The Japanese writer Yukio Mishima has always been controversial, and his works often carry a sense of repression and extreme aesthetics, an aesthetic realm of pursuit of "death, night, and blood."
Mishima was an astonishing talent, his short life was more legendary than many stories, mishima was not only a writer, but also a good playwright, filmmaker, actor and journalist.
The controversy over Mishima lies not only in the strange aesthetics he pursues, but also in his war-fanatical thoughts, his sexual orientation, his Bushido spirit, and the way he eventually died in shame.
Let's leave aside some of the debates at the political level for the time being, because controversies on many issues are actually difficult to conclude, and in terms of literary attainments alone, Yukio Mishima's works are extremely impactful, and he has written 21 novels, more than 80 short stories, and more than 30 screenplays in his lifetime, of which about ten have been adapted into movies, and his works are the most translated into foreign languages by contemporary Japanese writers.
To this day, many scholars and readers still believe that if Mishima had not committed suicide, he would have won the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Among Mishima's many works, "Hunger and Thirst for Love" is not a well-known one, it is one of Mishima's early masterpieces, and it has caused strong repercussions in Japan after its publication.
Yukio Mishima
<h1 class= "pgc-h-center-line" > the desire for love causes a fire of jealousy</h1>
Literary critic Kiyoshi Hanada once commented that it was a work that imitated the pain of Tantalus, facing people who regard despair as the value of survival, the miserable way of living, Fukuda Hengcun analyzed it from the perspective of female image shaping, considering it to be "one of the masterpieces of post-war literature", and even a "Musashino Lady" that can be leveled with Ooka and called the best wonderful work of the year.
However, the greatest impact of this work on me was actually from a Freud view that reminded me of it, that is, the essence of man is not "I think", as Descartes said, but "I desire".
The essence of human beings is desire, and the essence of love is actually desire, and the desire to love is sometimes not only reflected in desire, but more often may be accompanied by expectation, jealousy, and boundless pain.
The word "love" gives us the impression of romance most of the time, aesthetic beauty, and may also be companionship and giving. But we know that the so-called love is not all good, because love gives rise to hate, and it is not uncommon for love to be born of fear.
When the desire born of love reaches a certain level, that power is destructive to everyone involved in the relationship, either physically, mentally, or even physically and mentally.
The heroine of "Hunger and Thirst for Love" is such a person, she is very similar to Flaubert's Madame Bovary, who has spent her whole life pursuing true love, but her thirst for love is at the mercy of love, and the jealousy that arises makes it difficult for her to find true love in her life.
Etsuko lies in her husband Ryosuke, father-in-law Mikichi and gardener Saburo, these three men are confused and lost in their emotional entanglements, and then repeatedly frustrated, so that when the story reaches a climax, it is also the end of the time, she personally ends the life of her lover, from the desire for love, and finally to destruction and nothingness.
<h1 class= "pgc-h-center-line" > jealous love with her husband Ryosuke</h1>
Etsuko's three love experiences are extremely repressive and hopeless, and the beginning of this repression is the relationship between her and her husband Ryosuke.
Etsuko and Ryosuke were not equal from the beginning, not in terms of portal or status, but between hearts and concerns.
Ryosuke is the second son of the industrialist Miyoshi, who came from a very good background, came from a well-off family, and was also well educated and had a good career. The origin of his wife, Yuezi, is also very prominent, a descendant of a famous general of the Warring States period and the sole heir of the rich family.
But this seemingly door-to-door couple, what they expect and what they desire is not the same.
The combination of Ryosuke and Etsuko was not based on love from the beginning, and his favorite was his family, so when Etsuko no longer had all this, it was naturally difficult to keep her husband's heart.
Ryosuke can often stay at night, he does not want to look at his wife more, he does not want to have more communication, he never hides his pleasure, flowers and willows, and even shows off the tie given to him by his mistress in front of his wife.
Her husband's infidelity deeply irritated Etsuko and left her mentally tormented, which provoked her intense jealousy, and Etsuko even tried twice to take arsenic to end her life in protest.
Etsuko's personality slowly becomes distorted, and even when her husband is seriously ill, what she expects is not for her husband to recover his health as soon as possible, but for him to lie in the hospital and be sick like this, so that he will not flee from his side to find other women to have fun.
In this way, she keeps her husband by her side, craves from her "almsgiving" for what she thinks is love, and she even wants to go to the funeral, not for love, but because of the indelible jealousy that this "love" brings.
So when the door of the morgue was opened, when her husband's body was slowly pushed away from him, she felt not the sadness of losing her lover, but a kind of liberation and joy, and she would be freed from the jealousy that had overwhelmed her.
I don't even know if the oxygen tube that Ryosuke pulled out at the last moment of his life was pulled out by Etsuko, or maybe it was she who personally sent her husband on this road of no return.
<h1 class= "pgc-h-center-line" > the empty love with her father-in-law Mikichi</h1>
Ryosuke's death is like a beginning, the beginning of a "search for love" that Makes Etsuko unable to stop, but is what she is really after love?
This kind of love, under her increasingly distorted personality, has gradually become deformed and terrible.
