Spring Snow (The Sea of Fertility #1)

by Yukio Mishima

The very night before, he had dreamed of his own coffin, made of unpainted wood. It stood in the middle of an empty room with large windows, and outside, the pre-dawn darkness was shading to a deep blue; it was filled with the sound of birdsong.

For even in the triviality of a single playing card missing from a deck, the world’s order is inevitably turned awry. And for someone like Kiyoaki, the smallest incongruity took on the proportions of a watch deprived of one cogwheel.

For everything sacred has the substance of dreams and memories, and so we experience the miracle of what is separated from us by time or distance suddenly being made tangible. Dreams, memories, the sacred—they are all alike in that they are beyond our grasp. Once we are even marginally separated from what we can touch, the object is sanctified; it acquires the beauty of the unattainable, the quality of the miraculous. Everything, really, has this quality of sacredness, but we can desecrate it at a touch. How strange man is! His touch defiles and yet he contains the source of miracles.”

“I think I’d be more inclined to say that the style of the Meiji era is still dying. But how would I know? To live in the midst of an era is to be oblivious to its style. You and I, you see, must be immersed in some style of living or other, but we’re like goldfish swimming around in a bowl without ever noticing it. Take yourself: yours is a world of feeling. You appear different from most people. And you yourself are quite sure that you have never allowed your personality to be compromised. However, there is absolutely no way of proving that. The testimony of your contemporaries has no value whatever. Who knows? It may just be that your world of feeling represents the style of this era in its purest form. But then again, there’s no way of knowing.”

Water - DFW

History is a record of destruction. One must always make room for the next ephemeral crystal. For history, to build and to destroy are one and the same thing.

For if Chance ceases to exist, then Will becomes meaningless—no more significant than a speck of rust on the huge chain of cause and effect that we only glimpse from time to time.

I really did not follow this line of thought, anyone have ideas?

“Perhaps His Imperial Highness’s horses had a stroke on the way,” he observed by way of a greeting. But no matter how biting the Baron’s sarcasm, his speech was mumbled and his expression blank in true English fashion, so that no one heard him.

Left to himself, Kiyoaki looked up at the tree above him and for the first time that day gave some thought to the cherry blossoms. They hung in huge clusters from the black austerity of the branches like a mass of white seashells spread over a reef. The evening wind made the curtains billow along the path, and when it caught the tips of the branches, they bent gracefully in a rustle of blossoms. Then the great, widespread branches themselves began to sway with an easy grandeur under their weight of white. The pallor of the flowers was tinged here and there by pink clusters of buds. And with almost invisible subtlety, the star-shaped center of each blossom was marked with pink in tiny, sharp strokes, like the stitches holding a button in place.

Overcome as he was by resentment, he did not pause to reflect that it was his letter that had begun everything, that it was his lie that had initiated the train of events. All he could see was that his every misfortune sprang from Satoko’s treachery.

Interesting opinion from the narrator

His father was exhausted by the mere attempt at solving the riddle of his son’s moods. He was exhausted by the mere sight of his handsome son’s bored indifference and his cold silences. He searched the memories of his own youth, but he could not recall any torment that had given rise to the kind of instability that ruled his son. Kiyoaki was like a lake whose clear waters reveal the very pebbles on its bed at one moment, only to cloud over the next in a sudden squall.

Those who lack imagination have no choice but to base their conclusions on the reality they see around them. But on the other hand, those who are imaginative have a tendency to build fortified castles they have designed themselves, and to seal off every window in them.

“Just remember this: everything that happened was your fault,” said Kiyoaki with as much dignity as he could muster, staring at the veins that throbbed under the white powder caking Tadeshina’s forehead.

“It’s true. It’s all my fault. I know that no amount of apology can make up for what I have done. But I should apologize more to my mistress than to you.

Satoko was bereft of words, and he himself had brought her to this. It had been his most fervent hope to see her reduced to this state, robbed of the power given her by her greater age to drop those little homilies she had been so fond of, capable of nothing but silent tears. At this moment she held an irresistible attraction for him, in her kimono the color of white wisteria, but it was not merely that of a rich prize finally within his grasp; it was the lure of the forbidden, the utterly unattainable, the proscribed.

