Spring Snow

Kiyoaki Matsugae is raised inside a household straining to look aristocratic, the Matsugae fortune being new money grafted onto old court manners by way of the aristocratic Ayakura family, who fostered him as a boy specifically to refine his breeding. That secondhand refinement produces a young man who has learned elegance as performance rather than feeling: his early coldness toward Satoko, a woman he has known since childhood and plainly loves, is staged cruelty, a way of proving to himself that he is above ordinary wanting until her engagement to an imperial prince makes wanting her impossible, and therefore, for the first time, real.

Once Satoko is formally sanctioned to marry Prince Toin, with the emperor's own blessing attached to the match, Kiyoaki's desire stops being adolescent hesitation and becomes a direct transgression against the imperial house itself. Mishima is precise about what that raises the stakes to: this is no longer a story about two young people finding their nerve, it's a story about a boy testing whether personal will can survive contact with the entire structure of state and family honor built to crush it.

Honda, Kiyoaki's rational, legally minded friend, watches all of this from just outside the passion he can't share, and it's through Honda's eyes, and a small birthmark under Satoko's arm noted early and half-forgotten, that Mishima plants the machinery for the rest of his Sea of Fertility tetralogy: a belief in reincarnation that will let this single Taisho-era tragedy recur, transformed, across three more volumes and several more decades of Honda's life.

Spring Snow is the opening volume of Mishima's four-book Sea of Fertility, whose title borrows the name of a lunar mare, a 'sea' that is in fact a dry, dead plain, an irony Mishima intended as commentary on beauty that promises fertility and delivers only barrenness. He finished the tetralogy's final pages on the morning of November 25, 1970, the same day he committed ritual suicide after a failed attempt to incite a coup, which has made it difficult ever since to read the series, and this novel's obsession with youth, purity, and self-annihilating will, as separate from the life of the man who wrote it.