Mishima Yukio, Spring Snow, trans. Michael Gallagher (New York, NY: Vintage, 2000), 389 pp, ISBN 9780099282990, paperback.
Mishima Yukio has attracted many labels: Japanese nationalist, sexual deviant, narcissistic terrorist. [1] He is remembered for having infamously used his private militia to stage a coup at the headquarters of the Japanese Self-Defense Forces’s Eastern Command, failing which, he committed suicide by slitting his belly. Mishima’s literature is similarly provocative—a captivating theatre of beauty, eroticism, and death, closely intertwined with the surreal performance that was his life.
Seductive charm aside, though, Mishima’s literature can be a chore to read. In Japan, he is infamous for his frequent use of obscure Chinese characters. Readers of his translated work are, furthermore, not spared from his habit of interrupting his narratives with rambling philosophical passages. Gwenn Petersen notes that these passages frequently contradict one another and do not form a consistent philosophy.
My first experience with Mishima was through Confessions of a Mask (1949), which I abandoned halfway in frustration. Despite that, I somehow continued to read three more of his novels. Only then did I start to vaguely enjoy his fiction. [2]
My love-hate relationship with Mishima is best captured by the first book of his Sea of Fertility tetralogy, Spring Snow (1969). [3] Like all the other Mishima novels I have read, Spring Snow is a simultaneously pleasurable and tedious experience. I am recommending this novel because it best puts me in mind of the complicated way in which I have come to love Mishima. Through this review, I aim to demonstrate how the tedium I experienced when reading Spring Snow eventually resulted in my enjoyment of the novel.
The novel’s plot involves the relationship between the protagonist Matsugae Kiyoaki and his love interest Satoko Ayakura. Unfortunately, because Kiyoaki is not very serious about their relationship, it barely develops. Eventually, Kiyoaki pays the price when Satoko is arranged to be married to a royal prince. This leads Kiyoaki to finally take action, though in the most drastic way possible: getting Satoko pregnant. In the aristocratic world to which Kiyoaki and Satoko belong, the moment someone is engaged, having affairs with anyone else is forbidden. News of Satoko’s pregnancy therefore becomes a scandal for both the Matsugae and Ayakura families. At this point, the plot abruptly accelerates as the Matsugaes attempt to cover up the scandal and Kiyoaki endeavours to reclaim Satoko.
Despite this exciting plot, my first impression of Spring Snow was that it was remarkably tedious to read. This is because the aforementioned plot only begins to advance in the final third of the novel. On the other hand, the former two thirds are a gruellingly slow read. Many passages are dedicated to ornate descriptions of Kiyoaki’s home, the Matsugae estate, as well as Kiyoaki’s detailed daydreams. Chapters seventeen and eighteen, detailing the vapid conversation between aristocratic families invited to the Matsugae estate for a banquet, are Mishima's most successful attempt at putting his readers to sleep. Fortunately, readers of the work in translation are spared from Mishima’s obscure Chinese characters—present in the original—which have a hand in slowing down the reading experience even further. Kiyoaki’s “Otachimachi” ritual, for instance, is conveyed by words such as 盥 (wash basin) and 歌留多 (karuta cards). In Japan, these words are usually written in hiragana script, [4] which suggests that the Chinese characters for them might be unfamiliar to Japanese readers. In order to decipher these words, Japanese readers would probably have to juggle between the novel and a dictionary, a process which would no doubt further exacerbate the movement of an already slow-moving plot. [5] Such factors make Spring Snow an arguably laborious read.
