— Yukio Mishima from The Temple of The Golden Pavilion
Yukio Mishima interview in English
Death and Transfiguration by Richard Strauss pt. 1
pt. 2
Shinji gazed at the receding outline of Utajima and, as he did so, he became aware of his own feelings for the first time.
Here he was, a young man born and bred on that island, loving it more than anything else in the world, and yet he was eager to leave it. It was his desire to leave the island that had made him accept the captain’s offer of a berth on the Utajima-maru.
Once the island was out of sight the boy’s heart became peaceful. As he had never been on his daily fishing trips, he was now free of the thought that tonight he would have to return to the island again.
‘I’m free!’ he shouted in his heart. This was the first time he had ever realized there could be such a strange sort of freedom as this.
The Kamikaze-maru sailed on through a drizzling rain. Yasuo and the captain stretched out on the straw mats in the passenger cabin and went to sleep. Yasuo had not spoken to Shinji once since they had boarded the ferry.
The boy pressed his face close to one of the round portholes, across which the raindrops were running, and by its light examined the contents of the package from Hatsue. It contained a charm from Yashiro Shrine, a snapshot of Hatsue, and a letter. The letter read:
‘Every day from now on I’ll be going to Yashiro Shrine to pray for your safety. My heart belongs to you. Please take care of yourself and come back safe and sound. I’m enclosing my picture so I can go voyaging with you. It was taken at Cape Daio. About our voyage - Father hasn’t said a word to me, but I think he must have some special reason for putting both you and Yasuo on his ship. And somehow I think I can see a ray of hope for us. Please, please don’t give up hope; please keep on fighting.’
The letter encouraged the boy. Strength filled his arms and the feeling that life was worth living flooded through his entire body.
-- Yukio Mishima from The Sound of Waves
They don’t even know the definition of danger. They think danger means something physical, getting scratched and a little blood running and the newspapers making a big fuss. Well, that hasn’t got anything to do with it. Real danger is nothing more than just living. Of course, living is merely the chaos of existence, but more than that it’s a crazy mixed-up business of dismantling existence instant by instant to the point where the original chaos is restored, and taking strength from the uncertainty and the fear that chaos brings to re-create existence instant by instant. You won’t find another job as dangerous as that. There isn’t any fear in existence itself, or any uncertainty, but living creates it. And society is basically meaningless, a Roman mixed bath. And school, school is just society in miniature: that’s why we’re always being ordered around. A bunch of blind men tell us what to do, tear our unlimited ability to shreds.
— Yukio Mishima from The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea
“When I am doing my work, I think it is natural for me to find it obscene for human beings to live only for themselves. You might call this the boredom of living. Human lives are mysterious in that human beings are not strong enough to live and die just for themselves. It is because human beings always think of living for some kind of ideal, and they soon get bored of living just for themselves. It is because of this that the need to die for something arises. That need is the “great cause” people talked about in the past. Dying for a “great cause” was considered the most glorious, hectic, or brilliant way of dying. However, there are no “great causes” now. This is natural because the democratic political system does not need “great causes”. But if we can not find values that go beyond thinking just for ourselves in our minds, we might come to think it to be meaningless to go on living.
-- Yukio Mishima
“An ugliness unfurled in the moonlight and soft shadow and suffused the whole world. If I were an amoeba, he thought, with an infinitesimal body, I could defeat ugliness. A man isn’t tiny or giant enough to defeat anything.”
— Yukio Mishima from The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea
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