Yukio Mishima

but what the intellect regards as shameful often appears splendidly beautiful to the heart.

Ever since those days this has been the attitude with which I have always confronted life: from things too much waited for, too much embellished with anticipatory daydreams, there is in the end nothing I can do but run away.

This perfect cube of empty night, ceaselessly swaying and leaping, to and fro, up and down, was boldly reigning over the cloudless noonday of early summer

The snow seemed like a dirty bandage hiding the open wounds of the city, hiding those irregular gashes of haphazard streets and tortuous alleys, courtyards and occasional plots of bare ground, that form the only beauty to be found in the panorama of our cities

Indeed, of all the kinds of decay in this world, decadent purity is the most malignant

knows but what those fits of depression she continued having until her death were a memento of vices in which my grandfather had indulged in his prime?

had a presentiment then that there is in this world a kind of desire like stinging pain. Looking up at that dirty youth, I was choked by desire, thinking, "I want to change into him," thinking, "I want to be him." I can remember clearly that my desire had two focal points. The first was his dark-blue "thigh-pullers," the other his occupation

other children, as soon as they attain the faculty of memory, want to become generals, I became possessed with the ambition to become a night-soil man.

I somehow felt it was "tragic" for a person to make his living in the midst of such an odor. Existences and events occurring without any relationship to myself, occurring at places that not only appealed to my senses but were moreover denied to me—these, together with the people involved in them, constituted my definition of "tragic things."

Needless to say, the odor could not, at that time, have had any direct relationship with sexual sensations, but it did gradually and tenaciously arouse within me a sensuous craving for such things as the destiny of soldiers, the tragic nature of their calling, the distant countries they would see, the ways they would die. . . .