Yukio Mishima (1925 – 1970)
Pen name of Kimitake Hiraoka, a Japanese novelist, playwright, essayist and short story writer.
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.
I had no taste for defeat much less victory without a fight.
Human beings they go on being born and dying, dying and being born. It's kind of boring, isn't it?
Actually the action called a kiss represented nothing more for me than some place where my spirit could seek shelter.
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.
I've never done much, but I've lived my whole life thinking of myself as the only real man. And if I'm right, then a limpid, lonely horn is going to trumpet through the dawn some day, and a turgid cloud laced with light will sweep down, and the poignant voice of glory will call for me from the distance and I'll have to jump out of bed and set out alone. That's why I've never married. I've waited, and waited, and here I am past thirty.
Is there not a sort of remorse that precedes sin? Was it remorse at the very fact that I existed?
The purest evil that human efforts could attain, in other words, was probably achieved by those men who made their wills the same and who made their eyes see the world in the same way, men who went against the pattern of life's diversity, men whose spirits shattered the natural wall of the individual body, making nothing of this barrier, set up to guard against mutual corrosion, men whose spirit accomplished what flesh could never accomplish.
Within those confining walls, teachers a bunch of men all armed with the same information gave the same lectures every year from the same notebooks and every year at the same point in the textbooks made the same jokes.
In its essence, any art that relies on words makes use of their ability to eat away of their corrosive function just as etching depends on the corrosive power of nitric acid.
I want to make a poem of my life.
There is no virtue in curiosity. In fact, it might be the most immoral desire a man can possess.
He'd been mistaken in thinking that if he killed himself the sordid bourgeois world would perish with him.
Japanese people today think of money, just money: Where is our national spirit today? The Jieitai must be the soul of Japan.
The nation has no spiritual foundation. That is why you dont agree with me. You will just be American mercenaries. There you are in your tiny world. You do nothing for Japan.
I salute the Emperor. Long live the emperor!
I had long since insisted upon interpreting the things that Fate forced me to do as victories of my own will and intelligence, and now this bad habit had grown into a sort of frenzied arrogance. In the nature of what I was calling my intelligence there was a touch of something illegitimate, a touch of the sham pretender who has been placed on the throne by some freak chance. This dolt of a usurper could not foresee the revenge that would inevitably be wreaked upon his stupid despotism.
The most appropriate type of daily life for me was a day-by-day world destruction; peace was the most difficult and abnormal state to live in.
As he saw it, there was only one choice to be strong and upright, or to commit suicide.
How oddly situated a man is apt to find himself at the age of thirty-eight! His youth belongs to the distant past. Yet the period of memory beginning with the end of youth and extending to the present has left him not a single vivid impression. And therefore he persists in feeling that nothing more than a fragile barrier separates him from his youth. He is forever hearing with the utmost clarity the sounds of this neighboring domain, but there is no way to penetrate the barrier.
I received an impassioned letter from Sonoko. There was no doubt that she was truly in love. I felt jealous. Mine was the unbearable jealousy a cultured pearl must feel toward a genuine one. Or can there be such a thing in this world as a man who is jealous of the woman who loves him, precisely because of her love?
We tend to suffer from the illusion that we are capable of dying for a belief or theory. What Hagakure is insisting is that even in merciless death, a futile death that knows neither flower nor fruit has dignity as the death of a human being. If we value so highly the dignity of life, how can we not also value the dignity of death? No death may be called futile.