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“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
“Chusai Oshio realized in his own person the Wang Yang-ming concept of unity of thought and action, embodying the dictum : ‘To know and not to act is not to know.’”
- Yukio Mishima, Runaway Horses
Tags: action, wang yang-ming
“The cynicism that regards hero worship as comical is always shadowed by a sense of physical inferiority.”
- Yukio Mishima,Sun and Steel
Tags: cynicism, insecurity
“We must resurrect a faith in purity and its glorification.”
- Yukio Mishima, Mishima on Hagakure
“…there is no discipline so easy to speak of and so difficult to perform as the Combined Way of the Warrior and the Scholar. I decided that nothing else could offer me the excuse to live my life as an artist. This realization, too, I owe to Hagakure.”
- Yukio Mishima, Mishima on Hagakure
“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
“It is true enough that when I lifted a certain weight of steel, I was able to believe in my own strength. I sweated and panted, struggling to obtain certain proof of my strength. At such times, strength was mine, and equally it was the steel’s. My sense of existence was feeding on 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
