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Yukio Mishima

Yukio Mishima Books

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Spring Snow

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Runaway Horses

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Sun & Steel

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Thirst for love

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Life for Sale

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Star

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Beautiful Star

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Kinkaku-Ji

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“Count Ayakura’s abstraction persisted. He believed that only a vulgar mentality was willing to acknowledge the possibility of catastrophe. He felt that taking naps was much more beneficial than confronting catastrophes. However precipitous the future might seem, he learned from the game of kemari that the ball must always come down. There was no call for consternation. Grief and rage, along with other outbursts of passion, were mistakes easily committed by a mind lacking in refinement. And the Count was certainly not a man who lacked refinement. 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.”

AcceptanceIndifferenceJapanEleganceInactionRefinementPassivity
Book:Spring Snow
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“The acceptance of suffering as a proof of courage was the theme of primitive initiation rites in the distant past, and all such rites were at the same time ceremonies of death and resurrection. Men have by now forgotten the profound hidden struggle between consciousness and the body that exists in courage, and physical courage in particular. Consciousness is generally considered to be passive, and the active body to constitute the essence of all that is bole and daring; yet in the drama of physical courage the roles are, in fact, reversed. The flesh beats a steady retreat into its function of self-defense, while it is clearly consciousness that controls the decision that sends the body soaring into self-abandonment. It is the ultimate in clarity of consciousness that constitutes one of the strongest contributing factors in self-abandonment.”

ConsciousnessCourage
Book:Sun & Steel
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“Only through the group, I realised — through sharing the suffering of the group — could the body reach that height of existence that the individual alone could never attain. And for the body to reach that level at which the divine might be glimpsed, a dissolution of individuality was necessary. The tragic quality of the group was also necessary, the quality that constantly raised the group out of the abandon and torpor into which it was prone to lapse, leading it to an ever-mounting shared suffering and so to death, which was the ultimate suffering. The group must be open to death — which meant, of course, that it must be a community of warriors.”

CommunityStrengthUnityWarriors
Book:Sun & Steel
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“To put it in a rather vulgar way, I had been dreaming about love in the firm belief that I could not be loved, but at the final stage I had substituted desire for love and felt a sort of relief. But in the end I had understood that desire itself demanded for its fulfillment that I should forget about the conditions of my existence, and that I should abandon what for me constituted the only barrier to love, namely the belief that I could not be loved. I had always thought of desire as being something clearer than it really is, and I had not realized that it required people to see themselves in a slightly dreamlike, unreal way.”

LoveDesire
Book:The Temple of the Golden Pavilion
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“It was far easier to imagine the annihilation of one's entire family than to picture things that now belonged to a distant, impossible past, say an array of bottles of imported liquors in a Ginza shopwindow, or the sight of neon signs flickering in the night sky over the Ginza. As a result our imagination confined itself to easier paths. Imagination like this, which follows the path of least resistance, has no connection with coldness of heart, no matter how cruel it may appear. It is nothing but the product of a lazy, tepid mind.”

ImaginationWartime
Book:Confessions of a Mask
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“Perché pensate di aver peccato? se un amore è giusto il Buddha non può far altro che proteggerlo." [...] “Pensate che l'amore sia una colpa?" le disse. Lei non rispose, e lui le chiese ancora: "Oppure non vi ponete questo interrogativo, perché non temete il castigo del Buddha?" [...] "Non c'è pericolo che diventi un incendio?" disse la donna con un'espressione scherzosa negli occhi vivaci. "Certo che diventerà un incendio, ogni vero amore lo diventa", rispose con audacia l'impulsivo Haruie.”

LovePassionGuilty
Book:La foresta in fiore
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“Again, there were maidens who cherished the firm belief that he had come from the sea. Because within his breast could be heard the roaring of the sea. Because in the pupils of his eyes there lingered the mysterious and eternal horizon that the sea leaves as a keepsake deep in the eyes of all who are born at the seaside and forced to depart from it. Because his signs were sultry like the tidal breezes of full summer, fragrant with the smell of seaweed cast upon the shore.”

