Spring Snow by Yukio Mishima

The flyleaf on The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles hails its author as worthy of entering the ranks of the likes of Mishima. I took this as a kind of letter of introduction when I stumbled across this book on the library shelves - Mishima, oh, literary giant, oh, okay, I should check it out.

First off, it has to be said, Mishima writes wonderfully about nature. It if that sounds too National Geographic-esque to be interesting, I'm sorry, because it's actually fantastic. I now even begin to understand why someone might get off on Haiku, thanks to Mishima's descriptive passages. I am normally one who quickly scans over that stuff, hunting for the good parts, the She said/He said. But reading, and inevitably picturing, Mishima's landscapes is a joy in itself. I'm still holding on to the mental image this one conjures for me:

"The sweeping view was unobstructed and made one feel that all it encompassed - sky, land, and the sea embraced by the capes - was part of the Matsugae domain. No images obtruded on its sovereignty save those fantastically billowing clouds, the occasional bird, and the ships that passed by far out in the offing. In Summer, when the cloud formations were at their peak, the whole thing seemed to be transformed into a huge theatre, with the villa for the spectators and the smooth expanse of the bay becoming the vast stage on which the clouds performed their extravagant ballets.

The outside terrace was floored in heavy teak, laid out in checkers. The architect had been against exposing a wooded floor to the ravages of the weather, but he yielded when the Marquis reminded him sharply that the decks of ships were made of wood."

Nice, huh? I could certainly handle such a summer home myself. The would-be inheritor of all this and more is 18 year-old Kiyoake Matsugae, only son of the Marquis Matsugae. Kiyoake is an insecure, self-absorbed young man of exceptional beauty. Satoko is two years older, a helluva lot wiser and very much in love with him. The pair grew up together. Since the Matsugae clan are arriviste, only newly-noble, really samurai class, the Marquis placed his son to be raised in the truly aristocratic household of Satoko's father. The year is 1911 and society is pretty restrictive for the love birds, but it would have been a lot easier if Kiyo wasn't such a raging twit. But he learns his lesson and faces the consequences and wouldn't be much of a tragic hero otherwise, so I guess we have to take him as he comes. And Mishima writes perceptively on the subtleties of Kiyo's twittishness, so he's a well-developed character.

There is a lot going on in this novel that I am not hip to, I can tell that much. I'm sure if I was a student of Japanese History, or Cultural Studies, or Literature, for that matter, I would be picking up more of the author's message. I actually found Spring Snow a bit weak on that front, the sense that Mishima is preaching about something that is maybe not as important as he thought it was - the degeneration of a noble society, or summat like that, wot. The strength is that Mishima can write characters and descripton that amply fill his classic storyline. "Spring Snow" is the first in a series of four. I'll definitely read another, and let you know how it goes.

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