Table of Contents
Cover
Copyright
About the Author
By Yukio Mishima
Spring Snow
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Footnotes
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Epub ISBN: 9781407054131
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Published by Vintage 2000
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Copyright © Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1972
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Originally published in Japan as Haru no Yuki by Shinchosha Company, Tokyo, 1968.
English translation originally published by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.,
New York, in 1972.
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About the Author
Yukio Mishima was born into a samurai family and imbued with the code of complete control over mind and body, and loyalty to the Emperor – the same code that produced the austerity and self-sacrifice of Zen. He wrote countless short stories and thirty-three plays, in some of which he acted. Several films have been made from his novels, including The Sound of Waves; Enjo, which was based on The Temple of the Golden Pavilion; and The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea. Among his other works are the novels Confessions of a Mask and Thirst for Love and the short-story collections Death in Midsummer and Acts of Worship.
The Sea of Fertility tetralogy, however, is his masterpiece. After Mishima conceived the idea of The Sea of Fertility in 1964, he frequently said he would die when it was completed. On November 25th, 1970, the day he completed The Decay of the Angel, the last novel of the cycle, Mishima committed seppuku (ritual suicide) at the age of 45.
By Yukio Mishima
THE SEA OF FERTILITY, A CYCLE OF FOUR NOVELS
Spring Snow
Runaway Horses
The Temple of Dawn
The Decay of the Angel
Confessions of a Mask
Thirst for Love
Forbidden Colors
The Sailor who Fell from Grace with the Sea
After the Banquet
The Temple of the Golden Pavilion
Five Modern NÙ Plays
The Sound of Waves
Death in Midsummer
Acts of Worship
1
WHEN CONVERSATION at school turned to the Russo-Japanese War, Kiyoaki Matsugae asked his closest friend, Shigekuni Honda, how much he could remember about it. Shigekuni’s memories were vague—he just barely recalled having been taken once to the front gate to watch a torchlight procession. The year the war ended they had both been eleven, and it seemed to Kiyoaki that they should be able to remember it a little more accurately. Their classmates who talked so knowingly about the war were for the most part merely embellishing hazy memories with tidbits they had picked up from grown-ups.
Two members of the Matsugae family, Kiyoaki’s uncles, had been killed. His grandmother still received a pension from the government, thanks to these two sons she had lost, but she never used the money; she left the envelopes unopened on the ledge of the household shrine. Perhaps that was why the photograph which impressed Kiyoaki most out of the entire collection of war photographs in the house was one entitled “Vicinity of Tokuri Temple: Memorial Services for the War Dead” and dated June 26, 1904, the thirty-seventh year of the Meiji era. This photograph, printed in sepia ink, was quite unlike the usual cluttered mementos of the war. It had been composed with an artist’s eye for structure: it really made it seem as if the thousands of soldiers who were present were arranged deliberately, like figures in a painting, to focus the entire attention of the viewer on the tall cenotaph of unpainted wood in their midst. In the distance, mountains sloped gently in the haze, rising in easy stages to the left of the picture, away from the broad plain at their foot; to the right, they merged in the distance with scattered clumps of trees, vanishing into the yellow dust of the horizon. And here, instead of mountains, there was a row of trees growing taller as the eye moved to the right; a yellow sky showed through the gaps between them. Six very tall trees stood at graceful intervals in the foreground, each placed so as to complement the overall harmony of the landscape. It was impossible to tell what kind they were, but their heavy top branches seemed to bend in the wind with a tragic grandeur.
The distant expanse of plains glowed faintly; this side of the mountains, the vegetation lay flat and desolate. At the center of the picture, minute, stood the plain wooden cenotaph and the altar with flowers lying on it, its white cloth twisted by the wind.
For the rest you saw nothing but soldiers, thousands of them. In the foreground, they were turned away from the camera to reveal the white sunshields hanging from their caps and the diagonal leather straps across their backs. They had not formed up in neat ranks, but were clustered in
groups, heads drooping. A mere handful in the lower left corner had half-turned their dark faces toward the camera, like figures in a Renaissance painting. Farther behind them, a host of soldiers stretched away in an immense semicircle to the ends of the plain, so many men that it was quite impossible to tell one from another, and more were grouped far away among the trees.
The figures of these soldiers, in both foreground and rear, were bathed in a strange half-light that outlined leggings and boots and picked out the curves of bent shoulders and the napes of necks. This light charged the entire picture with an indescribable sense of grief.
