Spring Snow

Spring Snow

Yukio Mishima, 1966

We live in an age without heroic death.

            Nobody in the world would be happier to know that his life was nearly inseparable from his art than the bodybuilding Japanese power bottom Yukio Mishima, who spent his entire artistic career trying to reconcile the two. Some folks will tell you that you shouldn’t judge a work of art based upon the life of the artist but I’m not one of them. For example, I think it’s really useful to know that Fitzgerald was a hysterical alcoholic. I am of the opinion that context is important to enjoying or understanding anything, and that knowing more about an artist will always make a work of art deeper and richer. I can think of few artists whose lives loom more monolithically over their work than Yukio Mishima. That might be one of the reasons I like him so much, he was so dramatic and over-the-top compared to your average sweater-clad author. Mishima painted on a different, larger canvas than the one upon which some MFA-toting writer might work. His life was his bibliography. What you should know: Mishima was Japan’s most famous writer, and a multiple Nobel nominee, before he and four members of his private army (of a sort, I think of it as more of a boy’s club, like the Boy Scouts mixed with a martial arts organization, where Mishima could watch athletic young men march around in designer uniforms) stormed a Japanese Defense Force base, kidnapped a general, and before the assembled soldiers delivered a speech about power, glory, action, the Emperor, the shape of contemporary Japan, and Westernization, a speech that no one listened to, and then, finally, Mishima committed ritual suicide by disembowelment. Having read many of his books, and read much about him, it’s hard not to think of this all as being planned, manufactured, as some sort of fatal performance art. Harmony of pen and sword. Other things you should know: Mishima was a bodybuilder, and a homosexual, though he had a wife and children. He was a singular, contradictory, individual human being. There’s probably never been a cat quite like Mishima, which is an achievement in and of itself. 

            Spring Snow is the first book of the Sea of Fertility tetralogy, a cycle of four novels about sex, death, art, rebirth, struggle, beauty and purity. They were Mishima’s final work. The story takes place in 1912, a few years after the first Russo-Japanese War, the war in which Japan took to the global stage as a modern imperial power. Throughout history it’s been common for a rising imperial power to pick a fight with an empire that is crippled, old, weak. The United States took on old man Spain during the Spanish-American War, and thus announced herself to the world. It’s a kind of really violent debutante ball. At the Battle of Tsushima the Imperial Japanese Navy sank twenty-one Russian ships, including seven battleships, while only losing three ships of their own. The casualties were something like six thousand dead Russian sailors, and a hundred dead Japanese sailors. In many ways the Russo-Japanese War was a rehearsal for the brutal wars of the 20th Century: trench warfare, gas attacks, doomed charges and massive naval conflicts. A fascinating subject.

            On the surface Spring Snow is a very simple love story: Kiyoaki Matsugae, the son of the wealthy Marquis Matsugae, and grandson of a man lionized as a pillar of the Meiji Restoration (an event in Japanese history in which power was transferred from the Tokugawa Shogunate and returned to the Emperor) carries on a doomed affair with a childhood friend, Satoko, the beautiful and refined daughter of the Count Ayakura. The Matsugaes are enormously wealthy, but their lineage has humble origins, and little historical prestige beyond the grandfather. The Ayakuras have a name, imperial connections, and little else. Satoko is betrothed to a princeling so the two of them carry on their affair in secret, at cheap boarding houses. Kiyoaki impregnates Satoko, which brings much shame and distress to their families; she is forced into an abortion and escapes to a convent, where she shaves her head and turns her back to the world. Kiyoaki makes the journey to the convent, which is high in the snowy mountains, but she refuses to see him, and the cold gives him pneumonia and he dies at twenty. It’s about a lot more than that, though. It’s about the conflict between old and new, East and West, soft and strong. Mishima is very psychological, like Dostoevsky, and his characters are always a mess of personalities so strong that they cannot help but conflict when they meet. Kiyoaki, a teenager, is ruled by his emotions, he has no rationality and he lives a directionless life. He has no willpower. He is very self-absorbed, and his environment provides him little in the way of warmth, comfort, or emotional support. He's a very lost and lonely person. Satoko, who is two years older and thus already an old maid, is controlled, reserved, elegant, and she quietly bears the misfortune of being a woman in this particular time and place, where she is merely an object for the prestige of men. The Matsugaes are vigorous and stupid. The Ayakuras are regal and complacent.

