Word: mishima
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...SOUND OF WAVES (183 pp.)-Yuklo Mishima-Knopf...
...Japanese novel is rather like a Japanese flower arrangement. It is subtle, delicate and personal, and it invariably fades a little in the vase of translation. The Sound of Waves does not wholly escape this fate, but its 31-year-old author, Yukio Mishima, is a spare-time weight lifter, and he has infused his tale of troubled young love among hard-working fisherfolk with a peasant robustness notably lacking in recent, more aristocratically attuned Japanese novels, e.g., Lady of Beauty, Some Prefer Nettles...
...prayers. Hatsue is lithe and lovely, the winner among the women divers of an unofficial "best-shaped breasts" contest. A fleeting kiss on the beach is about all Shinji can hope for from Hatsue, since her father is a wealthy shipowner with small use for penniless apprentice fishermen. Author Mishima, who seems to have learned some of his flower-arranging from Hollywood, maroons the couple in an abandoned tower during a storm...
...social bridge between them. Village gossip assumes the worst, and Hatsue's father plays the ogre. In the popular Japanese tradition, true love of this kind is expected to end badly, preferably with a double suicide jump off the face of a cliff or into a volcano. Novelist Mishima resolutely avoids the bucket-of-tears finale for an imitation Western happy ending, which will startle readers by its incongruity. But love in Japan is not so much the book's real subject as love of Japan. The desire to evoke the spare, printlike beauty of their native land...
...shifts on Wednesdays and Saturdays. Last week four more noble playmates with special talents were chosen to match Akihito's varying moods: Yasuo Nishi, 7, accomplished pilot of baby automobiles; Yoshitska Torio, 7, very good at drawing; Takatoshi Kinoshita, 6, a singer and athlete; and Tsuyo Mishima, 7, brilliant toy soldier tactician...