From these men, there emanated a tangible emotion that broke in a wave against the small white altar, the flowers, the cenotaph in their midst. From this enormous mass stretching to the edge of the plain, a single thought, beyond all power of human expression, bore down like a great, heavy ring of iron on the center.
Both its age and its sepia ink tinged the photograph with an atmosphere of infinite poignance.
∗
Kiyoaki was eighteen. Nothing in the household where he had been born would account for his being so sensitive, so prone to melancholy. One would have been hard pressed to find, in that rambling house built on high ground near Shibuya, anyone who in any way shared his sensibilities. It was an old samurai family, but Kiyoaki’s father, Marquis Matsugae, embarrassed by the humble position his forebears had occupied as recently as the end of the shogunate fifty years before, had sent the boy, still a very small child, to be brought up in the household of a court nobleman. Had he not done so, Kiyoaki would probably not have developed into so sensitive a young man.
Marquis Matsugae’s residence occupied a large tract of land beyond Shibuya, on the outskirts of Tokyo. The many buildings spread out over a hundred acres, their roofs rising in an exciting counterpoise. The main house was of Japanese architecture, but in the corner of the park stood an imposing Western-style house designed by an Englishman. It was said to be one of four residences in Japan—Marshal Oyama’s was the first—that one might enter without removing one’s outdoor shoes.
In the middle of the park a large pond spread out against the backdrop of a hill covered with maples. The pond was big enough to boat on; it had an island in the middle, water lilies in flower, and even water shields that could be picked for the kitchen. The drawing-room of the main house faced the pond, as did the banqueting room of the Western house.
Some two hundred stone lanterns were scattered at random along the banks and on the island, which also boasted three cranes made out of cast-iron, two stretching their long necks to the sky and the other with its head bent low.
Water sprang from its source at the crest of the maple hill and descended the slopes in several falls; the stream then passed beneath a stone bridge and dropped into a pool that was shaded by red rocks from the island of Sado, before flowing into the pond at a spot where, in season, a patch of lovely irises bloomed. The pond was stocked both with carp and winter crucian. Twice a year, the Marquis allowed schoolchildren to come there on picnics.
When Kiyoaki was a child, the servants had frightened him with stories about the snapping turtles. Long ago, when his grandfather was ill, a friend had presented him with a hundred of these turtles in the hope that their meat would rebuild his strength. Released into the pond, they had bred rapidly. Once a snapping turtle got your finger in its beak, the servants told Kiyoaki, that was the end of it.
There were several pavilions used for the tea ceremony and also a large billiard room. Behind the main house, wild yams grew thick in the grounds, and there was a grove of cypresses planted by Kiyoaki’s grandfather, and intersected by two paths. One led to the rear gate; the other climbed a small hill to the plateau at its top where a shrine stood at one corner of a wide expanse of grass. This was where his grandfather and two uncles were enshrined. The steps, lanterns, and torii, all stone, were traditional, but on either side of the steps, in place of the usual lion-dogs, a pair of cannon shells from the Russo-Japanese War had been painted white and set in the ground. Somewhat lower down there was a shrine to Inari, the harvest god, behind a magnificent trellis of wisteria. The anniversary of his grandfather’s death fell at the end of May; thus the wisteria was always in full glory when the family gathered here for the services, and the women would stand in its shade to avoid the glare of the sun. Their white faces, powdered even more meticulously than usual for the occasion, were dappled in violet, as though some exquisite shadow of death had fallen across their cheeks.
The women. No one could count exactly the multitude of women who lived in the Matsugae mansion. Kiyoaki’s grandmother, of course, took precedence over them all, though she preferred to live in retirement at some distance from the main house, with eight maids to attend to her needs. Every morning, rain or shine, Kiyoaki’s mother would finish dressing and go at once with two maids in attendance to pay her respects to the old lady. And every day the old lady would scrutinize her daughter-in-law’s appearance.
“That hairstyle isn’t very becoming. Why not try doing it in the high-collar way tomorrow? I’m sure it would look better on you,” she would say, her eyes narrowed lovingly. But when the hair was arranged the Western way next morning, the old lady would comment: “Really, Tsujiko, a high-collar hair-do simply doesn’t suit an old-fashioned Japanese beauty like you. Please try the Marumage style tomorrow.” And so, for as long as Kiyoaki could remember, his mother’s coiffure had been perpetually changing.
The hairdressers and their apprentices were in constant attendance. Not only did his mother’s hair demand their services but they had to look after more than forty maids. However, they had shown concern for the hair of a male member of the household on only one occasion. This was when Kiyoaki was in his first year at the middle school attached to Peers School. The honor had fallen to him of being selected to act as a page in the New Year’s festivities at the Imperial Palace.
