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 accomplished 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 which entangled beauty, moral integrity, and suicide as if they were three sides of just one conceptual triangle. He ended his life with thematic consistency, committing politically motivated seppuku^c in healthy middle age, leaving behind a fit, toned corpse. Lifelong faith in an ideal, and then martyrdom for that same ideal, it inspires curiosity, even an amoral respect.

Let me reintroduce the tetralogy’s philosophy in its western clothes. The most popular form comes from The Dark Knight (2008).

You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain.^d

Its second most popular form is the inspiration for that line, from Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil.

He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee.^e

All articulations of the idea propose that nature's ugliness will assimilate the morally pure, if given sufficient time. If we want to avoid moral decay, we must face the world head-on, which invariably leads to death. Whenever we relax our ideals for safety, such as (in Mishima’s view) merely campaigning and voting instead of carrying out the political assassination yourself and taking on the risks our values demand, we become less of ourselves and more of the world. The world can end us in our idealistic youth or our complicit senescence. These are the two paths.

The Sea of Fertility consists of four novels following Honda Shigekuni through his entire life. Starring alongside him, in one book each, are his childhood friend Kiyoaki Matsuge and his reincarnations. Honda spends his life making safe choices, studying law, entering a passionless marriage with a submissive spouse, and otherwise dissociating from strong emotions as best he can. In contrast, see how Kiyo processes news that his love has become engaged with 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, his love Satoko’s fiancee is the imperial prince, and the trysts they arrange eventually get Satoko committed to a nunnery and Kiyo dead.

It repeats in the next novel: a young and impetuous Isao Linuma 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 dies.

Meanwhile, at every fork in the road, Honda bends the knee to his environment, denies himself, shrinks his internal life to better satisfy the expectations of his society. By the time he reaches old age, there is scarcely a person left. He is merely a substrate for Japanese society at large to compute itself on.

In the third novel, Honda’s coping mechanism of watching other people live life 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 arranges 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.

This is the final result of a lifetime of making decisions based on what has a favorable outcome. Principals emerge from an internal life, and without one, eventually all that’s left to live by is outcomes, compared amorally on axes like comfort, safety, and pleasure.

But the only alternatives to compromising our idealism are suicide and terrorism, à la Yukio. So what is it worth?

As I write this, I am beyond the age idealism would have killed me, and I expect to live much longer. While I can see that there’s an axis on which the pervert, the pragmatic politician, and the gentle elderly mentor are all corrupt, I get the sense 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 his moribund days, Honda visits Satoko, who long after the tribulations of the first novel had become abbess of the nunnery. By this point Honda, widowed and isolated, has nothing left to do but wander around in a malaise, almost the lone survivor of his past, save one person.

After devoting his entire life to Kiyo and Kiyo’s reincarnations, even adopting the fourth, Honda wanted to reminisce one last time with the other person who loved Kiyo as much as he did. But when they, meet, it doesn’t go as expected.

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)