Lectures on the Mind for Young Samurai, by Mishima Yukio
"The approximation of all forms of sex to the trifling, if expensive, escapist pleasure that comes from taking [sleeping] pills may be called the most critical phenomenon of our time."
Lectures on the Mind for Young Samurai
Mishima Yukio
For Young Samurai
On Life
After beginning life, people gradually begin art. I have the sense that my case was the reverse, that I began life after I began art. Be that as it may, in general, the sequence1 is to go from life to art.
Artists who threw light on the meaning of going from life to art are, for example, Stendhal2 and Casanova. Stendhal's own life was full of vexation and he was not necessarily popular with women, but in the course of repeated failures, he realized that it was only through literature that his dreams could be realized. On the other hand, Casanova through inborn talent had one love affair after another, and when, after having tasted the good fruit of that life to his satisfaction, he had decided that there was no more for him to do, he began to write his recollections.
This is both a contest and a competition between art and life. We have fallen under the illusion that we learn life from novelists, but the lives of novelists are impoverished, while in the wider world there are many people who have lived rich lives. Further, probably one percent of those people who have lived rich lives have a desire to record them. But recording itself requires talent and technique, and, just like all sports and techniques, it a long process of training3. While engaged in training, one cannot enjoy life. Further, in the midst of adventure one cannot train the talent for recording. So when people think to record their own lives, to leave them to the world as a pleasant story for future generations, it is generally too late. Those who were not too late, who barely made it in time, are rare examples like Casanova.
On the other hand, like Stendhal, life does not necessarily go as one wishes. One is not necessarily popular with women, either. To condense all the dissatisfaction, rage, dreams, and poetry of one’s life into a single novel, one must have spectacular ability. Because that is to create something from nothing, and to create a different world with one’s powers of imagination. Powers of imagination are often born of dissatisfaction. Or they are born of boredom. When we are engrossed in action and pouring all our energies into living in a time of crisis, it is almost never the case that we have room for powers of imagination. If powers of imagination become the cause of neuroses, wartime Japan, which was subjected to air raids, was a situation in which it was most difficult for neuroses to emerge. In that era, there were few thieves, little crime, and the sustenance4 of people’s powers of imagination was entirely concentrated in that enterprise in which success is impossible if all the energies of a people are not focused that is war.
Earlier I said that my own life began later than art, but such novelists are in fact the majority. Someone who begins writing novels at twenty has no option but to expand his powers of imagination on the basis of what he has felt until that age. That is rather a problem of sensitivity5 than experience. We, in the midst of the easily wounded fragility of sensitivity, discover incongruities with our life, and in order to bury the gaps in those incongruities, seek to play in the world of words. Because that is the origin of many novelists, the strong power of will, endurance, and other powers of the fully fledged human being sufficient to taste true life consequently end up being used when they begin to write novels. Abilities that are supposed to be useful for life are all devoted to areas of competence for being a novelist. They harden as professionals, and they can seek the most pure, most unsullied, and most intense experiences of their own lives only in the life of sensitivity prior to their boyhood. That writers are often said to mature toward their maiden work is for no other reason than that, for writers, it is that unstable work formed from the most keen sensitivity when their experience of life was yet insufficient that becomes the treasured home of their life experience to which they will return repeatedly.
Not only boyhood, but also infancy is a treasured home for writers. There, life is not an experience, but merely a dream. Not reason, but merely sensitivity. They also evade the responsibilities of adults and are protected by them. This is a different subject, but that, in the political action of the National Federation of Students’ Self-Government Associations, a character as a sort of artistic act cannot be completely gotten rid of is because they are still glued to this sort of juvenile world and politics of dreams and concepts. We do not begin life satisfied with it from the first. Satisfied people are quite exceptional. This will remain the same no matter what sort of social revolution succeeds. Art begins from there.