Spring Snow (The Sea of Fertility #1)

by Yukio Mishima

A few moments later, sword clattering, boots squeaking, the martial figure of His Imperial Highness Prince Harunori appeared on the porch. He greeted his father with a military salute, and the immediate impression he gave Satoko was one of empty dignity. But how obvious the paternal pride of Prince Toin was in this display of military pomp, and how evident the young prince’s conviction that he was fulfilling every detail of his father’s projected image of him.

During this exchange Kiyoaki had chosen his every word with care and an eye to its suitability for the occasion before smoothly giving voice to it. He made it patently clear that in a situation such as this, the emptiest words were those that aroused the strongest emotions. He professed to live for sentiment alone, but circumstances now compelled him to learn the politics of the intellect.

His eye was caught by the iridescent back of a beetle that had been standing on the windowsill but was now advancing steadily into his room. Two reddish purple stripes ran the length of its brilliant oval shell of green and gold. Now it waved its antennae cautiously as it began to inch its way forward on its tiny hacksaw legs, which reminded Kiyoaki of minuscule jeweler’s blades. In the midst of time’s dissolving whirlpool, how absurd that this tiny dot of richly concentrated brilliance should endure in a secure world of its own. As he watched, he gradually became fascinated. Little by little the beetle kept edging its glittering body closer to him as if its pointless progress were a lesson that when traversing a world of unceasing flux, the only thing of importance was to radiate beauty.

KIYOAKI DREW COMFORT from the peace of mind that comes with loss. In his heart, he always preferred the actuality of loss to the fear of it. He had lost Satoko. And with that he was content. For by now he had learned how to quiet even his subsequent resentment.

Every show of feeling was now governed with a marvelous economy. If a candle has burned brilliantly but now stands alone in the dark with its flame extinguished, it need no longer fear that its substance will dissolve into hot wax. For the first time in his life, Kiyoaki came to realize the healing powers of solitude.

“Don’t be angry, Kri. I don’t mean to insult your sister for a moment. All I’m trying to do is find words for the strangeness of a lover’s existence. Let me put it this way: although she is here in this picture, it shows her only as she was at a certain moment in the past. But I feel that here in this emerald she gave me when we parted is her soul, just as she is now at this moment. In my mind, the emerald and the picture—her body and her soul—were separated. But look now: the two are reunited.

“Even when we’re with someone we love, we’re foolish enough to think of her body and soul as being separate. Although I am apart from her now, I may be in a much better position than I was to appreciate the structure of the single crystal that is Ying Chan. Separation is painful, but so is its opposite. And if being together brings joy, then it is only proper that separation should do the same in its own way.

His depression still clung to him after he and his companion had taken their seats in the courtroom.

But now, just three days before, Kiyoaki had suddenly come to him and, like a newly cured patient transmitting his disease to someone else, had passed on to his friend the virus of introspection.

Shigekuni sat thinking. Once passion was set in motion according to its own laws, then it was irresistible. This was a theory that would never be accepted by modern law, which took it as self-evident that conscience and reason ruled man.

“There is an abundance of death in our lives. We never lack reminders—funerals, cemeteries, withered commemorative bouquets, memories of the dead, deaths of friends, and then the anticipation of our own death. Who knows? Perhaps in their own way the dead make a great deal of life. Perhaps they’re always looking in our direction from their own land—at our towns, our schools, the smokestacks of our factories,

Although Honda was well aware that a man in love has no room in his heart for anything but his feelings and loses even his ability to sympathize with the sorrows of others, he could imagine no heart more naturally suited than Kiyoaki’s to be such a vessel of pure passion, cold and tough as tempered glass.

“Yes. Though I don’t yet know just how I’ll be able to do it. The path we’re taking is not a road, Kiyo, it’s a pier, and it ends someplace where the sea begins. It can’t be helped.”

For once, however, Honda had miscalculated in attempting to make use of Kiyoaki’s delusions of vanity as a means to console him. For he had not the slightest interest in his own attractiveness any more, nor even in Satoko’s love for him. He was only concerned with when and where the two of them could meet without anxiety, as freely as they liked, regardless of anyone else. And he feared that by now it could only happen in some place beyond this world, and only when this world had been destroyed. The vital issue was not feeling but circumstance. In his weary, desperate, bloodshot eyes there was a vision of a world thrown into chaos for their sake.

remembered once hearing that invalids near to death look at their hands constantly.

Kiyoaki felt that he had become part of the background and that his life and love for Satoko were being treated as things already terminated. Before his very eyes, his father and mother and grandmother seemed to be carefully planning the funeral, quite unconcerned that the corpse could hear every word. Even before his funeral, something seemed already to have been buried. And so on the one hand he was like an attenuated corpse and, on the other, a severely scolded child who had no one to turn to.

had something of the soiled plumage of a dead bird, a creature that had once sung beautifully but whose flesh was tasteless and so inedible after all.

An atmosphere of cordiality pervaded the room, however fragile the fiction that sustained it. For the fiction supplied them with that tangible element so vital at this moment. No one considered Satoko’s soul; it was her hair alone that pertained to the national interest.

Finally the Countess broke down and wept as she pleaded with her daughter, but this gained her nothing,

Ever since the old woman’s thwarted suicide, however, he could only think of her with indescribable disgust.

To judge by her having betrayed him to his father in her farewell letter, he was convinced that some twist of character made her derive a peculiar pleasure from betraying all those without exception whom she had brought together. He had come to realize that she was like those people who would tend their gardens scrupulously just for the pleasure of tearing up their flowers once they had bloomed.

“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.”

Kiyoaki, meantime, glanced up fearfully at the Emperor’s face, his imagination quickened by the memory of the late Emperor’s having patted him on the head when he was a boy. His Majesty seemed to be rather more frail than his imperial father had been, and although he was listening to the reading of his own composition, his face showed no sign of complacency, but retained an icy composure. Kiyoaki suddenly shook in fear at the totally improbable notion that His Imperial Majesty was in fact suppressing an anger that was directed at him. “I’ve dared to betray His Majesty. There’s nothing to do but to die.” He held fast to that one thought as he stood there, the atmosphere around him heavy with the rich fragrance of incense, feeling as though he might collapse at any moment.

vanished. A frantic desire to break out of his plight grew more intense every day. Although everything had one single message for him—be it every hour, every morning, every noon and night, or the sky, the trees, the clouds and wind all telling him to give her up—he was still tormented by uncertainty.

IT WAS A MORNING when light flakes of snow danced in the brisk wind that swept over the plain of Yamato. They seemed too fragile even for spring snow, but were rather more reminiscent of a swarm of summer insects.