Yukio Mishima (1925 – 1970)
Pen name of Kimitake Hiraoka, a Japanese novelist, playwright, essayist and short story writer.
I want to make a poem of my life.
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.
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.
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.
Is there not a sort of remorse that precedes sin? Was it remorse at the very fact that I existed?
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.
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.
Actually the action called a kiss represented nothing more for me than some place where my spirit could seek shelter.
Human beings — they go on being born and dying, dying and being born. It's kind of boring, isn't it?
I had no taste for defeat — much less victory — without a fight.