This was sort of a random book I picked and it was very interesting. I started it and absolutely loved it and then I looked up the author and I just thought what the heck. This guy was a psycho. He tried to stage a coup and committed seppuku? It sounds like he went insane at the end of his life with radical nationalism and this book was a part of it, letting him imagine a time at the height of imperial reverence in Japan. He was also apparently a closeted homosexual, something that is clear from his descriptions of men in the books.
But he has a really beautiful way of writing, and clearly likes to write about beautiful things and beautiful people. Here are a couple passages I liked from the book:
The butler came in to announce that the carriage was waiting. The horses neighed and their breath flared white from their nostrils, to swirl up into the black, wintry sky. Kiyoaki enjoyed seeing horses proudly displaying their strength in winter, when their usual musky smell was fainter and their hooves rang clearly on the frozen ground. On a warm spring day, a galloping horse was only too clearly a sweating animal of flesh and blood. But a horseracing through a snowstorm became one with the very elements; wrapped in the whirling blast of the north wind, the beast embodied the icy breath of winter.
Iinuma had plenty of time to reflect later, but very often a man's whole life alters course because of a moment's hesitation. That instant is like a fold made down the middle of a sheet of paper. In it, the underside becomes the upmost, and what was once visible is hidden forever.
One hot sultry night, as Kiyoaki was settling into an uneasy sleep, he began to dream. It was quite unlike his previous experiences. If one flounders in the shallows of sleep, wading where the water is tepid and full of all sorts of flotsam that has come in from deeper water to pile up with the land debris in a tangled heap, one is liable to slash one's feet.
Her lovely white hand grew more and more emaciated until she could no longer move it. It lay there as cold and still as a single moonbeam coming in through a window.
Maybe the biggest theme in the book is the contrast of the East and West, with Japanese embrace of the West usually being considered as an indication of decadence or weakness. In this book all about aristocrats, the best things are the Japanese things. I think that when Mishima writes his flowery descriptions, he focuses them on aspects of Japanese culture and Japanese people's thoughts, usually using Westernness just as a marker of someone's personality. Our principal characters in the book, Kiyoaki and Satoko, don't really do the Western imitation thing that other aristocrats do in the book. Similarly, devotion to the Emperor is a huge theme. All the characters are totally dedicated to protecting the Emperor, even if it means hiding things from the Imperial Family, because it is better to hide the truth from them so that scandal never touches them.
One thought I had reading about Mishima is that he must have regretted not serving in the Japanese military in World War Two. I read that he faked Typhus to get out of it, and this book makes me think he regretted it, since Kiyoaki, the protagonist, also fakes illness at one point, and looks wistfully at the soldiers he sees. And then Mishima became an ultranationalist later in his life and then committed seppuku. If Kiyoaki is autobiographical, Mishima doesn't seem like a pleasant guy. The protagonist is conniving, cynical, and cruel.
