Literary Birthday – 14 January – Yukio Mishima

Yukio Mishima was born 14 January 1925, and died 25 November 1970.

Five Quotes

1. Insensitive people are only upset when they actually see blood. Yet, by the time that blood has been shed, the tragedy is already completed.
2. All my life I have been acutely aware of a contradiction in the very nature of my existence. For forty-five years I struggled to resolve this dilemma by writing plays and novels. The more I wrote, the more I realised mere words were not enough. So I found another form of expression.
3. At no time are we ever in such complete possession of a journey, down to its last nook and cranny, as when we are busy with preparations for it.
4. Dreams, memories, the sacred—they are all alike in that they are beyond our grasp. Once we are even marginally separated from what we can touch, the object is sanctified; it acquires the beauty of the unattainable, the quality of the miraculous. Everything, really, has this quality of sacredness, but we can desecrate it at a touch. How strange man is! His touch defiles and yet he contains the source of miracles.
5. When silence is prolonged over a certain period of time, it takes on new meaning.

Yukio Mishima was a Japanese author, poet, playwright, actor, and film director. He wrote 40 novels, 18 plays, 20 books of short stories, and at least 20 books of essays, one libretto, as well as one film. He was recognised as one of the most important post-war stylists of the Japanese language. His novels include The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea and Spring Snow.

Source for Image: 朝日新聞社, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

by Amanda Patterson

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