flowerhack

Ordinarily I'm a little shy about writing up book reviews, but I was surprised at how difficult it was to google for a comparative review of the four books Yukio Mishima's Sea of Fertility tetralogy.  I would've very much liked to have seen more folks' thoughts on how each of the books compared to each other before I set out to read this series.  So, for the sake of Making the Internet a Better Place™, I now offer my thoughts.

(There are spoilers—none so major as to spoil enjoyment of the books, I think, but I tend to not mind spoilers as much as the average person, so take that for what you will.)

Spring Snow

This review will be short, because I enjoyed this book far too much to talk about it sensibly—it absolutely bowled me over. It was the first Mishima novel I ever read, and Mishima's prose is intoxicating to a new reader, especially in this volume: lush to the point of bordering on excess, with the steady presence of a transparent narrator who effortlessly captures the minutiae of the characters' thoughts—the slight stabs of envy between friends, the moments of petty anger hidden behind a civilized smile.

The main character, Kiyoaki, is simultaneously endearing and infuriating: he is a lazy, spoiled, cunning aristocrat's son, nearing the end of high school, and he behaves like you might expect—that is, often irrationally and insensitively. And yet Mishima captures youthful restiveness and longing so well that I found myself caring deeply about him, almost from the very beginning:

The hot sun struck the backs of their close-shaven necks. It was a peaceful, uneventful, glorious Sunday afternoon. Yet Kiyoaki remained convinced that at the bottom of this world, which was like a leather bag filled with water, there was a little hole, and it seemed to him that he could hear time leaking from it, drop by drop.

[...Honda said,] “I’m convinced that the trouble with you is, you’re horribly greedy. Greedy men are apt to seem miserable. Look, what more could you want than a day like this?”

“Something definite. What it might be, I’ve no idea,” the young man answered wearily, as handsome as he was indecisive. Fond as he was of his friend, there were times when Kiyoaki found Honda’s keenly analytic mind and his confident turns of phrase—the very image of youth—a severe trial to his capricious nature.

I think this book's especially enjoyable if you're already familiar with the classic The Tale of Genji—in many ways Kiyoaki feels like a 20th-century Genji, and the parallels are striking and intriguing—but either way, Spring Snow is very easily among my top five favorite books of all time, and if you read it I think you might love it too.

Runaway Horses

Runaway Horses is good but not dazzling, with some notable flaws. The first of these flaws is the pacing—Mishima makes the odd choice of inserting a lengthy book-within-a-book just a short way into the novel. This insert, a recounting of the historic Shinpuren Rebellion, is rather dry, and detracts from the momentum that the novel as a whole has only just begun to build. It's possible this was an unavoidable sacrifice—the events of the Shinpuren Rebellion lay heavily on the mind of the novel's protagonist, and they do enhance the overall plot, particularly in the later half. But its placement still feels strange.

Once we return to the main story, Mishima's prose is as lovely as ever, but its subject is no longer the youthful, bombastic Kiyoaki. Instead we are given Isao: a remarkably mature, masculine, self-possessed college student, who has secretly been plotting to overthrow the government with a handful of other right-wing youths. Reading this book with Mishima's biography in mind—the author himself attempted a coup of the government and killed himself at age forty-five—makes it impossible to avoid drawing comparisons between the author and his protagonist.

Unfortunately, the feeling I got was that Mishima identified with his protagonist too strongly, hindering the portrayal of his character. Isao is too perfect: an effortlessly talented kendo fighter, keenly intelligent, and stoic, with over a dozen teenaged followers who revere him. Sure, I'm sure there are people like Isao who simply have remarkable charisma and charm, but while reading, you want to roll your eyes at the way his followers grovel around him.

And Isao is also feels under-defined as a character—the root of what drove him to right-wing patriotism, the drive that makes him want to do this dramatic thing, never seems quite clear on an emotional level. Perhaps, since Mishima identified so strongly with Isao's patriotism, it simply didn't occur to him that his readers might need to understand it as well.

Isao's incomprehensibility might have been an intended effect. Mishima waltzes poetic about "purity" often in this book—how Isao's ambitions are pure, steadfast, untouchable—and this untouchableness also makes him a touch inhuman, or perhaps superhuman. Perhaps Isao is meant to be more an ideal, a symbol to aspire to, than an actual character. But it also prevents us from identifying with him fully.

Thus, the moments that shone the most for me were the moments when Isao is at his most human—and though these moments are few, they are memorable. When a mentor of his backs out of the planned coup at the last moment, Isao is no longer a pure, flawless revolutionary. He's a hurt teenage boy realizing that adults are as fallible and cowardly and weak-willed as anyone else. That is a vivid moment in anyone's life. Mishima captures it vividly.

And the little twist with Makiko near the end was fabulous and unexpected. Until then, things seemed to me too poetic, too neat, too perfect, and I was thrilled how Mishima subverted what could've been a straightforward, trite romance.