Yet, Spring Snow gets interesting when we begin to suspect that Mishima might have intended for it to be that way—that is, a laborious read. We might first notice how the novel’s slow plot echoes the general demeanour of its characters. Satoko’s father, Count Ayakura, is a paradigm of a passive aristocratic character. At the highpoint of the plot when Kiyoaki’s family is scrambling to prevent news of Satoko’s pregnancy from leaking out to the public, Count Ayakura is reluctant to help. Mishima employs the extended metaphor of kemari, a ball game played by aristocrats since Japan’s seventh century, to describe how Count Ayakura is unwilling to kick the kemari ball, instead waiting for someone else to do it. In this way, the Count leaves all the cover-up work to the Matsugaes. Count Ayakura’s refusal to take action can be read as a self-reflexive comment that the novel makes on its own slow-to-advance narrative—its unwillingness to kick its plot into motion, as it were. Another element of Spring Snow which resonates with this notion of passivity is Kiyoaki’s daydream-prone personality, which directly interrupts the plot’s advancement by forcing the narrative to momentarily digress into Kiyoaki’s fantasies. At various points in the novel, then, because passivity appears as such a common motif, we might begin to feel as if the tedium of Mishima’s prose is intentional—that it in fact constitutes a performative critique of his aristocratic characters and their tedious passivity. Mishima even seems to imply that the characters themselves are responsible for making the plot advance so sluggishly. The novel’s main plot, which involves the relationship between Kiyoaki and Satoko, takes so long to develop precisely because Kiyoaki refuses to actively deepen his relationship with Satoko. Similarly, Count Ayakura, reluctant to cover up Kiyoaki’s scandal, fails to play his role in the final third of the plot. He instead delays it and, in doing so, impels the narrative’s digression into the aforementioned kemari metaphor. Because this metaphor that details the Count’s passivity directly interferes with the narrative, his passive character is doubly emphasised. In this way, Mishima seems to blame his characters for making Spring Snow so tedious to read.
The tedium of Spring Snow becomes even more significant when considered in the context of Japanese history. The novel is set in 1912, the final year of Japan’s Meiji era. This era began when the Japanese emperor was restored to power in 1868, thus bringing a close to the ‘feudal’ government from the prior Tokugawa period. [6] The return of power to the emperor can be equated to a revival of Japan’s classical Heian period, when aristocratic culture was at its height. [7] The fact that Mishima chose to set the novel in 1912—the year in which the Meiji emperor—suggests that it is also time for the aristocracy to fade away. Considering this in relation to Mishima’s critique of his aristocratic characters, we can surmise that he is casting a critical eye on the Japanese nobility’s refusal to relinquish their classical golden age. After all, in Spring Snow, Mishima’s lush use of Chinese characters and his detailed descriptions of aristocratic practices preserved since Japan’s classical age serve to convey the timeless elegance of this world, even as it intrudes into the twentieth century. This world, though, is but an eden tediously static, unchanging and disconnected from the rest of the world. Just as the Meiji era inevitably meets its demise, the aristocracy cannot refuse the flow of history forever.
Similarly, Spring Snow cannot eternally put off its narrative. Kiyoaki’s decision to get Satoko pregnant sets both the aristocratic world and the narrative into motion. His act is not only a violation of aristocratic customs, but also poses the danger of leaking out from the closed aristocratic world to the rest of Japan. In this way, Kiyoaki’s transgressive act is one that shoves the aristocratic world out of its shell, forcing it to come face-to-face with the modern world outside. At the same time, Kiyoaki stops being passive and his character becomes directly instrumental in the advancement of the plot of Spring Snow, finally liberating us from the tedious experience of the novel’s first two-thirds. After enduring all the way, we are finally rewarded by the pleasure of a thrilling narrative.
However, that was not the only pleasure I got out of reading the novel. I have personally experienced great pleasure from finishing this review of Spring Snow, having managed to find a coherent way to discuss tedium in Mishima’s fiction. I have spent many hours puzzling over this aspect of the novel, experimenting with innumerable ways to connect the dots. Although the process was undoubtedly tedious, I would be lying if I said that I did not enjoy it.
