[In the following essay, Yoshida explores Mishima's manipulation of space and time in The Sea of Fertility.]

At the age of forty-five, Yukio Mishima provided his own conclusion to the drama of his life by committing seppuku, ritual disembowelment. He died on 25 November 1970, the same day that he finished his last work, the tetralogy The Sea of Fertility, comprised of the novels Spring Snow, Runaway Horses, The Temple of Dawn and The Decay of the Angel (all published in English translation by Knopf in 1972-74). There is a striking similarity between the suicide of the main character in the second novel of the series and the circumstances of the author's suicide. Literary criticism has tended to blur the line between the work and the life of its author, an approach to which Mishima would have objected. Most reviews of the work by Japanese critics have been unfavorable, with little attention paid to the structural scheme of time and space and to the other modernistic aspects of the novel. Some critics have claimed that the lack of Mishima's usual impeccable craftsmanship, especially in the third and fourth novels, was caused by an increasing obsession with his own death and by the exhaustion of his talent as a novelist.

The major modernistic aspect in the tetralogy is Mishima's treatment of time and space. In the traditional novel, time and space are two indispensable organizing elements. Time is the medium of narration, and space provides the narrative with an orientation to reality. In chronological terms, time flows only in one direction, as in actual life, and thus the novel is fixed in its temporal limitation. In the same way space has its own unshakable norm: no one can exist in more than one place simultaneously. In The Sea of Fertility, however, the temporal and spatial sequences are arranged to create the effect of an interfusion of time and space beyond their physical limitations.

The four novels in The Sea of Fertility are set in a sequence of historical time spanning more than sixty years. Chronological time in the narrative is built on solid, careful historicity and is skillfully combined by Mishima with three different philosophical concepts of time: the cyclical time of Buddhist reincarnation, the linear time of Judeo-Christian thought and the spatial time of the Buddhist school of yuishiki (consciousness only). The cyclical nature of time experienced by the four main characters in the tetralogy is a literary projection of the Buddhist concept of reincarnation: the mystic transmigration of a consciousness from one human embodiment to another at death, rather than a genealogical transmission as from father to son.¹ In contrast, Honda, the primary character who lives through these four generations of reincarnation, represents a linear experience of time analogous to the Judeo-Christian concept. The third temporal concept which unifies this gargantuan novel is the spatialization of time. Time is only cognizable at the present moment; and as soon as that moment slips into the past, it is no longer time but is like a series of dots or discrete units receding into the past, disconnected from the present.

It is well known that the first novel in the tetralogy, Spring Snow, was inspired by “The Tale of Hamamatsu Chūnagon,” one of many tales written in the Heian period (794-1185). It is true that the story line of Spring Snow somewhat resembles that found in the first half of “Hamamatsu Chūnagon”; but more important is the fact that the historical period in which Spring Snow is set—the Taisho aristocracy (1912-25)—is superimposed onto the Heian era, creating a simultaneity of the Taisho and Heian periods and thus suggesting that historical time is cyclical as well.

Mishima accomplishes this feat by depicting in detail the court rituals and customs of the Taisho period, which had originated in the Heian period. Then he places these Heian-like characters in a pseudo-Heian atmosphere. For example, the model for Kiyoaki, the protagonist, is the young hero of The Tale of Genji who jeopardizes his future by falling in love with Oborozukio, the crown prince's betrothed. Tadeshina's obsessive devotion to Satoko's illicit love affair, for instance, can be accepted by the reader only when Tadeshina is interpreted as a thinly disguised Ukon or Jijū or Kojijū, who is intimately involved in her mistress's love affair, as described in The Tale of Genji. Iinuma, Kiyoaki's tutor, can be categorized in the same fashion. Honda, in the Kamakura scene, is almost an exact replica of Koremitsu, Genji's confidant. Satoko's seeking of sanctuary at the convent of Gesshu reminds the reader of Ukifune's decision to take vows—probably the archetypal solution in the Heian period for a woman caught in a love triangle.

Mishima not only fuses the Heian and the Taisho eras in this fashion, but also dissolves the distinctions between past, present and future. His literary device for the blending of future and other sequences of time is the “Dream Journal” of Kiyoaki, which provides the novel with the secret tunnels of the time machine connecting to the future. Kiyoaki's dream is the passageway to the militant Isao in Runaway Horses and to the lustful lesbian Ying Chan in The Temple of Dawn. Mishima also rearranges the sequence of the novel's incidents in a symbolic way and foreshadows the ending of the tetralogy at the beginning. The death of Kiyoaki as well as the ultimate defeat of the power of samusara (karma and reincarnation) is suggested when the abbess of the Gesshu Temple, Satoko's great-aunt, visits the Matsugaes and the dead body of a black dog is found at the top of the waterfall in the garden. The color black is consistently used throughout Spring Snow to represent passion. At the end of the tetralogy, Satoko, who has succeeded her great-aunt as abbess, denies the existence of her once-passionate lover Kiyoaki, since she had seen the death of romantic passion in the dead body of the black dog sixty years before.