The Temple of Dawn

Charitably, I could say simply that this is the weakest and most tedious novel of the series. Uncharitably, I could also say this book both bored and disgusted me, at various intervals,

The first half consists largely of a travelogue cataloging Honda's journey through India, interspersed heavily with his philosophical musings regarding the nature of reincarnation. And when I say "heavily," I mean it literally reads like a textbook on theories of reincarnation. I found my eyes glazing over during these passages—they simply don't seem to do much to drive the overall plot forward, and they seem quite disconnected from the later events in the book.

But the dullness of the first half is at least preferable to the plot that unfolds in the second half. The latest reincarnation of Kiyoaki is the eighteen-year-old Thai princess Ying Chang. Honda's friendly interest quickly turns into sexual obsession. With a friend, he plots to have Ying Chang taken advantage of by another man, so that Honda can swoop in afterward to "play the role of the gentle, sweet, overly kind confidant and enjoy her at your leisure."

Charitably, one could try to argue that Mishima is going for a Humbert-and-Lolita effect, where the reader is meant to be disgusted by Honda despite Honda's earnestness. Yet, while Lolita is driven by the obviously-disturbed first-person perspective of Humbert, The Sea of Fertility has been driven by Mishima's third-person omniscient narrator, who has never been shy rendering judgment on the quality and character of the people presented to us. This narrator told us of Kiyoaki's self-centeredness and occasional cruelty, for example, as well as revealing the cruel and petty and selfish thoughts of any number of characters for what they are. Yet here I got the sense the narrator wanted us to pity Honda beyond all else—see his obsession as tragic-yet-beautiful, see it as a poetically lovely thing, and I simply found myself unsympathetic. So if that's the desired effect here, I feel it falls flat.

Similarly problematic is the portrayal of Honda's wife, Rié, who existed as a passive, subservient footnote in Runaway Horses, is similarly frustrating. Rié has become grumpier in old age, and becomes furiously jealous when she (rightly) suspects Honda's fascination with Ying Chang. This could've been an interesting opportunity to offer the "outside" perspective on Honda's behavior that the narrative so desperately needed—yet instead the narration focuses repeatedly on her "swollenness," the physical ugliness, telling us about how nasty and cruel her thoughts are, in a way that makes it clear we are supposed to find her reprehensible. Yet I liked Rié, I thought her actions were reasonable and justified, and Mishima's determination to turn her into some green-eyed monster was off-putting.

The way Mishima writes women is never outstanding, throughout the series, but in this book it simply becomes too much to bear.

The Decay of the Angel

The subject of this final book is Toru, a teenage orphan who is described in stark terms early on as a gorgeous-yet-remote, cold, heartless young man: "he was unmixed evil." It feels strange to have Mishima describe a character in such stark terms, given how the portraits he paints are generally more complex and multilayered. It's especially odd given that one of his other novels, Temple of the Golden Pavillion, Mishima gives such a stirring, disturbing, and convincing view into the mind of a psychopathic character.

But perhaps, like Isao, Toru is meant to represent more an ideal than an actual person—the physical manifestation of corruption or emptiness or "evil" or something to that effect. And, just like with Isao, I found Toru most interesting in the small moments that reveal his humanity—in particular, the book's climax, in which Keiko confronts Toru, is one of the most brilliant moments in the whole series, highlighting both Keiko's cunning and Toru's vanity and weakness.

Besides that moment, however, the rest of novel is so-so. There's a lovely moment early on, when Keiko and Honda go out to visit a famous pine grove, and in a very small number of pages Mishima captures quite a bit: the effect of aging on Keiko and Honda, musings on the modernization of Japan, a sense of loss for an older, quieter aesthetic, and so on. But mostly, the story is about Toru, and Toru is too calculating and cruel and "machine-like" to be a fully intriguing character. He does and says and plots cruel things for no fully discernible reason, and Honda seems too old and confused to sense how dangerous Toru is. In this respect, it's a great improvement over The Temple of Dawn—in Temple, I felt like the author wanted me to pity Honda, and I could not find any reason to do so; here, you truly do feel bad for Honda, even while recognizing he's sometimes cruel and misguided.

I do think it's possible I might find the portrait of Honda's muddled old age and downfall more poignant if I were closer to that age myself. I'd be curious to reread this book in forty years or so and see what I think then.

Ultimately, I feel that perhaps Mishima is at his best when writing about younger people. His work is romantic in character, full of bombastic, colorful prose that feels well-suited for his younger characters but a bit strange when they begin to age. And the subject matter simply fits his favorite themes better—young men acting rashly and nobly is inspiring; seeing aging men behaving the same way often seems more like erraticness and stupidity, and Mishima does not always handle the distinction elegantly.

Overall, I'd recommend Spring Snow to anyone, and recommend Runaway Horses if you really enjoyed Spring Snow. The Temple of Dawn is skippable, and The Decay of the Angel has its moments if you wish to see the series's conclusion.