This is exactly the kind of relationship I have with Mishima’s oeuvre. The labor of finishing his novels sometimes bores me to tears, and I frequently ditch them for other books before deciding to return to them. Yet, mulling over cryptic passages, discovering parallels in unexpected places, and finding a way to put it all together are incomparable pleasures. For instance, images from the monotonous first two-thirds of Spring Snow begin to take on eerie newfound significance when they are considered alongside the larger theme of the Sea of Fertility tetralogy: reincarnation. One of these recurring images involves the snapping turtles that Kiyoaki is peculiarly afraid of. Because these turtles inhabit the pond in the Matsugae state, it is possible to imagine them as the hideously reincarnated forms of the aristocrats, eternally trapped in their idyllic world. Connections can also be made across Mishima’s relatively homogenous oeuvre. For example, the spectral way in which the beautiful youth Yuichi appears and disappears from the opening and closing of Forbidden Colors could possibly relate to the Sea of Fertility’s ideas of reincarnation. When read with an eye for these connections, Mishima’s work offers much greater pleasure than when merely read for the plot.
Although Mishima might appear to some as a one-dimensional author that repeatedly flogs the dead horses of aesthetics, violence and sexuality, [8] looking past that reveals a writer who crafted what could be called an elaborate mythos, supported by a nearly encyclopaedic knowledge of history, philosophy, and literature from both the east and the west. Readers interested in Mishima's signature themes of deviance and transgression might wish to pick Confessions of a Mask (1949) or The Temple of the Golden Pavilion (1956) as starting points rather than Spring Snow, where such themes are less apparent. However, I would say that Spring Snow is worth paying attention to in the way it explicates the complicated process by which we can grow to enjoy the spectacle that is Mishima Yukio. In order to express this process once again, I would like to conclude this review with a passage close to the end of Spring Snow that describes Kiyoaki’s gruelling trek to a monastery:
Having come this way six times in the last five days, it would seem that there was nothing left to catch him unawares. But as he began to make his way upward from where he had left the rickshaw, with unsteady legs and stumbling feet, he looked around him and the world took on a mournful clarity in his fevered eyes. The scenery that had become familiar in recent days now had a strange novelty about it that was almost unnerving…But could such a still and perfect world, which eschewed all intimacy, really bear any relation to the familiar world he knew? (374)
My experience with Mishima is very much like Kiyoaki’s on his way to the monastery. As I trudge through Mishima’s seemingly monotonous world, thinking that I have already seen all there is to see, something strangely novel begins to emerge. It makes me feel like I am attaining enlightenment after a long period of reincarnation, thus allowing me to view my tedious readerly experience in a new, unexpectedly refreshing light. I hope that readers initially turned off by Mishima might consider reading him in this way in order to enjoy Mishima—as well as literature in general—in a wholly different way. The pleasure of the text, after all, can be said to consist of more pleasures than one, and tedium is one of the paths that opens us to those yet undiscovered worlds of enjoyment.
Tan Wei Lin is a Japanese Studies major with a minor in English Literature approaching his fifth year in NUS, having had spent the fourth studying Japanese at Waseda University. His interests lie mainly in modern Japanese literature and culture, especially in its potential to reshape western modes of thought such as psychoanalysis and queer theory.
[1] Scholarship on his work has a tendency to dramatise these elements. For example, see the titles of works by Roy Starrs (Deadly Dialectics: Sex, Violence and Nihilism in the World of Yukio Mishima, 1994), Jerry Piven (The Madness and Perversion of Yukio Mishima, 2004), and Andrew Rankin (Mishima, Aesthetic Terrorist: An Intellectual Portrait, 2018).
[2] I am probably not the only one who feels frustrated by Mishima’s writing. One of my professors, Emi Morita, told me that she read Mishima’s short story, “Patriotism” (1961), a long time ago. She said that she found his prose annoying to read and has avoided Mishima ever since. (That was until she offered to help me grapple with Forbidden Colors [1951, 1953] for her module on working with Japanese academic sources. Professor Morita said that she enjoyed Forbidden Colors a lot more than “Patriotism”.)