            I haven’t yet read the other three books in the Sea of Fertility, though I intend to. I gather that the plot is that Honda, one of Kiyoaki’s school friends, an intelligent, dedicated, serious man, believes that he finds Kiyoaki’s spirit reincarnated in various people throughout his life. So Kiyoaki is the original incarnation, and then in Runaway Horses he encounters him again, in a new body, in The Temple of Dawn another form, and The Decay of the Angel a final form. Sounds like an interesting idea. I can’t wait to get through all of them.

            I had struggled with the book I read just before this (Period by Dennis Cooper, which I didn’t finish and I don’t intend to) and was feeling really down on myself because I couldn’t bring myself to finish a 130-page book. Period was sloppy, lazy, hazy, ugly and pointless. It read as if almost zero effort was put into writing it. So I was sitting around, despondent, with an awful taste in my mouth that I just couldn’t get rid of, and I said to myself: what’s the opposite of a sloppy, lazy book? Mishima was the first thing that came to mind. Mishima’s prose is stunningly beautiful, full of rich, luxurious texture, and fine detail, golden detail. He moves from the hot action of a sword stroke to the cool silk of a kimono with an uncanny ease. It’s very precise, very masculine and powerful writing. Very clear, lucid, and easy to follow, sort of akin to Ernest Hemingway, though the similarities end there. Mishima isn’t given to ostentatious displays of punctuation. He might be one of the most naturally talented writers I could think of. What a burden walking around with such talent burning inside must have been!

            It must be said that Mishima was definitely a far-right author. He was radically conservative. He might be the only ultraconservative writer that I can really stomach for an extended period (or at least I hope so, since the Sea of Fertility is about 1200 pages long). Maybe Louis Ferdinand Celine, maybe I can take him for a similar length. Mishima, though, was a strange sort of conservative. He wasn’t a bigot, and he certainly wasn’t a Nazi, and he thought that World War Two was the work of “War Profiteers,” but he was very opposed to Westernization and he yearned for a return to an ephemeral, purified Japan. And it’s a point in Mishima’s favor that he didn’t support any regimes that were actively involved in the killing of human beings, unlike Celine, who wrote anti-Semitic pamphlets in Nazi-occupied France, or like Borges, who guzzled celebrity while the military dictatorship murdered tens of thousands of people.

            Though I would consider myself firmly on the opposite end of the political spectrum from Mishima I must say that Mishima’s philosophy is not without its allure. It’s a very brutal, unforgiving philosophy but in a lot of ways he’s right. He believes that people have the right to a dignified death of their choosing, which I agree with, and I don’t think it’s at all controversial to say that one of the utensils of capitalism is deindividualization. People, who could have been great human beings, are reduced to consumers, or cogs in a machine. There’s a saying: the nail that sticks up gets hammered down. Mishima believed that’s how society defeats people, by turning them into nails. One of the other things I appreciate about Mishima is that he is all about self-reinvention, about turning yourself into a “complete man” who is strong enough to handle great art and enormous emotions. I guess where Mishima and I differ is that he sees a samurai as a complete man and I see, I dunno, Che Guevara. There’s a great Henry Rollins essay (a Mishima disciple if there ever was one) where he talks about how bodybuilding changed his life, and as he absorbed the lessons communicated to him by the Iron he felt the years of fear, humiliation, and self-loathing melting away under the deluge of his self discovery, and that bodybuilding keeps him mentally sharp and emotionally strong. I can’t say that I’m not jealous. I wish that as a teen someone had shown me the way to destroy the adult world. Instead I was shown the way to let the adult world destroy me. Every time I read a Mishima book I get in this strange mood where I want to do a bunch of push-ups and get big dumb prison muscles and read poetry and such. Of course I never do. Harmony of Pen and Sword!

            Since I have three more books remaining in the Sea of Fertility, and I don’t want to run out of things to say about Yukio Mishima I’m going to end this review (or whatever you want to call it) here, and say that I’m very much looking forward to finishing the other novels in this cycle. Mishima was a unique and fascinating character. While I may not agree with Mishima on a lot of things, I appreciate the amount of care and artistry and beauty he put into his novels. All artists must believe that their work has meaning, but few go to such great lengths to bring that meaning to life.