Spring Snow

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Epub ISBN: 9781407054131

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Published by Vintage 2000

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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

W
HEN 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.

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