Sun & Steel by Yukio Mishima

Author:Yukio Mishima [Mishima, Yukio]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Classics, Short Stories, History, Asia, Biography, 20th Century
ISBN: 9784770029034
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

6

…It is a rather risky matter to discuss a happiness that has no need of words.

The one thing I am sure can easily be deduced from what I have written is that in order to bring about what I refer to here as happiness, an extremely troublesome set of conditions must first be fulfilled, and an extremely complex set of procedures gone through.

The short period—one month and a half—of army life that I later experienced yielded many glittering fragments of happiness, but there is one of them—an unforgettable, all-embracing sense of happiness that I experienced at a moment in itself apparently quite insignificant and quite unmilitary—that I feel compelled to write of here. Although I was in the midst of a group army life, this supreme sense of wellbeing came upon me, as on every previous occasion in my life, when I was quite alone.

It happened at dusk on May 25, a beautiful day in early summer. I was attached to a parachute squad; the day’s training was over; I had been for a bath, and was on my way back to the dormitory.

The late afternoon sky was dyed in shades of blue and pink, and the turf spread below was an even, glowing jade. Here and there on either side of the path along which

I walked stood the aging, robust, wooden buildings, nostalgic souvenirs of an age when this had been the cavalry school: the covered riding paddock, now a gymnasium, the stables, now a post-exchange…

I was still in my P.T. clothes: long white cotton training pants just issued that day, rubber gym shoes, a running shirt. Even the mud that already soiled the bottom of the pants contributed to my sense of wellbeing.

That morning’s training in handling a parachute, the extraordinarily rarified feeling as for the first time one committed oneself to the empty air, still lingered inside me, a transparent residue, fragile as a medicinal wafer. The deep, rapid breathing caused by the circuit training and running that followed had pervaded my whole body with a pleasing lethargy. Rifles, weapons of every kind, were at hand. My shoulder was ready for slinging a gun at any time. I had run to my heart’s content over the green grass, felt the sun burning my skin a golden brown; beneath the summer sunlight, I had seen, thirty-five feet below me, people’s shadows sharply etched and firmly attached to their feet. I had jumped into space from the summit of the silver tower, aware as I went of how the shadow that I myself would cast among them the next instant would lie isolated like a black puddle on the earth, untied to my body. At that moment I was, beyond all doubt, freed from my shadow, from my self-awareness.

My day had been full to the brim of the body and of action. There was physical excitement, and strength, and sweat, and muscle; the green grass of summer was everywhere, a breeze stirred the dust on the path I walked

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