Tag: Yukio Mishima

Seven Years of Mostly About Stories

I have invested, perhaps foolishly, in a few friends’ startups, and my reward so far has been a few years’ worth of monthly updates that tell me that things are happening and people are working. Even if I don’t receive any money back, I still enjoy this sense of a joint journey, of being carried by the same wave. You, reader, are also an investor, albeit with your time rather than money, in me and what I make here, and to you I owe an update too. It doesn’t quite sit right with me to have a blog, which is inevitably personal in outlook and even features the first person singular pronoun at regular points, and yet to exist so shadily. One never knows, of course, whether you want me to exist as an independent entity, but I have my hopes on that score.

Indeed, I take as a vague principle that if you readers want properly academic writing, you head to Jstor, and that if you want the polished impersonality of a modern essay or review, you go to the New Yorker or LARB. In short, that if you are here, reading this, rather than merely stumbling on something on the internet while desperately trying to put together an essay for your studies, you must, in a certain sense, want this personal element, in other words, me. 

Life

Last year, I was entering the final stretch of a trainee programme at a large company and had moved to Germany. Over the course of last year, I finished this scheme and received a full-time position, also in Germany. This was a far from guaranteed outcome, and the high levels of stress associated with searching for a role in an unfriendly job market had a negative impact both on my reading and on my writing. All that is now behind us. The new work contract is permanent, and I have the full force of German unions and worker protections at my back to ensure any future moves will be entirely voluntary.

I have spoken before about my enjoyment of stability, indeed my great need for it. After my unplanned exit from Russia in early 2022, I have more or less lived without even a year’s certainty ahead of me. I am not a person who savours spontaneity or the absence of structure. “Be settled in your life and as ordinary as the bourgeois, in order to be fierce and original in your works.” This quote of Flaubert’s is one I have always admired whenever I have seen it, and I can say that it has proven true for my own case too.

And what stability! My work contract is permanent. My rental contract, in a spacious and well-located flat, is equally permanent. Never before has the future been so secure, even if the new risks of stasis and stagnation have appeared for the first time on the horizon. This is a great blessing.

Writing

I finished a first draft of a reasonably lengthy novella and was pleased enough with it, an unusual thing, to show it to a few friends in exchange for some helpful feedback. During the dark days of the job hunt and the brighter-but-still-stressful days of the apartment and furniture hunt, I did not succeed in writing creatively. I was, however, last year blessed with ideas for two novels of, I think, great potential. Unfortunately, one is historical in nature and requires a condition of personal leisure that is currently unavailable to me. The other novel is already in progress.

Now that I have this external stability mentioned above alongside an excellent work-life-balance, there is neither any practical obstacle nor reasonable excuse available to me not to focus with redoubled efforts upon my ambitions of becoming a great, or at least reasonably good, fiction writer. I see this as consisting of three elements.

First, I must improve my experience. This I can do simply by living and paying attention. In a favourite phrase, it means keeping both eyes open and noting things down. Observations, images, snatches of phrases. One of my tasks for this year is to do this in a dedicated volume, as my diary is primarily an emotion-regulation tool now and hence no longer the best place for such things. I am not fundamentally concerned about my chances in this development area: I have had a reasonable number of interesting experiences to call upon already – in Russia, growing up in Scotland, and elsewhere. What I must do now is become the kind of noticer that can identify and place the perfect detail to turn mere remembered experience into a rich vividness.

Second, I must improve my background knowledge. Mostly About Stories is, I hope, a storehouse of at least some value in this regard, but the fact remains that there are significant areas where my knowledge is, in my view, insufficient. Reading – history, philosophy, criticism, art history, politics, economics, religion, current affairs – and so on, in conjunction with discussions, where possible, with those who know better, should answer this need. While I have a reasonable amount of free time outside of work, I cannot afford the truly scattergun approach of a writer of leisure. Therefore, this reading does need to be somewhat targeted. Learning is a project, and projects can be managed.

Third, and perhaps most importantly, I must improve my technique. Many, many, writerly sins can be forgiven of people who know how to put together an incisive sentence in a style that is their own. Can’t do dialogue? Then give us the descriptive jewels of a Marquez paragraph, the chaotic mess of a Krasznahorkai, the hilarious brutality of Bernhard or the wondrous rhythms of Fosse.

