Spring Snow (The Sea of Fertility #1)

by Yukio Mishima

Just let matters slide. How much better to accept each sweet drop of the honey that was Time, than to stoop to the vulgarity latent in every decision. However grave the matter at hand might be, if one neglected it for long enough, the act of neglect itself would begin to affect the situation, and someone else would emerge as an ally. Such was Count Ayakura’s version of political theory.

No one considered Satoko’s soul; it was her hair alone that pertained to the national interest.

the torment of a coward.

There were times when he wanted to shout out his guilt at the top of his voice.

The feeling that the year was ending was a knife in his heart—this year above all years—for it would never come again. In these last, waning days, he had come to realize that this year had seen the peak of his life.

“This year was mine—and now it’s gone,” he cried out to himself. “It’s gone! Just like a cloud dissolving.”

And then the loneliness—it’s something that burns. Like hot thick soup you can’t bear inside your mouth unless you blow on it again and again. And there it is, always in front of me. In its heavy white bowl of thick china, dirty and dull as an old pillow. Who is it that keeps forcing it on me? “I’ve been left all alone. I’m burning with desire. I hate what’s happened to me. I’m lost and I don’t know where I’m going. What my heart wants it can’t have … my little private joys, rationalizations, self-deceptions—all gone! All I have left is a flame of longing for times gone by, for what I’ve lost. Growing old for nothing. I’m left with a terrible emptiness. What can life offer me but bitterness? Alone in my room … alone all through the nights … cut off from the world and from everyone in it by my own despair. And if I cry out, who is there to hear me? And all the while my public self is as graceful as ever. A hollow nobility—that’s what’s left of me.”

He felt the desire to take a steady look at the shattered fragments of a poem that had once been alive inside him too, until he had grown weary of looking.

Only the elegance that had been so conscious a part of him had withered. His heart had become desolate. Nowhere in himself could he find the kind of graceful sorrow that inspires poems. He was empty now, his soul a desert swept by parching winds. He had never felt more estranged from elegance and from beauty as well.

He wondered about the tortured look he had seen on his friend’s face just a moment before. Hadn’t it in fact been an expression of intense joy, the kind to be found nowhere but at the extremity of human existence? Perhaps Kiyoaki had seen something, and Honda envied him that, an emotion that in turn stirred an odd shame and self-reproach in him.