“But now that old wars are finished, a new kind of war has just begun; this is the era for the war of emotion. The kind of war no one can see, only feel—a war, therefore, that the dull and insensitive won’t even notice. But it’s begun in earnest. The young men who have been chosen to wage it have already begun to fight. And you’re one of them—there’s no doubt about that.

It ended a few feet from where he sat. The sea, broad and vast, with all its mighty force, ended right there before his eyes. Be it the edge of time or space, there is nothing so awe-inspiring as a border. To be here at this place with his three companions, at this marvelous border between land and sea, struck him as being very similar to being alive as one age was ending and another beginning, like being part of a great moment in history. And then too the tide of their own era, in which he and Kiyoaki lived, also had to have an appointed time to ebb, a shore on which to break, a limit beyond which it could not go.

“If there is such a thing as reincarnation,” Honda began, betraying a certain eagerness, “I’d be very much in favor of it if it were the kind in your story, with the man himself being aware of his previous existence. But if it’s a case of a man’s personality coming to an end and his self-awareness being lost so that there’s absolutely no trace of them in his next life, and if a completely new personality and a totally different self-awareness come into being, well, in that case I think that various reincarnations extending over a period of time are no more significantly linked to one another than the lives of all the individuals who happen to be alive at the same given moment. In other words, I feel that in such a case the concept of reincarnation would be practically meaningless. Something has to be passed on in transmigration, but I don’t see how we can take any number of separate and distinct existences, each with its own self-awareness, and bracket them together as one, claiming that a single consciousness unites them. Right now, each one of us has no memory at all of even a single previous existence. And so it’s obvious that it would be pointless to try to produce any proof of transmigration. There’s only one way that it could be proved: if we had a self-awareness so independent that it could stand aside from both this life and previous lives and view them objectively. But as it is, each man’s consciousness is limited to the past, the present, or the future of that si...

Kiyoaki was standing in the middle of a road that led through open fields. For some reason he was wearing a white cotton kimono and matching hakama, a costume he had never worn, and he was armed with a hunting rifle. The land around him was rolling country, but it was not deserted. He could see a cluster of farmhouses up ahead, and a cyclist passed him on the road. A strange, somber light permeated the entire scene. It was no brighter than the final traces of daylight, and was so diffuse that it could more easily have sprung from the ground rather than the sky, for the grass in the rolling fields gave off a green glow from its very roots and bathed the bicycle in a hazy silver gleam as it vanished into the distance. He looked down and saw that even the thick thongs of his clogs and the veins of his bare feet stood out with brilliant, uncanny clarity.

I really like this style of description

A man may be hard to persuade by rational argument while he is easily swayed by a display of passion, even if it is feigned.

“I clearly saw the bright sea and the shining beach just as they were. Why wasn’t I able to see the subtle change that had occurred deep in the substance of the universe?

When someone great is gone

The creaking of the branches, the crying of the owl, the treacherous footing underneath—everything filled him with delight as he felt himself moving onward and upward as irresistibly as a devouring flame. With each step he imagined himself crushing the darkness beneath his heel as if it were something soft and alive. At the crest of the hill, the brilliant, star-filled winter sky was spread wide.

What came to his mind instead was the memory of a night sea like a huge, black beast with a living warmth, a pulse of its own, and blood that cried out—the sea at Kamakura, whose awesome rumbling had tormented him to the limit of endurance on a summer night.

All along the road, the tall, dry grass swayed in the light wind, its feathery plumes having a faint glint of silver in the cold sunlight. Just beyond the fields, the foothills were shrouded in gray, but in the distance was a corner of clear blue sky and the snow-capped mountains were dazzling white.

In one circle of pale yellow light the lamp above them caught the ultimate symbols of two diametrically opposed worlds to which these young men had given themselves. One of them lay critically ill for the sake of love. The other was preparing himself for the grave demands of reality.

Though the train was racing through the night, the darkness was so thick and the sky so overcast that the fields and mountains beyond were almost blotted out, leaving nearly nothing to mark the forward progress of the train. From time to time, a tiny flash of light or the brief glow of a lantern tore a brilliant rent in the curtain of blackness, but these could not provide any orientation. It was not the train that made this rumbling noise, Honda mused. It was something else. Something that enveloped this little thing as it made its insignificant way through the night. The roaring issued from the massive darkness itself.