“I know the people at school want you to look like a little monk,” said one of the hairdressers, “but that shaved head just won’t look right with your fine costume today.”
“But they’ll scold me if my hair is long.”
“All right, all right,” said the hairdresser. “Let me see what I can do to improve it. You’ll be wearing a hat in any case, but I think we can arrange things so that even when you take it off, you’ll outshine all the other young gentlemen.”
So he said, but Kiyoaki at thirteen had had his head clipped so closely that it looked blue. When the hairdresser parted his hair, the comb hurt, and the hair oil stung his skin. For all the hairdresser’s vaunted skill, the head reflected in the mirror looked no different from any boy’s, yet at the banquet Kiyoaki was praised for his extraordinary beauty.
The Emperor Meiji himself had once honored the Matsugae residence with his presence. To entertain his Imperial Majesty, an exhibition of sumo wrestling had been staged beneath a huge gingko tree, around which a space had been curtained off. The Emperor watched from a balcony on the second floor of the Western house. Kiyoaki confided to the hairdresser that on that occasion he had been permitted to appear before the Emperor, and His Majesty had deigned to pat him on the head. That had taken place four years ago, but it nevertheless was possible that the Emperor might remember the head of a mere page at the New Year’s festivities.
“Really?” exclaimed the hairdresser, overwhelmed. “Young master, you mean to say you were caressed by the Emperor himself!” So saying, he slid backward across the tatami floor, clapping his hands in genuine reverence at the child.
The costume of a page attending a lady of the court consisted of matching blue velvet jacket and trousers, the latter reaching to just below the knees. Down either side of the jacket was a row of four large white fluffy pompons and more were attached to the cuffs and the trousers. The page wore a sword at his waist, and the shoes on his white-stockinged feet were fastened with black enamel buttons. A white silk tie was knotted in the center of his broad lace collar, and a tricorn hat, ad
orned with a large feather, hung down his back on a silk cord. Each New Year, about twenty sons of the nobility with outstanding school records were selected to take turns—in fours—bearing the train of the Empress, or in pairs to carry the train of an imperial princess during the three days of festivities. Kiyoaki carried the train of the Empress once and did the same for the Princess Kasuga. When it was his turn to bear the Empress’s train she had proceeded with solemn dignity down corridors fragrant with the musky incense lit by the palace attendants, and he had stood in attendance behind her during the audience. She was a woman of great elegance and intelligence, but by then she was already elderly, close to sixty. Princess Kasuga, however, was not much more than thirty. Beautiful, elegant, imposing, she was like a flower at its moment of perfection.
Even now, Kiyoaki could remember less about the rather sober train favored by the Empress than about the Princess’s broad sweep of white ermine, with its scattered black spots and its border of pearls. The Empress’s train had four loops for the pages’ hands, and the Princess’s two. Kiyoaki and the others had been so exhaustively drilled that they had no trouble in holding firm while advancing at a steady pace.
Princess Kasuga’s hair had the blackness and sheen of fine lacquer. Seen from behind, her elaborate coiffure seemed to dissolve into the rich white skin-textures of the nape of her neck, leaving single strands against her bare shoulders whose faint sheen was set off by her décolleté.
She held herself erect, and walked straight ahead with a firm step, betraying no tremor to her trainbearers, but in Kiyoaki’s eyes that great fan of white fur seemed to glow and fade to the sound of music, like a snow-covered peak first hidden, then exposed by a fluid pattern of clouds. At that moment, for the first time in his life, he was struck by the full force of womanly beauty—a dazzling burst of elegance that made his senses reel.
Princess Kasuga’s lavish use of French perfume extended to her train, and its fragrance overpowered the musky odor of incense. Some way down the corridor, Kiyoaki stumbled for a moment, inadvertently tugging at the train. The Princess turned her head slightly, and, as a sign that she was not at all annoyed, smiled gently at the youthful offender. Her gesture went unnoticed; body perfectly erect in that fractional turn, she had allowed Kiyoaki a glimpse of a corner of her mouth. At that moment, a single wisp of hair slipped over her clear white cheek, and out of the fine-drawn corner of an eye a smile flashed in a spark of black fire. But the pure line of her nose did not move. It was as if nothing had happened . . . this fleeting angle of the Princess’s face—too slight to be called a profile—made Kiyoaki feel as if he had seen a rainbow flicker for a bare instant through a prism of pure crystal.