Japanese Lit Challenge 18 #3

I read this for the Japanese Literature Challenge 18.

Spring Snow - Yukio Mishima

Set in about 1913, obviously in Tokyo, in a refined milieu of idle aristocrats and hyperactive parvenues. This poetic and wonderful novel is a tragic story of young love between Kiyoaki and Satoko told partly from the point of Kiyoaki’s best school friend Honda. The two young men are decidedly different though they attend the same school for sons of the elite. Honda is studious and serious, most comfortable when books are within reach, while Kiyoaki is dominated by his raw emotions and Heian esteem for elegance. The difference between the two is emphasized throughout the novel, highlighting how their choices are influenced by a sense of ethics or a sense of melancholy.

Decidedly not a quick read, the background is a relatively obscure period, Japan during the Taisho era, i.e., the transition period between the Meiji determination to modernize and the Showa determination to eradicate the language and culture of Taiwan, Korea and Okinawa and transform East and Southeast Asia into a vast slave labor camp. Mishima describes the feelings of the characters in flowery metaphors, which, while attractive, drive the reader outside for a walk to escape the overpowering scents. The pace picks up in the last quarter – so much so that it becomes un-put-down-able - and ends with a ruefully sad, inevitable resolution.

With brilliant characterization, plotting, and pace, Mishima is ambitious in this novel. He inserts tiny essays on philosophy, both Western and Buddhistic. He depicts the reality of the characters and their transgressive love as charged with risk, hazard and tension, but always with a feeling of transience and melancholy.

He’s also a modernist in the way he challenges the reader with the main character. Very young, Kiyoaki is selfish and self-centered. He has an inferiority complex which pushes him to take everything immoderately, or in a twisted way, even the most neutral observations. He treats Satoko as badly as Richard Ellsworth Savage treats Texas idealist Anne Trent in 1919. And even when Kiyoaki evolves in the course of the novel, we readers can’t shake the feeling that everything he does is only for his own benefit, without worrying about the dire consequences to others.

Such is Mishima and his translator’s sureness of touch, though, the tone never feels grim or bleak or over the top. At the end of the novel in which there is no shortage of anxiety and death, the reader feels becalmed by the atmosphere of melancholy that spreads over the entire work. It’s almost as if even the strongest emotions and the most dramatic situations were filtered through the sense that all we have to do is wait a little time and we will all be nobody and nowhere, and all will be gone.