Suddenly the full long wail of a ship's horn surged through the open window and flooded the dim roomโa cry of boundless, dark, demanding grief; pitch-black and glabrous as a whale's back and burdened with all the passions of the tides, the memory of voyages beyond counting, the joys, the humiliations: the sea was screaming.
Yukio MishimaTime 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 MishimaThe most appropriate type of daily life for me was a day-by-day world destruction; peace was the most difficult and abnormal state to live in.
Yukio MishimaDreams, 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.
Yukio Mishima