[1][2] The book takes its name from the included short story of the same title.

"The Priest of Shiga Temple and His Love" appeared in the UNESCO collection Modern Japanese Stories.

[5] A British edition appeared the following year, published by Secker & Warburg.

[2] "Manatsu no shi" ("Death in Midsummer") was also the name of a collection of Mishima short stories published by Sōgensha in 1953.

Apart from the title story, the contents of the 1953 Japanese and the 1966 English anthology are not identical.