Spring Snow: The Sea of Fertility, 1 [Paperback]

Along with this obsession with beauty is a suspicion or a questioning of the intrinsic utility of beauty. What is the purpose of perfection if such perfection is ineffectual and even inimical to the human condition apart from the fact that beauty is beauty is beauty . . . ad nauseum?

In many ways Mishima uses Spring Snow as a means of inverting the sentiment of Keats' notion of "Beauty is truth, truth is beauty . . ." However, unlike the spectacle that beauty evokes in some of Mishima's other writings (and even his life), the bubble of spectacle never pops in Spring Snow, instead, beauty ferments and spreads like cancer.

In this novel, Mishima's main characters, Satoka and Kiyoaki, are destroyed by their beauty, their elegance, their noble breeding. Kiyoaki is analogous to Hamlet in his diffidence and his psychic inertia. Moreover, his brilliant physical beauty compounds the aforementioned with an overly large measure of pride, which, along with noble breeding, hermetically seals him into a jar of dreams, self-doubt, anomie, and ennui. Satoka, likewise, is beautiful, perfect, and her perfection carries and transmits a self-possessed, cold, and almost painful glare to the public eye. However, to Kiyoaki, Satoka is a smoldering woman of passion, full of riddles and intrigue. Kiyoaki, inexperienced, prideful, and naïve, desires to reciprocate this passion only when it becomes taboo, and then he falls headlong into a brilliant and lavish darkness full of gauntness, full, blush moons, and supple waves. Their consummation is sweet but tinctured with doom.

Had the two had a grander purpose than getting drunk off this surfeit of poisonous love, had their hearts and minds been bound to something to divert them from their egocentricity, the story would have been far different. But in the end, as Romeo and Juliet's love dies, the love of Satoka and Kiyoaki dies.

However, unlike Shakespeare, Mishima denies the reader the succor of suicide. Satoka is left a tonsured, Buddhist nun, while Kiyoaki dies of pneumonia. The end of beauty is filled with emotion, but the beautiful are ineffectual, useless, and cannot ever perform substantive act that will secure their happiness or seal their fate (definitely not in the case of Kiyoaki, perhaps in the case of Satoka). However, beauty does not completely fade at the death of their love as Kiyoaki leaves his dream journal to his even-keeled, logical, and diligent friend, Honda. In this way beauty lives on, but exists not as truth but as germ or infection. Beauty dies, destroys, and spreads its seed. It is the spring snow, quiet, pure, each multi-tendriled snowflake delicate, unique, an unusual attenuation heralding the end of spring, girded by the assumption that another spring will come only for the deadly beauty of the quiet, pure spring snow to come again, to take root, and surreptitiously and gracefully destroy idle youth.

On the surface the novel appears to a simple tragic love affair taking place in 1911. Kiyoaki, a son of a marquis and finishing high school, enters a complicated relationship with Satoko, the daughter of a count he boarded at during his early childhood. He cannot decide whether he truly loves or despises her until she is engaged to a royal prince, at which point series of events make their lives fall apart. Kiyoaki is supported all the while by Honda, his best friend and a law student who is discovering at this time Western philosophy. In the background the Meiji emperor has just died and his successor swept into power, and provincial nobles are attempting to legitimize themselves in Tokyo while the fortunes of the old center of power decline.

Mishima's style is quite alluring, but the finest aspect of the novel is its characters. Kiyoaki is fantastically portrayed, a deluded romantic who unwittingly serves the forces of history tearing apart Japanese nobility. There is always a conflict between despising him and pitying him. Satoko is more of a mystery, but this seems to be intentional, an expression of some unknowable female otherness. Honda is the intent observer, trying to make sense of the tragedy befalling his friend and his society.

The translation by Michael Gallagher is generally readable, though I occasionally wondered if bits were added to Mishima's text in order to explain aspects of Japanese culture to English readers.

I found the novel a bit disappointing because it does not seem to go far enough in condemning Japan's adoption of Western values and in praising the traditional culture centered around the emperor. I began the novel hoping to find a manifesto of Mishima's creed which brought him to lead his glorious coup of 1970 and which ultimately led him to commit ritual suicide when his plans for a greater Japan failed. However, I have not yet moved on to the subsequent novels in the "Sea of Fertility" cycle, so perhaps this theme is developed further afterwards.

I would generally recommend SPRING SNOW. While an imperfect novel, it does entertain and is does leave one with the desire to move on to other works by Mishima.