At this time, Yuezi was no longer the same person she used to be, and when she came to the "Rice Temple", which was supposed to be a paradise-like existence far away from the hustle and bustle, all she saw was pale and Xiao Suo.
Mishima's state of mind for Etsuko in this period is set off through many environmental descriptions, and she can already understand Etsuko's transformation at this time in just a few words:
"The sun shines on the residential areas outside Osaka, like pale and weak arms stretched out."
In her eyes, the sun is no longer bright, and the vitality has become powerless, which is closely related to what she has experienced now- Etsuko and Ryosuke's father, who is also her father-in-law, have developed a grudge.
It may seem extremely difficult to say, but to the family led by father-in-law Miji, they seem to have become familiar with this state, Miji's favoritism towards Etsuko, and the long time they spent in a room after dinner.
Mikichi's manor in Yonen was originally a large family, the eldest son and eldest daughter-in-law, the wife and two children of Sanzi, as well as the gardener Saburo and the maid Miyo, but the secret between the two daughters-in-law has long become an open secret in the family.
But does Etsuko really have feelings for her father-in-law, the sixty-year-old man?
In fact, this feeling of Etsuko for her father-in-law is mixed with sympathy and emptiness, but there is absolutely no love between men and women, she does not enjoy it, and even in her eyes, her father-in-law's skin has long decayed like a bird that has stripped its hair.
Mishima used this passage in describing the way they interacted:
"Between Mikichi, who didn't say a word, and Yueko, who was silently moving, there was only the sound of silk rubbing when the belt was undone, which sounded like the cry of a creature."
She expresses her satisfaction with this "happy" life in her holiday notes, but she is mostly silent when she is alone, and their voices seem to her to be nothing more than "the cry of living things", the original release, nothing more.
She accepted all this on the surface, but in her heart, she was deeply burdened with the guilt of cheating with her father-in-law Miji, incest morality, coupled with the nobility of Etsuko's birth, so she was full of contempt for her father-in-law who was a "born farmer", all of which made her fall into a more painful abyss, and at the same time, she was more eager for true love.
As a result, her love for the gardener Saburo became more and more uncontrollable.
<h1 class = "pgc-h-center-line" > longing love with gardener Saburo</h1>
Etsuko's love for Sanro is the most intense, Andra is a simple, well-mannered rural youth who works as a gardener in Michi's house, living in poverty and wearing tattered clothes, but always attracts Etsuko to look at each other frequently.
One is a gardener, the other is a young grandmother, and the difference in status makes the already simple and honest Sanlang not have any non-division of thoughts about this young grandmother.
But Etsuko is different, and Etsuko's desire for Sanlang is incomparably strong, and this desire may not come from true love, but from a lack of it—she sees in Sanro what she does not have in herself, and she longs for a "normal life" full of the natural beauty of life.
The more you crave, the more you will become unable to extricate yourself.
The noble young woman, who had changed her hair in various buns for the sake of the humble gardener, longed to attract his attention; gave him socks, but was furious when she found that the socks were thrown in the trash; she asked Saburo with great concern whether she loved Miyo, and when she heard the negative answer, her excitement was incomparable.
However, their different cultural backgrounds and educational levels make them think about problems in a very different way, and Saburo never realized that Etsuko was even tired of these thoughts about him:
This careless young man was tired of this elderly widow who walked side by side with him in silence. Where would he know that she had carefully combed her bun every morning in order to make herself look. But I was just out of curiosity, glancing at this exquisite, fragrant, and incredible bun. He never dreamed that the heart of this woman who looked particularly cold and arrogant was actually circling with such girlish fantasies as wanting to hold her arms with herself. ”
Etsuko deceives herself and anesthetizes herself, and then once again allows jealousy to take its peak, and after Miyo is pregnant with Saburo's child and the two are ready to get married, she drives Miyo, who is pregnant with Rokko, out of the Yakichi family.
As Tang Yuemei said in the biography of Yukio Mishima, "A class consciousness can easily become a substitute for jealousy." Obviously, Etsuko has never had such an extremely old class consciousness toward Sanlang", jealousy makes Etsuko crazy, making her think that she is suffering from Sanro, so from love to hate, let her wield a shovel to kill Sanro - if you don't get him, destroy him!
The reason for killing his loved one is so simple that it feels terrible—"He tortured me."
This fate is the inevitable retribution for his torture of me. No one is allowed to torture me. No one can torture me. ”
The story leads to such an ending, perhaps the inevitable result of Etsuko's own personality and experience, from anxiety and longing, to concessions and compromises, and finally controlled by jealousy, step by step, until she can't extricate herself.
In Yuezi's heart, she felt extremely confused and wandering about the existence of tomorrow, and she felt that tomorrow was just a fat, dark and gray balloon-like existence, and that balloon was enough as long as it floated with the wind, without thinking about where it was going.
Perhaps in the end, Yuezi did not understand that jealousy can be born in love, but this hunger and thirst for love is the real "love incompetence", and in the end, she can only swallow herself and the bones of the other party in the jealousy of this flood beast.