The War of Emotion: Yukio Mishima’s The Sea of Fertility – Manuel Marrero & Conor Hultman
April 21, 2025
Spring Snow (1969) – Manuel Marrero
The surface of Yukio Mishima’s exploits and politics is very simple and can be reduced. You can hate women so much it’s cool to be gay. But the singularity of his engagement with the form is not merely that it overwhelms the senses and faculties, or that Mishima’s voice bulldozes the handful of existing Japanese translators to transcend the canon East and West. It deeply understands your repression and brokenness and promises correction or deliverance in anarchy. Probably nobody loved the written word better or more than at this apotheosis of self-determination. To think and write endlessly is the only way to prevent being enervated by terrible beauty. To be this sensitive you have to walk through fire and broken glass, you have to lose things that would soften you by making decisive moves. There’s no move, only the one. Cultivate a relationship with eternity or be a slave to sin and repetition. The deepest sleep of the just is no escape from conviction. One day I won’t need sleep.
The momentum of your thinking while reading Mishima is of sensuous philosophy, kernels of development through palace intrigue and the thin air of early twentieth century Tokyo, combustible crumpled lilacs not going anywhere. The thoughts choke out a way to live, to “delight in sacrilege” ’til “a death marked by elegance.” Sometimes there’s a “no” that splits the sky. There’s nothing better than two beautiful people loving each other. There’s a suicidal consuming passion you may touch like twin stoves. Life will humiliate you with divine force and you will have to reckon with “the actuality of loss versus the fear of it,” the “unmistakable proof of mortality” that “waned in languorous beauty” and “violent grief.”
You shouldn’t be able to put a book down. It should envelop you, effecting epiphenomena. And you can make magic happen from your fingertips. Death is possible and you are a life conductor. Mishima joked he would end his life upon completion. His writing was volcanic to salt the earth. Fidelity to beauty. Fealty to no other cause.
The national mood is emotion and fear is the national emotion. It’s a Dharmic gestalt. You don’t have complete knowledge. You don’t have perfect information. But it’s your move. Don’t expect time of day.
When I want something I want it to be good. When I write something, rather. I want it to be good when I write something. I want it to feel ensouled. To find the soul of poetry in a holding pattern. I’m trying to enact an act of telepathy. A noetic review. You just sit there and bleed and then you stop bleeding. I’m addicted to meaning. There’s a Velvet Underground quality. Everyone around it starts something.
Mishima bled out Spring Snow in a “vanished era,” a world eclipsed by the recent past it’s yearning for. The recent past that largely destroyed the world into being through violence, and on the eve of more violence which would destroy the heroes even if they got what they wanted. We are “the rays of the moon fragmented on the night sea of eternity,” “a confused riot of uncontrollable movements,” in steady degeneration, neurological degradation that begins after “all the energy” and “the fire of youth” cease to “radiate beauty,” and the “cries that rose from those young throats” die.
Live with honor death is always close. Wait long by the river and watch. “History is a record of destruction.” There’s no choice. No move. It’s a tinderbox and the numinous calamities are personal. Mishima writes like maybe that’s all there is. To be a ruinous flagellant and put your pain in it. Breathe in you. Send your body into convulsions. Work you into contortions about the terror of being with other people. Emotions distort reality. A landscape of annihilation spasming beneath the type.
“She was speaking now in retaliation against all those others, too, who surrounded her in her old age, and whose treacherous power she could sense closing in to crush her. Her voice came echoing gaily out of another era, one of upheavals, a violent era forgotten by this generation, in which fear of imprisonment and death held no one in check, an era in which the threat of both was part of the texture of everyday life. She belonged to a generation of women who had thought nothing of washing their dinner plates in a river while corpses went floating past.”
I gave up movies for Lent, stumbling a few times. Cinema has a narcotic quality that aids sleep. There’s a high temporal relativity to film. It can feel very slow or fast. There’s a sensual voiceover mesmerism to the films of Harmony Korine, a vigorously found poetry of thoughts. It aids sleep.
Runaway Horses (1969), The Temple of Dawn (1970), The Decay of the Angel (1971) – Conor Hultman
I choose to describe The Sea of Fertility as the latest crown jewel of world literature (that term to mean works that localize particular cultural expression into a thing of universal importance). It may be the last. It is hard to imagine an insight beyond the pitiless nihilism at the cosmic scale that Mishima places us.
