Word: kiyoaki
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...first book, Spring Snow, Honda develops a passionate friendship with another young man, Mitsugae Kiyoaki, who is courting a young woman of the aristocracy, Ayakura Satoko. Having become pregnant, Satoko finds refuge in a Buddhist abbey; Kiyoaki makes a desperate attempt to see her there, but succumbs to illness and dies...
...brought before him, accused of conspiring in a right-wing plot against the government. Honda resigns his position and successfully pleads the boy's defense, for he has seen a birthmark--three moles under the left armpit--that convinces him that the boy is a reincarnation of the dead Kiyoaki. Released from jail, the boy assassinates an important financial figure, and then commits harikiri alone...
...Spring Snow, the dreamy and aristocratic hero Kiyoaki Matsugae died a vaporously youthful death. He becomes Isao, the fanatic young political conspirator of Runaway Horses. In The Temple of Dawn, Kiyoaki/Isao is again transformed, this time into Ying Chan, a lovely Thai princess. The witness to all three incarnations is a wonderfully subtle spiritual voyeur named Honda, a rationalist Japanese judge and lawyer. Honda, like a principle of embattled moral intelligence, acts as Mishima's civilized guide through the mysteries of love, death, political tragedy and reincarnation...
...sensibility was at once delicate and apocalyptic. Like Spring Snow, the first volume of The Sea of Fertility, Runaway Horses shivers with fragile yet highly wrought detail. Here Mishima also experiments, to lovely effect, with the Buddhist doctrine of reincarnation, lunuma, it seems, may be the reincarnation of Kiyoaki Matsugae, the doomed young lover of Spring Snow...
Obviously the trials of this Asian young Werther need to be told with exceptional vigor and skill, but Mishima was no Goethe. Digressions and flashbacks are often handled with surprising awkwardness. Kiyoaki is stupefyingly narcissistic, and unfortunately so is the author. He pauses so often to admire his hero and his school friends that at times the prose itself resembles a drowning pool. Some of this satiety may be chargeable to a wordy, flaccid translation. Occasionally, however, Mishima produces sensual writing of great delicacy. Looking at two Siamese princes, Kiyoaki reflects: "Such skin must surely seal within itself a cool...