Improving one’s technique is, of course, a matter of practice. It is also a matter of study. On this blog I have, I hope, provided the occasional example of the analysis of a wider work. Sometimes I even quote things, as if to inform readers that I have actually read the thing I’m talking about. But really, I am not attacking sentences enough. Increasingly, I contemplate doing blog posts on single paragraphs to really get to the heart of why they work. All this is necessary because while I am often pleased with what I write in my blog posts – there’s often a good sentence here or there, if I may say so myself – with my fiction this is almost never the case. Such focused study, getting closer to language itself, ought to remedy this. The late William Gass did this at times in his essays (e.g. “The Sentence Seeks its Form”), and I have great respect for such an approach.

These three areas are by and large how I think I can improve independently. Naturally, the criticism of trusted and untrusted persons on things I have written is also important, perhaps essential. But by and large, owing to my external situation, my focus is on personal development as it lies within my own hands. I am now 28 years old – a reality that at times strikes me as disappointing, but which is not objectively a catastrophe. I still view myself as being very much a journeyman or apprentice when it comes to writing. This is likely why I am so interested in style and technique. I view writing as a craft that I must work at before I can go around throwing pieces of paper in other people’s faces. Or rather, I want to say things, but I have enough respect for writing and readers to want to make sure I can say them well first.

Blog

Mostly About Stories, of course, has continued. I hope you have enjoyed some of the pieces. I know, and it pains me, that the quality can be variable. There’s always a tension here between my desire to give you something short, snappy, and polished, and my desire to note down in moderately organised paragraphs everything I possibly can about a book while still keeping the time I spend working on the posts reasonably under control. Since I read and write my posts primarily to learn, (and hope readers learn while reading as well), my natural tendency is always for a big baggy monster of a post. Occasionally, I do make unspoken resolutions for you to myself never to write anything longer than 1500, or 2000, or 2500 words. So far, this has not worked.

I have not posted as often as I had intended, annoyingly. I actually have a few posts stacked up which I just haven’t gotten around yet to posting, so it’s not even a dearth of reading or writing at my end which is to blame. I want, ideally, to put something out each fortnight. I do also, though I’ve said it’s unlikely, want to post things that are slightly more tightly written – though first it will be necessary to get through the backlog.

Numbers

When I started MAS, I looked around to see whether there was any information on how many viewers blogs like this actually get. There is a site that does a survey, linked here. Since I write about literature, an even less popular topic than books and reading in general, I still feel there’s value and interest in sharing my own specifically.

Anyway, last year’s total views was 103’546. As our first six-figure result this feels like a small milestone, even if it may just be the power of an accumulation of mildly interesting posts. While the majority of readers may well be people looking to write school and university essays about books they haven’t read, I am grateful for those among you who write comments that often make me feel you have read the book far better than I have, or who write me encouraging messages via the Contact form. And if you are just here to read and enjoy in silence, know that I’m grateful for your presence here too. It’s what I’d do myself.

Books

I would say that my greatest discovery this year has been the Japanese writer Yukio Mishima. I had the impression that my post on The Sailor Who Fell From Grace with the Sea generated a lot of thoughts in readers – even the few friends who read the blog in real life mentioned it specifically when we caught up. I also enjoyed reflecting on Latronico’s Perfection, albeit slightly more than I enjoyed reading it.

Among the various things I read but did not write about, I received the greatest joy from Gary Saul Morson’s Wonder Confronts Certainty, about the relationship between ideas, life, and writing in the 19th century Russian novel, with a few forays into the Soviet period too. I would recommend this book to anyone who loves Russian literature and wants to know the historical interlinkages a little better, or perhaps just wants some new arguments to help articulate what possibly makes the literature special, if special it is.

Next

This year, I aim to write a first draft of the second of the novel ideas that came to me last year, the one that does not require months in a library. It is, however, at least in one sense, a novel of ideas. Hence, it does require plenty of reading – Camus, Sartre & de Beauvoir, Wittgenstein, the Stoics, and the Christian Mystics, are all on my reading list and may appear here (in some cases again) later on. Don’t say I didn’t warn you. I’m also going to read Dostoevsky again, for the first time since the 2022 Invasion. He’s necessary for the novel too.

I also aim to write slightly better blog posts and be mildly more consistent in posting them.

In general, I am excited for what discoveries lie ahead and for sharing them here, with you.

Violence as Answer – Yukio Mishima’s The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea

The really frightening thing about violence is how close it is to magic. If it were not, perhaps nobody would ever think of committing its acts. Violence is taboo and unacceptable to the orderly and their world, but their rejection gives it mystique. It becomes in this light a kind of portal from one world to another – from the boring, polite, controlled world, into something more raw and seemingly more real. This is what we might say to ourselves as we prepare our fists for the first blow. As a group action, violence also binds us together in complicity – guilt, even if we openly reject it, shimmers behind our thoughts and connects us to others it shadows. By a single act we have placed ourselves outside the world, while binding ourselves together in a secret confraternity. That is the power of violence, its magic, its temptation and its horror.

