Spring Snow

Spring Snow is set in Tokyo in 1912, when the hermetic world of the ancient aristocracy is being breached for the first time by outsiders -- rich provincial families unburdened by tradition, whose money and vitality make them formidable contenders for social and political power.

Among this rising new elite are the ambitious Matsugae, whose son has been raised in a family of the waning aristocracy, the elegant and attenuated Ayakura. Coming of age, he is caught up in the tensions between old and new -- fiercely loving and hating the exquisite, spirited Ayakura Satoko. He suffers in psychic paralysis until the shock of her engagement to a royal prince shows him the magnitude of his passion, and leads to a love affair that is as doomed as it was inevitable.

"Mishima is like Stendhal in his precise psychological analyses, like Dostoevsky in his explorations of darkly destructive personalities."

-- Christian Science Monitor

"[The Sea of Fertility] is a literary legacy on the scale of Proust's."

-- National Review

Translated from the Japanese by Michael Gallagher

If you read a biography of Mishima, you will likely find mountains of speculation concerning his various eccentricities (and that word is putting is nicely, methinks). Some will accuse him of right-wingery, others will rant about his "nationalism," etc. etc. etc. But I think that none of that applies. He was in no way a political person, just a hopelessly deluded romantic who still believed that romantic ideals had any place in modern society. This he applied to politics as well as to everything else. Spring Snow, fortunately, contains no politics, concentrating instead on romantic ideals as applied to the personal. The result is something that, while being Japanese through and through, is accessible to anyone. This book is worth reading for the marvelously poetic descriptions alone. I shan't say that it will "change your life," since that's cliche and more often than not utterly wrong, but I daresay that you will have an indelible impression made upon your mind. At first, you may not notice it, but as time passes, you will find that you remember large parts of Spring Snow on countless occasions, and you will find yourself recalling parts of it as examples of great beauty and purity, and reflexively applying them to your own life. And then you will cheer Mishima as quite possibly the last romantic on Earth. That is exactly what happened to me.


Beautiful!   March 1, 2000
Ryan Yeung (West Covina, CA United States)
30 out of 37 found this review helpful

I first read this book back when I was a College Freshman. Back then the book presented a very good picture of the aristocratic life of early 1900's Japan to me. I read it at it's face value, as a tragic love story. The story was so intense and quiet full of suspense that I went thru 7 sleepless nights in a row to finish this great book. Eight years later, I have a second reading of this book. Since I had grown more mature since my first reading, I am able to detect more of the underlying ideas in the book. Ideas such as patriotism VS self-interst, self-gratification VS self-restraint, are 2 such forces that drive the plot.


Beautiful, moving, delicate, and unforgettable.   July 10, 1997
17 out of 18 found this review helpful

Spring Snow is a dramatic, moving work that helps codify Mishima's tetralogy, the Sea of Fertility, as perhaps the 20th century's greatest magnum opus. Mishima writes in a delicately impressionistic style, employing similes and metaphors of subtle, almost fragile beauty, that create a vivid and harmonic unity that simply inspire awe. Like Dante, he moves the reader's spirit as his characters spirits evolve. Like Dostoyevsky, he plunges relentlessly into the dark caprices of the mind. Like Milton, his word choice was so perfect that I put down the Sea of Fertility wishing that I had written it myself. Spring Snow, the first installment of the cycle, stands very well on its own (though its ultimate meaning can only be appreciated as the tetralogy is continued). It takes place early in 20th century Japan, a time of transition in which Japan's decreased isolation leads to a Westernization that ultimately proves Spring Snow to be an elegy for the samurai tradition. It is also a wonderful and tragic love story -- far more convincing than Romeo and Juliet -- in which an impossible and doomed love threatens the young protagonists whose wealthy families adjust to the changing sociopolitical climate of Japan. The other three books in the cycle are (in order): 'Runaway Horses,' 'The Temple of Dawn,' and 'The Decay of the Angel'


