In this world, there will never be another miracle.
- Black Lizard in The Black Lizard. Imago Theater production, translated by Laurence Kominz & Mark Oshima
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You were so beautiful when you wanted to die. When you wanted to live, you became so ugly.
- Black Lizard in The Black Lizard. Imago Theater production, translated by Laurence Kominz & Mark Oshima
“What is so ghastly about exposed intestines? Why, when we see the insides of a human being, do we have to cover our eyes in terror? Why are a man’s intestines ugly? Is it not exactly the same in quality as a youthful, glossy skin? [...] Why does there seem to be something inhuman about regarding human beings like roses and refusing to make any distinction between the insides of their bodies and the outside? If only human beings could reverse their spirits and their bodies, could gracefully turn them inside out like rose petals and expose them to the spring breeze and to the sun…”
– Yukio Mishima, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion
Tags: entrails, guts, intestines, ordeal by roses, roses, seppuku, spirit
“Insensitive people are only upset when they actually see blood. Yet, by the time that blood has been shed, the tragedy is already completed.”
– Yukio Mishima, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion
“Purity, a concept that recalled flowers, the piquant mint taste of a mouthwash, a child clinging to its mother’s gentle breast, was something that joined all these directly to the concept of blood, the concept of swords cutting down through the shoulder to spray the air with blood. And to the concept of seppuku. The moment that a samurai “fell like the cherry blossoms, his blood-smeared corpse became at once like fragrant cherry blossoms. The concept of purity, then, could alter to the contrary with arbitrary swiftness. And so purity was the stuff of poetry.”
- Yukio Mishima, Runaway Horses
Tags: cherry blossom, kendo, league of the devine wind, purity, seppuku
“Isao had never felt that he might want to be a woman. He had never wished for anything else but to be a man, live in a manly way, die a manly death. To be thus a man was to give constant proof of one’s manliness–to be more a man today than yesterday, more a man tomorrow than today. To be a man was to forge ever upward toward the peak of manhood, there to die amid the white snows of that peak.
But to be a woman? It seemed to mean being a woman at the beginning and being a woman forever.”
- Yukio Mishima, Runaway Horses
Tags: manliness, manly death, womanhood, women
“Muscles, I found, were strength as well as form, and each complex of muscles was slightly responsible for the direction in which its own strength was exerted, much as though they were rays of light given the form of flesh.
Nothing could have accorded better with the definition of a work of art that I had long cherished than this concept of form enfolding strength, coupled with the idea that a work should be organic, radiating rays of light in all directions.
The muscles that I thus created were at one and the same time simple existence and works of art; they even, paradoxically, possessed a certain abstract nature. their one fatal flaw was that they were too closely involved with the life process, which decreed that they should decline and perish with the decline of life itself.”
- Yukio Mishima,Sun and Steel
“Beyond doubt, there was a certain splendor in pain, which bore a deep affinity to the splendor that lies hidden within strength.”
- Yukio Mishima,Sun and Steel
New book on Strength, Courage & Honor