Mishima's technique of blending historical time and narrative time, of fusing the future into the present and of rearranging the sequence of the incidents resembles what Sharon Spencer calls “the spatialization of time.” Spencer contends in Space, Time and Structure in the Modern Novel that modern novelists splinter and rearrange the events in their novels so that past, present and future actions are presented in reversed or combined patterns. When this is done, time in their novels is “spatialized,” for the reality of the events is determined by the place where they occur rather than by the time sequence in which they occur. In this way novelists may achieve simultaneity—that is, the presentation of two or more actions in different places occurring at the same moment in time—and consequently they may dissolve the distinctions between past, present and future as they are dissolved in dreams and in the stream-of-consciousness flow.² The future is usually conceived of as something like unmarked pages of a notebook; for the future, unlike the past, has no records.³ However, when the future is recorded in dreams, there is no difference between it and the past. Kiyoaki of Spring Snow sees in his dream the future event of his death, of his rebirth under the waterfall and of his third life in a tropical land.

When the second novel, Runaway Horses, opens, Honda is now thirty-eight years old and feels as if his youth had ended when Kiyoaki tragically died at the age of twenty. Every time he browses through the pages of Kiyoaki's “Dream Journal,” it becomes more and more difficult for him to draw a clear line between dream and reality, between what had happened and what could happen. The “Journal” predicts the future, sometimes a future which is already in the past and sometimes a future still to come; so in Honda's mind the future and the past begin to fuse and create a spatial time.

Kiyoaki's purity of passion is replaced by Isao's nationalistic purity, a Japanese quality associated with the Shinto deity called Susanō, the Mars of the Japanese creation myth. This mythical archetype is presented in a dual structure of time: one is the narrative time of fanatic militarism on the eve of the Japanese invasion of the Asian continent (1931); the other is the historical time of the Shimpūren incident (The League of the Divine Wind), a failed coup d'état which had taken place in 1876.

Isao, eighteen years of age, forms a secret group of single-minded, patriotic friends at the Academy of Patriotism owned by his father. Their purpose is to carry out a coup d'état in order to prevent the corruption of the political and financial world and to save Japan from the evil influence of Western countries. They try to follow the example of the Shimpūren rebellion against the bummei kaika (civilization and enlightenment—that is, Westernization) of the Meiji era. By superimposing this early Meiji movement upon Showa jingoism, Mishima again suggests the cyclical nature of history and further develops in the third and fourth novels the recurring theme of the impurity brought by Americanization. Isao's struggle for purity is doomed, however, since it is a struggle against the flow of time, against the course of history—the overwhelming Westernization of Japan. Time invariably involves changes and absolute irreversibility. The only way to overcome time is somehow to transcend it, as Satoko does. Consequently Isao kills himself after accomplishing only part of what he had planned.

In the third novel, The Temple of Dawn, Mishima achieves simultaneity between parts 1 and 2 of the novel, between the Indian city of Benares and the Japanese city of Gotemba. The first part mainly deals with Honda's experiences in Thailand and India. His encounter in Bangkok with Ying Chan makes him feel as though he were in the center of time, and he is able to see Kiyoaki and Isao in the past as well as Ying Chan and other transmigrated beings in the future. Another experience is the gruesome scene in Benares of a funeral pyre at the public crematorium on the Ganges. The fire purifies human bodies which otherwise would decompose, and the water of the Ganges washes the ashes away. In the second part of the novel this Hindu ritual of purification is conceptualized and superimposed upon Honda's villa in Japan at Gotemba, near Mount Fuji, the Japanese equivalent of the Temple of Dawn. Mount Fuji probably symbolizes the eternal beauty of Japan immune from the passage of time.

The expression of sexual monomania at Honda's villa is the schematization and spatialization of hopeless chaos resulting from a frantic Americanization in post-war Japan. It also simulates the Nepalese Temple of Love in Benares, whose golden spire has sculptures depicting the thousand postures of sexual intercourse. In Benares the Temple of Love, a crematorium, the holy Ganges and the glorious, awesome sunrise all exist side by side. In Gotemba, Honda's peephole, a pornographic performance to satiate his voyeurism and an immaculate Mount Fuji are all clustered together. When Honda has a swimming pool constructed in the backyard of the villa in an attempt to see Ying Chan nude, the villa blazes up one night with a couple of the sexual avant-garde in it. Honda's crematorium is in action, with the reflection of flames on the surface of the pool water. He has unwittingly created the Ganges beside his crematorium. A crimson Fuji slowly shows its form in the morning sun. Thus simultaneity between Benares and Gotemba is completed.

Mount Fuji is still an eternal symbol of Japanese beauty in the final novel of the tetralogy, The Decay of the Angel. [DA] Mishima uses the legend of “Hagoromo” (The Robe of an Angel) and its location—Miho, on the bay of Suruga at the foot of Mount Fuji—to symbolize the purity of ancient Japan. It is a spatialization of the cultural archetype whereby Mishima unfolds the theme of Japan's deterioration as well as of the future decay of Honda's angels. Honda, now a wealthy, seventy-six-year-old retired lawyer, muses on the once-immaculate beach of Miho:

Benares was sacred filth. Filth itself was sacred. That was India.

