Book Club: Sun and Steel by Yukio Mishima
Selected Quotes
Chapter 4, Pg 36
Success comes when both the timing and placing of the blow are just right. But more than this, it happens when the choice of time and target—one’s judgement—manages to catch the foe momentarily off guard, when one has an intuitive apprehension of that off-guard moment a fraction of a second before it becomes perceptible to the senses.
Chapter 7, Pg 58
How ironical it was! At a period when the futureless cup of catastrophe had been brimming over, I had not been given the qualifications for drinking from it. I had gone away, and when, after long training, I had returned armed with those qualifications in fullest measure, it was to find the cup drained, its bottom coldly visible, and myself past forty. Unfortunately, moreover, the only liquid that might quench my thirst was that which others had drained before me.
Chapter 10, Pg 83
Only through the group, I realized—through sharing the suffering of the group—could the body reach that height of existence that the individual alone could never attain. And for the body to reach that level at which the divine might be glimpsed, a dissolution of the individuality was necessary. The tragic quality of the group was also necessary—the quality that constantly raised the group out of the abandon and torpor into which it was prone to lapse, leading it on to ever-mounting shared suffering and so to death, which was the ultimate suffering. The group must be open to death—which meant, of course, that it must be a community of warriors…
In the dim light of early morning I was running, one of a group. A cotton towel with the symbol of a red sun on it was tied about my forehead, and I was stripped to the waist in the freezing air. Through the common suffering, the shared cries of encouragement, the shared pace, and the chorus of voices, I felt the slow emergence, like the sweat that gradually beaded my skin, of that “tragic” quality that is the affirmation of identity. It was a flame of the flesh, flickering up faintly beneath the biting breeze—a flame, one might almost say, of nobility. The sense of surrendering one’s body to a cause gave new life to the muscles. We were united in seeking death and glory; it was not merely my personal quest.
