It's fair to say that this past year, my reading life has been dominated by Japanese writers. I've been a late enthusiast of Haruki Murakami's work, but I've happily read all of it in the last three years. Just before the New Year I was introduced to the work of Yasunari Kawabata through which I was swept, awe-struck through his whole ouevre. Soon after that, I read my favorite book of all time, Natsume Soseki's I Am A Cat. Of course I read him through, though crest-fallen at the lesser prominence of felines in his later novels. Despite that, Soseki was my favorite Japanese writer, but perhaps my favorite writer of all.
Kawabata's colleague, confidant and competitor, ultimately prevailing in his winning of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Yukio Mishima, was someone I'd heard of but never assayed.
Yukio Mishima is my favorite writer. I was fully committed to bingeing his work after my introduction via Michael Gallagher's supremely sympathetic English translation of The Sea of Fertility's first volume, Spring Snow. Committed as I was, I read his earliest novels, Confessions of a Mask (1949) and the formidable Forbidden Colours (1951-53). I found Alfred H. Mark's translation of Colours irritatingly clunky in a way that made me suspect I was misapplying the abrupt and awkward prose to Mishima's immature work. My acquaintance with Meredith Weatherby's astonishing translation of Confessions of a Mask thoroughly disabused me of any feeling of young Mishima's shortcomings or brashness, properly laying the blame on the lame Alfred Marks. I own the next in chronological line of Mishima's work, Thirst For Love (1950), but, Marks having been the sole translator of that early work, I think I'll save it for a later date.
Luckily, the inestimably talented and sympathetic translative ear of Meredith Weatherby was the English voice of The Sound of Waves (1954) which I've now read in a white heat. Mishima has written widely for the stage, and in this book and in the few others I've read, I am struck by his gifted command in shaping dramatic situations, dynamics both personal and elemental, as the ambience and engine of his narrative. I have also been overwhelmed with his imagery, wherever I've encountered it, with his empathetic descriptions of the sea and surf.
After the homoerotic cosmopolitan immersions of contemporary Tokyo that are Mishima's Mask and Colours, it was bracing to say the least to find ourselves landed in the simpler setting of a humble fishing village on the small Japanese island, Uta-Jima (invoked as the first sonority, the first word of the novel)
I have always been arrested by the fierce intensity and laminate beauty of Mishima's water imagery, but The Sound of Waves is a whole redolent universe of such astonishing evocation. It is also an unabashed, intimately compassionate and compelling love story of two children of the island, Shinji, a young apprentice fisherman, and a daughter of the diving class of island women, Hatsue. As with Confessions of a Mask, one innate talent of Mishima is in his depiction of young love, of emergent sexuality. I am confident there has never been such a master of this dynamic of innocence and awakening since Vladimir Nabokov.
As much of the novel takes place in the sea, with its dangers and daring, its implacable strength and eternity, much of the dramatic and emotional action takes place within the torii of the modest pinnacle of the island, the Yoshiro Shrine. And the true nexus of intrigue and destiny takes place at the electrical shrine dispelling darkness, danger and mystery, the lighthouse.
A writer friend of mine, someone who'd been badgering me to continue with the Three-Body Problem trilogy, when I apologized that I could not abandon my Mishima n=binge, understood, saying that it was a problematic calculus, Cixin Liu's prophecies and epiphanies coming once every 100 pages, arriving in Mishima with every phrase.
Every characterization is true. There are no mechanistic caricatures like in a Dickens novel. Even when making right decisions, the frailty and foibles of those molding the fate of the protagonists may not state their judgements in ways that fulfill our own sense of justice and morality, but justice prevails nonetheless, and the characters and their colloquy are always true to themselves.
There are cliff-hangers in this love story, matters of bravery and menace, revelations of dark and ungenerous natures, the sanity and sanctity of suicide, morality of simple origins, intrinsic fear of modernity. The book is rich and enriching.
I feel like every Mishima book I read will become my new favorite. That's an unfair presumption but nonetheless true with The Sound of Waves.
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Kilt_monster
Eloquent, simple, nice to read!
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 11, 2015