Spring Snow...

It's not just the snowfall of early April that has started me thinking of Yukio Mishima again lately. It's also something to do with very long novels, and with the idea of reincarnation too... Plus some dark thoughts about one's level of physical fitness, and general tendency toward torpor... And also the issue of how thoroughly busy one ought to be as a writer. Mishima never really stopped working - until, that is, he stopped - and in about as appalling a manner as one could envisage. The photo herewith depicts the pre-iron Mishima of course - dreaming perchance of the rather leathery muscle-Mary he would become? Anyhow, Googling about to remind myself of some of the content of Mishima's short stories I found this thoroughgoing response to the Sea of Fertility tetralogy, which I'm aiming to re-read this year, images from which have stayed in my mental furniture ever since I first picked up that huge volume back in 1988. So I still think of it as my favourite of his, if not for After the Banquet, which I wasn't so keen on as an adolescent but have come to regard more highly over the years in which my interest in sexual perversity has, simultaneously and thankfully, receded.