Spring Snow (The Sea of Fertility #1)

by Yukio Mishima

“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...