The most admirable aspect of the quartet is the structure. Each book represents a yuga, a section of the world cycle in Indian religion. Spring Snow is the Satya Yuga, the golden age of the gods. The middle two sections represent a steady decline, until the Kali Yuga, represented by The Decay of the Angel, is the world completely abandoned by the gods and bereft of virtue, ready for cleansing annihilation.
This can be appreciated as a set up for social control. According to the elders, of course we are always in the Kali Yuga. The world is always almost too late for salvation, the recent past has always been impossibly better than today. It’s an asymptotic conservative engine, a tool to keep the uncontrollable energy of youth in line.
It is also a brilliant overstructure to build this reincarnation story. Spring Snow would be that time when truth was natural and virtue was easy. Yet, the “heroes” are pure only in a cold, cruel sense. Kiyoaki, the turbulently confused pretty boy. Satoko, with the penchant for deceit. Honda is always hovering there in the narrative, mostly passive and inert– the purity of a specter. Mishima suggests that, if it is a world, it is necessarily corrupted, even in the best times.
In the second book and from thereafter, Honda becomes the perspective character, and the main witness to history. He is initiated into the secret of life and the universe through the knowledge of Kiyoaki’s serial lives. In this way, memory becomes the true golden age. What the reader was able to see as already unideal, in the Taishō era of the first book, is made into better times through the roseate brush of the mind. As Kiyoaki degenerates further and further in his avatars, he paradoxically is refined into the purest possible ideal beyond dreams, existing in a void parallel to Honda’s debased ultimate form.
A ruthless knife of skepticism is forever hunting across the tetralogy. Included in doubt are: historical narratives; the concepts of truth, love, and duty; religion and gods; the project of empiricism; politics; and skepticism itself, arising as it does out of the fallible human brain. A very black Buddhism is ferreted out through passages of theological discursion, leading up to a climax that casts the whole line of Dharmic tradition into shadow. The books ask, what if the diagnosis is right, and the material world is lost, but this knowledge isn’t complete, or doesn’t help? What then?
The parallelisms get so dense that all at once this ancient Indian cosmology, is also the tragic march of the worst fifty years of Japanese history, an x-ray progression of a brain succumbing to dementia, the even and quartered corrosion of the spirit, and a self-reflective commentary on the career of the author. The books themselves are in the end suspected of being impotent gestures thrown up into the endless face of human indignity, useless and scattered in an instance.
Action is simultaneously considered useless, impossible, and the only thing that can make someone human. Isao’s passionate radicalism is honored, he represents all that’s desirable in youth, even if it might be a narcissistic hero-impulse. The assassination plot is underscored by the dramatic irony of taking place right before the mindless carnage of WWII. It’s further dragged into contemplative patheticism by its inspiration, a Meiji era rebellion that represents the very samurai culture that, by Mishima’s time, was being at once erased and reified. It is uncertain whether Isao will be remembered long, and for how long his echoes might be heard through time before getting distorted or snuffed. What he did looked beautiful, and that was enough, perhaps.
Fatalism is also suggested, especially in the story arc of Ying Chan in The Temple of Dawn. The confusion of how to read the future, and what to do if it is accurately read, arises only to be clouded over by the end of The Decay of the Angel. The prophecy is broken, the reincarnating link is severed, and the preceding narrative is put in uncertain terms. If the miraculous can happen, it is possible it can cease to happen. Absurdities that do have a logic run throughout the series. They point to a disgraceful quality of the human condition. We have the sense that there is right, and good, and their complementary opposites, that there is a goal, and a reason to achieve it, and these must exist at the same time with the certainty of death. Honda desperately tries to find a spiritual philosophy, or at least a confirmed nihilism, to orient these terms to. Mishima leaves us exactly where we are, stranded at the end of answers.
This disgust only keeps its power by admitting, even loving, beauty. We are shown pageants of the rich, the tortured ardor of the young, the height of civilization embodied in a man’s search for truth, and these are laden with gorgeous passages threaded with poeticisms and metaphoric language, wrapped up in a plot as tight and replete with surprises as anything out of the English or the Russian novelists. This, all this, is digestive chocolate to ease the bitter pill in. The books are a suicide note, after all. The best one of all time. The author was well aware of the empty irony of such an achievement.