But in Japan, beauty, tradition, poetry, had none of them been touched by the soiled hand of sanctity. Those who touched them and in the end strangled them were quite devoid of sanctity. They all had the same hands, vigorously scoured with soap.⁴

The trip to Miho leads Honda to the fourth reincarnation, sixteen-year-old Toru. He is a narcissist, aloof and indifferent to disorder outside himself. His only raison d'être is to see, as his name implies. He has the white, clean hands of those who have killed Japanese beauty, tradition and poetry. Toru decays in a most hideous way—but does not die—at the age of twenty. A short life span for his predecessors seems to suggest that longer experience of time in this world invariably brings more human deterioration, just as longer exposure to oxygen brings more rust to iron. This cyclical experience of time, however, has obviously caused the person through succeeding generations of reincarnation to increase in decadence. Finally there is Toru, completely soiled, in the wealthy Honda's house—strongly suggestive of the fate of the angel in the Hagoromo legend—in an affluent but polluted Japan.

Honda, who has reached the age of eighty-one at the end of the tetralogy, is victimized by his advanced voyeurism. His dignity as a retired judge is defiled. Obviously Honda has decayed progressively during his linear experience of time. His desire for an endless cycle of time urges him to adopt Toru, but contrary to his expectation, Toru shows no sign of death at the age of twenty. Instead, Toru blinds himself as a result of a suicide attempt. Thus deprived of his raison d'être, he continues to live and later fathers a child by his insane girl friend. The child will be Honda's grandchild, and it will probably procreate offspring to form a genealogical line for Honda—but not that mystical and therefore precious cycle of reincarnation.

When Honda, after sixty years, visits Satoko at the Gesshu Temple, he is dumbfounded to see that time has worked quite differently on her. Satoko is eighty-three years old, very beautiful, clear-eyed and now the abbess of the convent: “Age had sped in the direction not of decay but of purification. … Age had crystallized into a perfect jewel” (DA, 243).

The secret of the effect of time on Satoko is the yuishiki concept of temporality, the doctrine that is the major subject of study at the Gesshu Temple, In simple terms, the yuishiki concept is something like a constant and endless juxtaposition of annihilation and renewal of causality. This concept of time provides the possibility of breaking the chain of karma, or moral cause and effect. When enlightenment occurs, the chain can be broken as a result of the inherently discrete structure of time according to yuishiki doctrine. The enlightened being therefore transcends the entire temporal sequence as it is normally experienced by those still bound to the karmic cycle of transmigration, and the moment of enlightenment terminates that being's karmic burden. If time is recognized as a line, whether cyclical or linear, connecting the past to the present, then Satoko's present is none other than the result of the past—the past that she shared with Kiyoaki. However, her realization of the yuishiki doctrine has eliminated the causality between the past and present and thus makes it possible for Satoko to deny the existence of Kiyoaki in her mind.

Satoko's purity has been attained by a liberation from the experience of time. Honda has lived within a linear kind of time mainly as an observer seeking sincerity and purity, the most precious human qualities, in the four agents of cyclical time; finally, here at the Gesshu Temple, he finds them in Satoko. Honda feels as if eighty-one years of his life are crumbling to nothing as he gazes with Satoko at the empty garden of the temple.

In The Sea of Fertility Mishima presents the theme of the gradual decline and ultimate nothingness of human existence by telling his story within a structure of simultaneity. A cyclical view of history is skillfully employed to fuse narrative time and the past. The concept of cyclical time, embodied by Kiyoaki and his reincarnation, presents one aspect of the power of Eastern mysticism; the Judeo-Christian concept of linear time, represented by Honda, symbolizes Western logic and reasoning. In the end both fail. Furthermore, Honda's attempt to fuse these two only results in the meaningless life of Toru and his posterity. Satoko alone remains intact in a timeless world at the convent. Trying to find any meaning in human existence is as much of an illusion, Mishima seems to say, as naming a barren sea on the moon “The Sea of Fertility.”⁵

Notes

1. Patricia Drechsel Tobin points out that the major organizing element in such family-chronicle novels as Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks or D. H. Lawrence's The Rainbow is the genealogical continuation of time. See Patricia Drechsel Tobin, Time and the Novel: The Genealogical Imperative, Princeton, N.J., Princeton University Press, 1978, pp. 3-28.

2. See Sharon Spencer, Space, Time and Structure in the Modern Novel, New York, New York University Press, 1971, pp. 155-59.

3. See Hans Meyerhoff, Time in Literature, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1968, p. 43.

4. Yukio Mishima, The Decay of the Angel, E. G. Seidensticker, tr. New York: Pocket Books, 1975, p. 60. Subsequent references use the abbreviation DA.

5. On Mishima see also Bettina L. Knapp, “Mishima's Cosmic Noh Drama: The Damask Drum,” WLT 54:3 (Summer 1980), pp. 383-87.