[3] The subsequent three novels of the Sea of Fertility tetralogy are Runaway Horses (1969), The Temple of Dawn (1970) and The Decay of the Angel (1971).
[4] Hiragana is one of the two phonetic writing scripts for the Japanese language. Words that can be written in Chinese characters, also known as kanji, are sometimes written in hiragana because the Chinese characters might be too difficult to read or write. For example, the Wikipedia pages of the aforementioned words that Mishima used, 盥 and 歌留多, are titled たらい (tarai) and かるた (karuta) respectively. This gives a good gauge of how an average Japanese reader is used to reading these words in a quotidian context.
[5] I have talked to friends and professors, both Japanese and non-Japanese, who have read Mishima in Japanese. Almost all of them have complained about Mishima’s Chinese characters being tremendously difficult. One of my professors, Dr Scot Hislop, has mentioned that he personally knows a Chinese writer who has an extensive knowledge of Chinese characters. He said that even she had to use a dictionary to read Mishima.
[6] The Tokugawa period lasted from 1603 to 1867, while the Meiji period lasted from 1868 to 1912. While Japan’s emperor has existed from way before those periods (with the earliest date of his appearance still up for debate), the emperor was not in direct power during the Tokugawa period. Japan at that time was instead ruled primarily by a military government known as the bakufu. Though scholars offhandedly refer to this government as being ‘feudal’ in structure, this is merely a convenient gloss, hence my use of inverted commas. The Meiji era was brought about by an event known as the Meiji Restoration in 1868, which, in short, had the objective of returning direct power to the emperor. For more details, refer to Gordon (2003), 46-59.
[7] The Heian period was from 794 to 1185. It is generally known as Japan’s classical period, when aristocratic culture was at its height. The Tale of Genji (1021) and The Pillow Book (1002) are two notable works of literature from the Heian period that are revered to this day. See McCullough (1999), 390-448, on aristocratic culture in this period.
[8] In his book, Piven (2004) demonstrates Mishima’s “need to mythologize himself through beautification and masks” (243) by tracing the way that the aforementioned themes are obsessively explored in Mishima’s fiction.
Works Cited and Refeferenced
Gordon, Andrew. A Modern History of Japan: From Tokugawa Times to the Present. Oxford University
Press, 2003.
McCullough, Helen Craig. “Aristocratic Culture.” The Cambridge History of Japan. Edited by Donald H.
Shively and William H. McCullough, vol. 2, Cambridge University Press, 1999.
Mishima, Yukio. Confessions of a Mask. 1949. Translated by Meredith Weatherby, New Directions, 1958.
——. The Decay of the Angel. 1971. Translated by Edward Seidensticker, Alfred A. Knopf, 1974.
——. Forbidden Colors. 1951, 1953. Translated by Alfred H. Marks, Alfred A. Knopf, 1968.
——. Haru no Yuki: Hōjō no Umi (ichi). 1969. Shinchōbunko, 1991.
——. Runaway Horses. 1969. Translated by Michael Gallagher, Alfred A. Knopf, 1973.
——. The Temple of Dawn. 1970. Translated by E. Dale Saunders and Cecilia Segawa Seigle, Alfred A.
Knopf, 1973.
——. The Temple of the Golden Pavilion. 1956. Translated by Ivan Morris, Alfred A. Knopf, 1959.
——. Spring Snow. Translated by Michael Gallagher, 1972. Vintage, 2000.
Peterson, Gwenn. The Moon in the Water: Understanding Tanizaki, Kawabata, and Mishima. University of
Hawaii Press, 1992.
Piven, Jerry. The Madness and Perversion of Yukio Mishima. Praeger, 2004.
Rankin, Andrew. Mishima, Aesthetic Terrorist: An Intellectual Portrait. University of Hawaii Press, 2018.
Starrs, Roy. Deadly Dialectics: Sex, Violence and Nihilism in the World of Yukio Mishima. University of
Hawaii Press, 1994.
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