SeaOceanRomanticSt Sebastian
Book:Confessions of a Mask
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“나는 이러한 얼굴에 직면한다. 중요한 비밀을 고백할 때에도, 미에 대한 격렬한 감동을 호소할 때에도, 자신의 내장을 꺼내어 보여주는 듯한 경우에도, 내가 직면하는 것은 이러한 얼굴이다. 인간은 평소에 인간을 향해 이러한 얼굴을 보이면 안 된다. 그 얼굴은 더할 나위 없이 충실히 나의 우스꽝스러운 초조감을 그대로 흉내 내어, 마치 무시무시한 거울처럼 변해 있었다. 아무리 잘생긴 얼굴이라도, 그럴 때에는 나와 똑같이 추한 얼굴로 변모한다. 그것을 본 순간 내가 표현하려고 생각했던 중요한 것들은 기왓장이나 다를 바 없는 무가치한 존재로 전락하고 만다.......”

People
Book:The Temple of the Golden Pavilion
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“Every morning, the newspapers are crammed full of human-interest stories, and on television we see one human after another. When animals do make an occasional appearance, they are ascribed human characteristics to make them palatable. And people only talk about themselves. Even if the subject is natural phenomena like earthquakes, tsunamis or cherry blossoms coming into full bloom, everything is seen in terms of the impact on people. Nothing delights people more than to talk about people dying or being killed.”

Human NatureVanitySpeciesismSolipsism
Book:Beautiful Star
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“El intelecto, lejos de ser un valor cultural inofensivo, me había sido otorgado únicamente como un arma, un medio de supervivencia. Así, las disciplinas físicas que más adelante serían tan necesarias para mi supervivencia se podían comparar en cierto sentido al modo en que una persona para quien el cuerpo ha sido el único medio de vida se embarca en un frenético intento de adquirir una educación intelectual cuando su juventud está en el lecho de muerte.”

Inspirational AttitudeBody Language
Book:Sun & Steel
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“Two men may talk together enthusiastically for an hour or so about shared experiences, and yet not have a true conversation. A lonely man who wants to indulge his nostalgic mood feels the need of someone with whom to share it. When he finds such a companion, he starts to pour out his monologue as though recounting a dream. And so the talk goes on between them, their monologues alternating, but after a time they suddenly become aware that they have nothing to say to each other. They are like two men standing at either side of a chasm, the bridge across which has been destroyed.”

Loneliness
Book:Runaway Horses
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“It was certainly not consolation that Kashiwagi sought in beauty. .. What he loved was that for a short while after his breath had brought beauty into existence in the air, his own clubfeet and gloomy thinking remained there, more clearly and more vividly than before. The uselessness of beauty, the fact that beauty which had passed through his body left no mark there whatsoever, that it changed absolutely nothing- it was this that Kashiwagi loved.”

Beauty
Book:The Temple of the Golden Pavilion
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“Beauty, on the other hand, is always on this side. It is in this world, in the present, firm; it can be touched with the hand. That our sexual appetites can taste it is beauty's precondition. Sensuality is, therefore, essential. It confirms beauty. However, beauty can never be reached, because the susceptibilities of sense, more than anything else, block attainment of it. The method by which the Greeks expressed beauty through sculpture was a wise one. I am a novelist. Of all the rubbish that has been invented in the modern times, the profession I have chosen is the worst. Don't you think that for the expression of beauty it is the most bungling and low-class of professions?”

BeautySexualitySensualityGreeksYukio Mishima
Book:Forbidden Colors
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“Beauty has become a stimulus to garrulity. It has gotten so that on confronting the beautiful one feels duty-bound to say something in a great hurry. It has gotten so we feel we must convert beauty right away. If we don't convert it, it's dangerous. Like explosives, beauty has become a difficult thing to own. The power of possessing beauty through silence, this majestic power for which one would lay down his life, has been lost.”

BeautyGarrulity
Book:Forbidden Colors
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“Finally, rocking the whole harbour and carrying to every city windows; besetting kitchens with dinner on the stove, and shoddy hotel bedrooms where sheets are never changed, and desks waiting for children to come home, and schools and tennis courts and graveyards; plunging everything into a moment of grief and ruthlessly tearing even the hearts of the uninvolved, the Rakuyo's horn screamed out one last enormous farewell. Trailing white smoke, she sailed straight out to sea.”

LossGriefFarewell
Book:The Sailor who Fell from Grace with the Sea
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“Suddenly the full long wail of a ship's horn surged through the open window and flooded the dim room - a cry of boundless, dark, demanding grief; pitch-black and glabrous as a whale's back and burdened with all the passions of the tides, the memory of voyages beyond counting, the joys, the humiliations: the sea was screaming. Full of the glitter and the frenzy of night, the horn thundered in, conveying from the distant offing, from the dead center of the sea, a thirst for the dark nectar in the little room.”

BooksPoetic
Book:The Sailor who Fell from Grace with the Sea
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