Time is what matters. As time goes by, you and I will be carried inexorably into the mainstream of our period, even though weโre unaware of what it is. And later, when they say that young men in the early Taisho era thought, dressed, talked, in such and such a way, theyโll be talking about you and me. Weโll all be lumped togetherโฆ. In a few decades, people will see you and the people you despise as one and the same, a single entity.
Yukio Mishimaa samurai is a total human being, whereas a man who is completely absorbed in his technical skill has degenerated into a โfunctionโ, one cog in a machine.
Yukio MishimaThis is a photograph, so it is as you see: there are no lies and no deceptions. One can detect here, elevated to an incomparably higher level, the same pathetic emotional appeal that lies concealed in every fake spiritualist photograph, every pornographic photograph; one comes to suspect that the strange, disturbing emotional appeal of the photographic art consists solely in that same repeated refrain: this is a true ghost... this is a photograph, so it is as you see: there are no lies, no deceptions.
Yukio Mishima