Name: Spring Snow
Rating: 4.214285714285714 (28 reviews)
ISBN: 9780394442396

三島由紀夫

Kiyoaki Matsugae's passionate and ill-fated love for the betrothed daughter of a Tokyo aristocrat brings him into disfavor at the Imperial Court

Spring Snow

Yukio Mishima

The first book of Mishima's landmark The Sea of Fertility sequence, this novel is set in Tokyo in 1912, when the hermetic world of the ancient aristocracy is being breached for the first time by outsiders.

Matt

** spoiler alert **
           I didn't have any expectations going into the book. It is quite extraordinary story about a young lad who has little motivation in life until he experiences a single moment of infatuation.

Through the politics and changing climate in Japan to his relationships and selfish views, the world of a noble family is turned upside down by the burning passion of two in a seemingly Forbidden love...Made Forbidden by their own lackluster view of life and turning back is a chance long gone.

Simon Elliott Stegall

"The symptoms of a man afflicted by true beauty are much like those of leprosy." I've been reading some Japanese literature this year, as well as introducing myself to Kurosawa's films, and one thing keeps standing out to me. Oriental and Occidental culture (insofar as those terms can hold any water at all) seem to be characterized, in part, by a preoccupation with Ephemerality and Permanence, respectively. I doubt I need to prove that the West ever since Plato (or maybe Abraham) has been obsessed with locating some kind of transcendent Permanence, to our credit in some areas and our detriment in others. I don't know much about the East, but I think the Japanese aesthetic, at least, founded on Shintoism and Buddhism and sifted through centuries of an agrarian lifestyle, seems to be, on one level, all about cycles and Ephemerality. To illustrate this I need only point to two ubiquitous Japanese symbols of ephemeral cycles: the cherry blossom and Amaterasu, the rising sun.

Yet Japanese literature is full of ironies. Its art- the poetry especially- is obsessively interior even though the language which conveys it is stiflingly formal. Its aesthetic is all about delicacy and the heart's gentle agony (the gentler the more agonizing) and, of course, the ephemerality of all individuals, and yet its culture up to WWII was xenophobic, insular, traditional, and in many ways unaltered from the golden Heian period a thousand years before. 

This irony is the essence of Mishima's Spring Snow. It's in the name. If you want a Western comparison, I suppose its like Romeo and Juliet in some respects, and Proust in others. At its core it's about impermanent individuals desperately and futilely seeking permanence (in all the wrong places).

Mishima was an avowed nihilist, but frankly that doesn't come through as much as you'd think, because his characters aren't nihilistic in the slightest. Kiyoaki is an emotional anime boy (before they were cool) who is hopelessly in love with a girl but too stuck up to admit it; Honda is a hard-working and upstanding student who is obsessed with the idea of reincarnation; and the other characters have similarly idiosyncratic preoccupations. None of these characters have the debonair, cigarette-dangling, "live and let die" vibe of a Western nihilist. The book is only nihilistic in the sense that, ultimately, it all comes to naught. But you could accuse Shakespeare of the same thing.

And plus, Mishima's writing is beautiful and occasionally astounding. Check out this jaw-dropping description of Kiyoaki's grandmother, perfect in its compression and vividity: She belonged to a generation of women who had thought nothing of washing their dinner plates in a river while corpses went floating past. That sentence is so good it makes my head spin. Or this, about a rich aristocrat (the father of Kiyoaki's beloved):  The Count was never one to be long vexed by worries, and as an inevitable consequence, his worries always ended up by vexing others. Pith of that exactitude is entirely worthy of Proust or Shakespeare.

But ultimately Mishima's aesthetic is that of a eulogy. This is where he sets himself so apart from Western authors. Proust, even at his most wry and resigned moments, still retains that Western hope that maybe lost things can be found. The 20th century Western nihilists strove to erase even the remorse they might feel for the lostness of things. Among all these I find the Japanese got it right; if you're going to declare everything impermanent, you had better give everything a proper funeral.

Spring Snow

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