The Japanese writer Yukio Mishima’s short novel, The Sailor Who Fell From Grace with the Sea, (literally Afternoon tow, but John Nathan’s title is so beautiful I’m sure even Mishima would not have objected to it), has violence at its heart and violence as its source of meaning. Just as Mishima himself, trained in iron discipline by his father and connected by blood to the pre-Meiji Emperors through his grandmother, seemed to have violence at his own heart. In 1970, sick of the loss of values in post-war Japanese society as it succumbed to cultural Westernisation, he attempted a military coup with a few followers, then committed seppuku, disembowelling himself before having a loyal friend decapitate him. Before this, he wrote books. To judge from The Sailor Who Fell From Grace with the Sea, angry, violent books. And utterly brilliant ones.

I knew a little of Mishima and his writing before I started. Themes involving bodies, beauty, and shame were on my mind. What I was not prepared for was the sheer intensity of his work, the absolute authorial stamp on the prose regardless of what it narrates. From the first chapter alone, I knew I had entered an entirely new world. Noboru, a boy of thirteen, discovers a peephole between his bedroom and his mother Fusako’s. He observes her as she undresses alone, his father having died five years earlier, with intense curiosity. But it is not until they have a sailor round for the evening, and his mother takes him to bed, that Noboru is rewarded with a secret initiation into the world of adults.

Everything here is intensity, extremity, and taboo. Also light and shadow. It’s interesting to see Tanizaki’s comments on light from In Praise of Shadows given body here, with the extraordinary attention Mishima pays to the light in his scenes, in particular, the effect of moonlight enchanting a scene. Noboru’s unerotic excitement of the voyeurism of observing his mother is mixed with humiliation at the thought of her having been observed by the occupying American soldiers once there in the house. Pleasure and pain are joined in a single action – pressing one’s eye to the peephole. That is one world. When Noboru instead looks at the room through the door as normal, he finds it “drab and familiar”. This is the other one. Enchantment and taboo intensity, or emptiness. Noboru, at thirteen, knows exactly which one he wants.

Noboru loves the sea, its intensity and mystery, and he is attracted to the sailor, Ryuji, as its representative. The ocean also gives the boy the central images he uses to imagine his place in the world: “a large iron anchor withstanding the corrosion of the sea and scornful of the barnacles and oysters that harass the hulls of ships, sinking polished and indifferent through heaps of broken glass, toothless combs, bottle caps, and prophylactics into the mud at harbour bottom – that was how he liked to imagine his heart.” Yet though he tries to steel his heart, Noboru is a boy. He idolises Ryuji, who even looks like he’s stepped out of the waves, from the first meeting. And when he sees Ryuji and his mother coupling, it’s like he has witnessed the moment of the earth’s transfiguration. He determines to protect the illusion at all costs.

The sea is everywhere in this work. Its constant presence is marked most obviously by the horns of ships as they go past Tokyo, and it is visible through Fusako’s window too. Another motif is that of daydreaming and illusion. In the first two chapters following them Ryuji and Fusako both daydream. While going about their days Ryuji remembers his visit to a brothel in Hong Kong, and Fusako thinks back to her first meeting with him from the perspective of a few days afterwards. Violence, shame, and sex are also everywhere, and often linked, as in the half-naked bodies of the stevedores that Fusako watches as they labour, subjecting themselves to the danger of their dockside work. Even more subtly though, through the way that even tree roots can look like “tumid black blood vessels”, Mishima never lets readers relax from their immersion in his vision.

What we actually have is a story of lost illusions, and the terrible attempt to recover them. Fusako, Noboru’s mother, is lonely and gladly falls in love with the sailor Ryuji. Noboru’s idolisation of the man from the sea changes to horror and disgust when Ryuji demonstrates his kind-heartedness and joviality by falling in love in return, rather than representing the boy’s frosty ideal. All this might leave us without tragedy were Noboru not part of a secret group of boys, led by “the chief”, who have their own philosophy and a willingness to put it into practice.

This philosophy is one of “absolute dispassion”, which really means a refusal of all good-will and a “matchless inhumanity”. The children believe that through adopting a posture of cynicism towards the world they might become its masters. They complete the freezing of their hearts through the joint murder of a kitten – a scene so gruesome I don’t think I would ever willingly read it again, even though, in another sense, it’s just a child’s version of the murder that binds the revolutionaries of Dostoevsky’s Demons and every bit as stupid as it.