Quietly Disturbing   May 28, 2000
Calix F Eden (York, England)
11 out of 11 found this review helpful

Mishima has the ability to get underneath the skin of his readers. What seems like an innocent and harmless story of adolescence gradually becomes one of fundamental importance. In my view, this is the most brilliant of the three Mishima novels I have read. It is a masterpiece which leaves a bitter taste in the mouth. None of Mishima's characters seem happy and even the 'heroes' are ambiguous, despite the fact that many of them are perfect in physical terms. We have to judge the character for ourselves without help, rather like a film without background music. There is a strong homo-erotic undercurrent in Mishima's work, even though the central relationship in this novel is heterosexual. The focal character, Kiyoaki, seems to be massochistic and derives a form of pleasure from his own destruction.

I would strongly recommend anyone who is interested in the complexities of relationships and the specific cultural life of Japan to read this novel. Above all, it should be read for the intricacy and skill of its literature.


beauty is a terrible thing   June 6, 2001
Hume An (Evanston, IL)
9 out of 12 found this review helpful

Mishima, in his writing, is often preoccupied with aesthetic beauty. His characters slaver after it, long to assume it, and when apprehension is discovered to be forever out of reach, they long to remove this aesthetic beauty, this otherwordly perfection from the earth vis a vis a dramatic spectacle, which in turn becomes beauty itself.

Along with this obsession with beauty is a suspicion or a questioning of the intrinsic utility of beauty. What is the purpose of perfection if such perfection is ineffectual and even inimical to the human condition apart from the fact that beauty is beauty is beauty . . . ad nauseum?

In many ways Mishima uses Spring Snow as a means of inverting the sentiment of Keats' notion of "Beauty is truth, truth is beauty . . ." However, unlike the spectacle that beauty evokes in some of Mishima's other writings (and even his life), the bubble of spectacle never pops in Spring Snow, instead, beauty ferments and spreads like cancer.

In this novel, Mishima's main characters, Satoka and Kiyoaki, are destroyed by their beauty, their elegance, their noble breeding. Kiyoaki is analogous to Hamlet in his diffidence and his psychic inertia. Moreover, his brilliant physical beauty compounds the aforementioned with an overly large measure of pride, which, along with noble breeding, hermetically seals him into a jar of dreams, self-doubt, anomie, and ennui. Satoka, likewise, is beautiful, perfect, and her perfection carries and transmits a self-possessed, cold, and almost painful glare to the public eye. However, to Kiyoaki, Satoka is a smoldering woman of passion, full of riddles and intrigue. Kiyoaki, inexperienced, prideful, and naive, desires to reciprocate this passion only when it becomes taboo, and then he falls headlong into a brilliant and lavish darkness full of gauntness, full, blush moons, and supple waves. Their consummation is sweet but tinctured with doom.

Had the two had a grander purpose than getting drunk off this surfeit of poisonous love, had their hearts and minds been bound to something to divert them from their egocentricity, the story would have been far different. But in the end, as Romeo and Juliet's love dies, the love of Satoka and Kiyoaki dies.

However, unlike Shakespeare, Mishima denies the reader the succor of suicide. Satoka is left a tonsured, Buddhist nun, while Kiyoaki dies of pneumonia. The end of beauty is filled with emotion, but the beautiful are ineffectual, useless, and cannot ever perform substantive act that will secure their happiness or seal their fate (definitely not in the case of Kiyoaki, perhaps in the case of Satoka). However, beauty does not completely fade at the death of their love as Kiyoaki leaves his dream journal to his even-keeled, logical, and diligent friend, Honda. In this way beauty lives on, but exists not as truth but as germ or infection. Beauty dies, destroys, and spreads its seed. It is the spring snow, quiet, pure, each multi-tendriled snowflake delicate, unique, an unusual attenuation heralding the end of spring, girded by the assumption that another spring will come only for the deadly beauty of the quiet, pure spring snow to come again, to take root, and surreptitiously and gracefully destroy idle youth.