the Sea of Fertility

'yukio at his desk' by Midjourney

The virtuous die young, or cling to life and putrefy. This is the philosophy that undergirds The Sea of Fertility, the master work of Japanese playwright and novelist Yukio Mishima.

Classical Japanese literature in general has a “thing” for noble, gory deaths in young adulthood, but Mishima is the canonical example. In WWII he worked in a factory that manufactured equipment for kamikaze planes^a, and wrote to friends about how much he admired the pilots^b. After that he wrote plays and novels that conflated beauty, moral integrity, and suicide into one messy idea. Finally, in a thematically consistent end, he committed politically motivated seppuku^c in healthy middle age, leaving behind a fit, toned corpse.

The Sea of Fertility consists of four novels, following Shigekuni Honda from youth to senescence. Starring alongside him in each book are his childhood friend Kiyoaki Matsuge and his reincarnations. While Honda spends his life making safe choices, studying law, entering a passionless marriage with a submissive, long-suffering spouse (pour one out for Rié), and otherwise dissociating from strong emotions as best he can, Kiyo and his reincarnations make enemies of caution and pragmatism.

When Kiyo learns his crush/adopted sister Satoko (it's complicated) is engaged to someone else:

Long ago he [Kiyo] had resolved to recognize his emotions as his only guiding truth and to live his life accordingly, even if this meant a deliberate aimlessness. That principle had now brought him to his present sinister feelings of joy, which seemed to be the brink of a racing, plunging whirlpool. There seemed to be nothing left but to throw himself into it. (Spring Snow, p. 185)

Unfortunately for Kiyo, Satoko’s fiancee is the imperial prince, and the trysts they arrange eventually get Satoko committed to a nunnery and Kiyo dead.

But in his next life he's no more cautious. As a young and impetuous Isao Linuma, he knows the right thing to do is assassinate the baron. He struggles against Honda’s admonitions and society’s obstacles, almost doubts himself, then follows through and seppukus.

Meanwhile, at every fork in the road, Honda bends the knee to his environment, denies his internal life to better satisfy the expectations of some abstract other (society?). By the time he reaches old age, there is scarcely a person left inside. He is merely a substrate for Japan at large to compute itself on.

In the third novel, Honda’s coping mechanism of watching other people live takes a turn for the literal. When Kiyo reincarnates again as a Siamese princess named Ying Chan, Honda devises an elaborate plan to watch her have sex through a peep-hole. He recruits a suitor to seduce her, invites them both up to his Villa (which he may or may not have built for just this purpose), and stands at the ready in front of a small hole in the wall separating the guest room from his office.

I think in Yukio's view, this is simply what to expect from those who live carefully, and live long. The world corrupts them. If they are old, they are perverse. QED.

But if the only alternatives to protecting idealism like Yukio's are suicide and terrorism, what is it worth? I can't escape the sense that Yukio is all yang. His masculinity forbids letting the world in. It’s the world that needs to bend, and if it won’t, he rejects the world.

In Honda's moribund days, he visits Satoko, who long after the tribulations of the first novel has become abbess of the nunnery. By this point Honda, widowed and isolated, has nothing left to do but wander around in a malaise, the lone survivor of his past, save Satoko.

After devoting his entire life to Kiyo and Kiyo’s reincarnations, even adopting the fourth, Honda wanted to reminisce one last time with the only other person who loved Kiyo as much as he did. But when they meet, he doesn't find the validation of the way he's spent his life that he was looking for.

The Abbess laughed and seemed to sway gently. “Your interesting letter seemed almost too earnest.” Like the steward, she spoke the West Country dialect. “I thought there must be some holy bond between us.”

The last drops of youth leaped up within Honda. He had returned to that day sixty years before, when he had pleaded youthful ardor to the Abbess’s predecessor. He discarded his reserve.

“Your revered predecessor would not let me see you when I came with Kiyoaki’s last request. It had to be so, but I was angry. Kiyoaki Matsugae was after all my dearest friend.”

“Kiyoaki Matsugae. Who might he have been?”

Honda looked at her in astonishment.

She might be hard of hearing, but she could not have failed to hear him. Yet her words were so wide of the mark that he could only believe he had been misunderstood.

“I beg your pardon?” He wanted her to say it again.

There was no trace of dissimulation as she repeated the words. There was instead a sort of girlish curiosity in her eyes, and below them a quiet smile. “Who might he have been?” (Decay of The Angel, p. 214)