The idea is not the world. Noboru struggles to force his heart into hardness, convincing himself that he will gain “power over existence” through this bondage of violence. Uneasily, however, he retains his boyish love for ships and the sea. He teeters, perhaps, between the boyish excitement of adventure, and the equally boyish idea that cruelty equates to manliness. When Ryuji lets him down by becoming soft, the balance is lost, and in the end, it’s almost his own self that Noboru wishes to punish.

Ryuji himself is closer to Noboru than the latter realises. With his aloofness and belief in the “Grand Cause” and glory, Ryuji too is in love with illusory ideas. Yet after several years at sea, he has already begun to lose his belief that in his life upon the waves there lies real magic. He’s glad of his love for Fusako, and the chance to enjoy the much sweeter illusion of love, which after all may not be an illusion at all. In other words, Ryuji seems a symbol of that inevitable disillusionment and mellowing that comes with a little age.

The children cannot tolerate this. All they lack is Ryuji’s experience, which would tell them that they cannot maintain their vision of the world forever. Instead, shaken by his betrayal of the authentic, dispassionate, sailor’s life, they decide on punishment – “the deed essential to filling the emptiness of the world.” Some novels show their protagonists lose their illusions willingly, typically replacing cold ideas of the world with the warmth of emotions, as Bazarov does in Fathers and Sons. What makes The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea so powerful is that Mishima does not let the children lose their illusions. He offers them a way out – one brutal, horrible, but in its way even magical. There is no moral here – no sense that violence is not, in fact, the answer.

It’s a problem I have thought about a lot. Often, when depression strikes, it’s for me as if the world has been emptied of its meaning, just as it is for Noboru after Ryuji’s unwitting “betrayal”. One of the ways that I have thought about that void I enter is that while I cannot pull myself out of it I may yet be able to save others from it. The meaning of meaninglessness becomes preventing others from falling into it, whatever the cost. Taken this way, the only thing that matters is the preservation of illusion. Some time ago I wrote a story about an occupying army, cut off from the rest of its people, which is forced into increasingly violent acts in order to maintain to its own soldiers the illusion that it is there on foreign soil with good purpose. It was an exploration of this idea, which is obviously poisonous – there is a point where the actions taken to maintain an illusion are so extreme that it is better to allow for illusions to die.

In The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea we have such an action. Except that we do not have a sense that it goes too far. Because every character in the novel is absorbed in their own illusions, it’s hard to blame the children for trying to maintain their own. More pertinently, in the novel’s closing moments, as Ryuji reflects on his time at sea after giving it up for domestic life with Noboru and Fusako, he actually begins to miss it once again. In other words, at the precise moment when the children are ready to sacrifice him for the preservation of illusion he himself has retreated from reality back into that same illusion of seafaring greatness, as if to say that the children were right all along that there was nothing worthwhile in his coming ashore.

We could probably pick through the novel finding hints of Mishima’s fascism, but perhaps a better way of thinking about it is that the story presents a scenario where violence, illusion, shame and beauty come together to offer a vision of a world where the horror of the novel’s contents is justified and correct. Like any great work of literature it presents a worldview in a way that is compelling. More than that, The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea concerns that classic literary deity – dignity. But not mere dignity for individuals. Instead, the novel concerns the dignity of ideas we might today dismiss out of hand. It is here, in this moonlit world of cruelty and shifting dreams, that we see a way of life that once was so tantalising for so many, and may yet become so again. A cult of beauty, death, and glory.

It’s really quite cool stuff to read, so long as we keep our heads screwed on. We need the knowledge of this world to better combat it in our own, but it is a testament to Mishima’s dark strength that he makes the ideas so tempting too.

A few weeks after posting this I find myself feeling I might have argued a little too sympathetically for violence, which is not my view at all. I think what’s interesting with The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea is that it creates this illusion that violence really can be right and meaningful, when it isn’t if you actually think about it. The sailor might believe that he was wrong to return to land, but as soon as the boys start murdering him he’ll cry out in great pain and want more than anything to be returned to safety – he won’t be thinking about the significance of their actions.

Likewise I feel like I read somewhere that Mishima botched his suicide and was in agony throughout it – even he, I imagined, realised ideas were far less mystical or meaningful when they caused you physical pain. And so many of those whose attempts at taking their own life fail talk of the regret they felt, for example, while falling. Violence makes magic until the last moment, but I can’t help but feel that this last moment is really the only one that counts. It’s certainly the only one, when we cry out for the pain to end, whose plea I can wholeheartedly get behind.