Yukio Mishima
Yukio Mishima
Yukio Mishimais the pen name of Kimitake Hiraoka, a Japanese author, poet, playwright, actor, and film director. Mishima is considered one of the most important Japanese authors of the 20th century. He was considered for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1968 but the award went to his countryman Yasunari Kawabata. His works include the novels Confessions of a Mask and The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, and the autobiographical essay Sun and Steel. His avant-garde work displayed a blending...
NationalityJapanese
ProfessionPlaywright
Date of Birth14 January 1925
CountryJapan
The most appropriate type of daily life for me was a day-by-day world destruction; peace was the most difficult and abnormal state to live in.
Pain, I came to feel, might well prove to be the sole proof of the persistence of consciousness within the flesh, the sole physical expression of consciousness. As my body acquired muscle, and in turn strength, there was gradually born within me a tendency towards the positive acceptance of pain, and my interest in physical suffering deepened.
Mine was the unbearable jealousy a cultured pearl must feel toward a genuine one. Or can there be such a thing in this world as a man who is jealous of the woman who loves him, precisely because of her love?
Abruptly he thrust his snow-drenched leather gloves against my cheeks. I dodged. A raw carnal feeling blazed up within me, branding my cheeks. I felt myself staring at him with crystal clear eyes... From that time on I was in love with Omi.
When people concentrate on the idea of beauty, they are, without realizing it, confronted with the darkest thoughts that exist in this world. That, I suppose, is how human beings are made.
As long as you know I am waiting, take your time flowers of the spring.
Quite possibly, what I call happiness may coincide with what others call the moment of imminent danger
Other people must be destroyed. In order that I might truly face the sun, the world itself must be destroyed....
Is there not a sort of remorse that precedes sin? Was it remorse at the very fact that I existed?
We tend to suffer from the illusion that we are capable of dying for a belief or theory. What Hagakure is insisting is that even in merciless death, a futile death that knows neither flower nor fruit has dignity as the death of a human being. If we value so highly the dignity of life, how can we not also value the dignity of death? No death may be called futile.
...of all the kinds of decay in this world, decadent purity is the most malignant.
if the world changed, i could not exist, and if i changed, the world could not exist
..and certain that life consisted of a few simple signals and decisions; that death took root at the moment of birth and man’s only recourse thereafter was to water and tend it; that propagation was a fiction; consequently, society was a fiction too; that fathers and teachers, by virtue of being fathers and teachers, were guilty of a grievous sin.
It is a rather risky matter to discuss a happiness that has no need of words.