Saturday, January 03, 2009

Yukio Mishima's Spring Snow

This epic novel, the first in Mishima's The Sea of Fertility tetralogy, is at times simply, breathtakingly beautiful.

"The title, The Sea of Fertility, " Mishima told Donald Keene, "is intended to suggest the arid sea of the moon that belies its name. Or I might say that it superimposes the image of cosmic nihilism on that of the fertile sea." Evidently, Spring Snow's profundity would put off lesser literature enthusiasts.

Like the sea breaking on shore, wave riding on wave, era follows era, reaching its end at the zenith of its vigour before dissipating into nothingness.

Staged after the Russo-Japanese War in 1911, near the end of the Meiji era, the novel traces the coming of age of Kiyoaki Matsugae. Born of an influential, provincial family, Kiyoaki is the main subject of Mishima's psychological analyses, the emblem of the world of ancient aristocracy being breached, its power and relevance waning with westernisation.

When still a child, Kiyoaki is sent by his father, the Marquis, to Count Ayakura's household, from which he cultivates the elegance of court nobility, and meets Ayakura Satoko, the Count's daughter. With these, Kiyoaki develops into a sensitive young man prone to melancholy. Standing at the threshold of these two worlds, Kiyoaki detests the Marquis's life of pleasure quarters, extravagant western dinners and occasional billiard, yet allows his destiny of succession to sweep him along.

Against such a backdrop, Kiyoaki stumbles into a tragic love affair with Satoko. At times manipulative, yet characteristically, never in control of his emotions, Kiyoaki is attracted to the inevitability when Satoko is betrothed to a royal prince, and rather, spirals to his end, but not before a final spark of passion. And by so doing, Kiyoaki's passing embodies the decline of the aristocracy in all its refinement.

A profound, delicate beauty in a tinge of sorrow lingers on...

"Just now I had a dream. I'll see you again. I know it. Beneath the falls."

- A feverish Kiyoaki says to Honda, his best friend, on their way back to Tokyo.

Kiyoaki dies at the age of twenty, at his prime.

As a love story, Spring Snow is like the "Romeo and Juliet" of the East, only better, though it is more elegiac than one likes to think.

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