese author, Madame de Sade shows considerable skill in its handling of the surface manners…. But real feeling...