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wolfdan9 's review for:
Spring Snow
by Yukio Mishima
"In his heart, he always preferred the actuality of loss to the fear of it."
As I read Spring Snow, the exceptional novel (magnum opus?) of genius Yukio Mishima, I took some notes, but by the end of my reading I felt that they did not really apply to the story any more. The first half of the novel reads a lot like a bildungsroman set in the interesting post-Meiji early 1900s. Kiyoaki is a wealthy, arrogant, melancholy, exceptionally beautiful young man who is learning how to handle his feelings of love for another noble girl, Satoko. In his fear of embarrassment, he goes to extreme lengths to shun her, like by writing her letters that confess his hatred toward her and ignoring her marriage to a prince of high social standing, until it is literally too late to demonstrate his true feelings. His realization (or self-confession) that he loves Satoko occurs after ignoring many requests from her caretaker to weigh in before the marriage is made official. He cruelly ignores her requests to talk and destroys every letter -- every attempt at correspondence -- to demonstrate his manly independence and superiority over Satoko. He does eventually desperately arrange a meeting, during which the two consummate, but only after her marriage is made official. Then she becomes pregnant after several other meetings. I don't mean to provide a simple summary of the novel's events (some of which interestingly parallel Turgenev's "Home of the Gentry," in my opinion), but it's interesting because Mishima seems to lead to this logical conclusion of doomed lovers, and it occurs as expected, but there's just something else behind the scenes pulling the strings of these events. Unlike something like Home of the Gentry (or SO MANY other star-crossed lover stories), in which there is a prominent commentary on the love of the two main characters, Mishima seems to be interested in a larger idea. Kiyoaki's life is important, but it is part of a grander spiritual hypothesis based in Buddhism. The idea of a "collective human consciousness" fascinates Mishima (the character Honda, Kiyoaki's best friend, seems to appear as a version of Mishima himself, although I'm not sure about this. He references it throughout the novel, seemingly reminding the reader of this theme that Honda cannot escape. My understanding is that future books in this tetralogy will focus on Honda as the main character (Kiyoaki heart-breakingly dies at the end of this story) and that the suggestion of reincarnation or collective human consciousness will factor in throughout the overarching narrative. I do feel quite fuzzy about the idea as it stands, but I found one of Mishima's strands of thought quite interesting -- the comparison of humans individually as currents and collectively as the ocean, who compose the same body of water as currents moving in their own direction, often together, as an independent entity but composing some greater, uncontrolled movement. It raises some questions about free will, life's purpose, and spirituality that is thought provoking. But Mishima also does not reveal much about this philosophy or his opinions on it besides a few bits of dialogue. I assume that is what he subsequent novels in the series are for, but it is challenging to present such a philosophically rich/dense theme without being overly didactic, so I sympathize with this challenge and am interested in the next novel, which seems to also Iinuma, a character who appeared for a bit in this novel and will become a far-right extremist (not unlike Mishima himself).
As I read Spring Snow, the exceptional novel (magnum opus?) of genius Yukio Mishima, I took some notes, but by the end of my reading I felt that they did not really apply to the story any more. The first half of the novel reads a lot like a bildungsroman set in the interesting post-Meiji early 1900s. Kiyoaki is a wealthy, arrogant, melancholy, exceptionally beautiful young man who is learning how to handle his feelings of love for another noble girl, Satoko. In his fear of embarrassment, he goes to extreme lengths to shun her, like by writing her letters that confess his hatred toward her and ignoring her marriage to a prince of high social standing, until it is literally too late to demonstrate his true feelings. His realization (or self-confession) that he loves Satoko occurs after ignoring many requests from her caretaker to weigh in before the marriage is made official. He cruelly ignores her requests to talk and destroys every letter -- every attempt at correspondence -- to demonstrate his manly independence and superiority over Satoko. He does eventually desperately arrange a meeting, during which the two consummate, but only after her marriage is made official. Then she becomes pregnant after several other meetings. I don't mean to provide a simple summary of the novel's events (some of which interestingly parallel Turgenev's "Home of the Gentry," in my opinion), but it's interesting because Mishima seems to lead to this logical conclusion of doomed lovers, and it occurs as expected, but there's just something else behind the scenes pulling the strings of these events. Unlike something like Home of the Gentry (or SO MANY other star-crossed lover stories), in which there is a prominent commentary on the love of the two main characters, Mishima seems to be interested in a larger idea. Kiyoaki's life is important, but it is part of a grander spiritual hypothesis based in Buddhism. The idea of a "collective human consciousness" fascinates Mishima (the character Honda, Kiyoaki's best friend, seems to appear as a version of Mishima himself, although I'm not sure about this. He references it throughout the novel, seemingly reminding the reader of this theme that Honda cannot escape. My understanding is that future books in this tetralogy will focus on Honda as the main character (Kiyoaki heart-breakingly dies at the end of this story) and that the suggestion of reincarnation or collective human consciousness will factor in throughout the overarching narrative. I do feel quite fuzzy about the idea as it stands, but I found one of Mishima's strands of thought quite interesting -- the comparison of humans individually as currents and collectively as the ocean, who compose the same body of water as currents moving in their own direction, often together, as an independent entity but composing some greater, uncontrolled movement. It raises some questions about free will, life's purpose, and spirituality that is thought provoking. But Mishima also does not reveal much about this philosophy or his opinions on it besides a few bits of dialogue. I assume that is what he subsequent novels in the series are for, but it is challenging to present such a philosophically rich/dense theme without being overly didactic, so I sympathize with this challenge and am interested in the next novel, which seems to also Iinuma, a character who appeared for a bit in this novel and will become a far-right extremist (not unlike Mishima himself).