"True love" is something that human beings have been pursuing all their lives, but there are many people who have not tasted love. They are hungry for love and even do some jaw-dropping absurdities. The novel "Hunger and Thirst for Love" by the famous Japanese post-war writer Yukio Mishima wrote such a story.
Yukio Mishima is good at writing about sex and love between men and women, and his works often show the truth of human nature and the truth of human instincts by digging into the depths of psychology that are different from ordinary people's lusts. Created in 1950, "Hunger and Thirst for Love" tells the story of Etsuko Sugimoto, who was born in the noble world, pursued true love all her life, and had different levels of feelings with her husband, father-in-law, and gardener, but was repeatedly frustrated.
Etsuko is deeply in love with her husband Ryosuke, but in exchange for her husband's public support for his mistress outside. After the death of her husband, Etsuko has a physical relationship with her father-in-law Mikichi, and at the same time falls in love with the young, healthy and natural gardener Saburo, but Saburo has another love. This fills Etsuko's heart with torment, and in a state of pain and fanaticism, she can only kill Saburo in search of relief. After the huge gap and climax, everything is plunged into boundless nothingness, which makes people feel incredible.
After its publication in Japan, Hunger and Thirst for Love caused a strong response, with literary critic Kiyoshi Hanada describing it as "a work that imitates Tantalos-style suffering and confronts the miserable way of life of people who value despair." Another critic, Fukuda Tsunezo, argued that Uchi was "one of the masterpieces of postwar literature, and can be called the best work of the year alongside Ooka's Lady Musashino." ”
Yukio Mishima
<h1>Etsuko's three failed love-seeking experiences were the trigger for her mental breakdown</h1>
The man Etsuko falls in love with for the first time is her husband, Ryosuke. Ryosuke is the second son of osaka industrialist Miyoshi, handsome and dashing, with a good educational background and a smooth career, and the famous Etsuko can be described as a door-to-door match. However, in fact, Ryosuke does not love Etsuko. He married Etsuko because she was a descendant of a famous warlord of the Warring States period and the sole heir of the rich family. When Etsuko's father dies and Etsuko inherits only a pitiful little stock, Ryosuke loses the last bit of warmth to Etsuko. Taking pleasure in stimulating his wife's jealousy, he deliberately showed off the tie given by his mistress to his wife, and openly placed the photo of the mistress in the bedroom. There is nothing warm about such a married life, and the status of the two in marriage is unequal.
After Ryosuke's death, Etsuko embarks on a second journey to find love, but this time the object is a bit unexpected, it is Etsuko's father-in-law Mikichi. Although this feeling is disgraceful, she has received some compensation both mentally and physically. Of course, Etsuko does not love Miki, and she accepts Miki more out of a sense of helplessness. She loathed his aging and the immoral relationship between them itself, but she was more spiritually dependent on Miki because he was the only person in the world who could give her love.
Etsuko's third love hunt is the most intense, and it is in her love for Sanro that she discovers the meaning of life. Saburo is different from other men, he is at the bottom of society, a poor hired worker, has no culture, but is strong and young, simple and honest, full of vigorous vitality. In Saburo, Etsuko sees everything that is missing from herself and of her class, both in Sanro's body as toned by ancient Greek sculptures and by his childlike innocence. However, due to the huge differences in origin, social status, education level, etc., it is impossible for Etsuko and Saburo to have a common way of thinking and attitude towards life, and they cannot understand each other's behavior, which brings an insurmountable gap to their feelings.
The arrogant Yuezi carefully combs various fragrant buns every day, just to win the lover's favor, but Mune's Saburo only glances at her bun out of curiosity, and does not realize her good intentions. Etsuko once tortured Saburo to ask who he loved, which caused him a lot of headaches, and he really didn't understand what love was.
Etsuko has a strong desire for love, which is due to her early experiences. Etsuko lost her mother at an early age, and her father died in her youth, which caused great trauma in her heart and caused her strong desire for love. Her fear of abandonment made her extremely anxious, which led to intense jealousy.
Whether it was to Ryosuke or Saburo, Etsuko's heart burned with a more intense jealousy than ordinary people: she was jealous that Ryosuke had left her mistress's photos and handkerchiefs at home, so she burned the photos and committed suicide by wearing arsenic twice in protest; she was jealous that Saburo and Miyo were in love, so she searched their rooms, drove Miyo away to break them up, and even finally killed Saburo to quell her jealousy.
Unfortunately, no matter what Etsuko does, she won't get the love she wants. The people she loved didn't love her, and the people who loved her she didn't love. In a sexual relationship with three men, she simply could not experience her true self and feel the meaning of survival, which led to her mental breakdown and caused her tragedy.
<h1>Etsuko's pursuit of love is a subversion of the traditional relationship between men and women</h1>
"Hunger and Thirst for Love" inherits Mishima's consistent literary style of repression, obscurity, decadence, and violent aesthetics, and Etsuko is like a bloodthirsty animal sniffing the smell of blood, pursuing the emotional experience of self-satisfaction in the emotional entanglement with three men. This is a subversion of traditional Japanese relationships between men and women.
Etsuko is a descendant of the famous generals of the Warring States period, and there is an innate sense of honor, stubbornness, purity and superiority in her bones. She despises the likes of Mikichi and Ryosuke as despicable urban intellectuals. She also has the god of Bushido, and in order to pursue true happiness, she will not hesitate to pay any price, even if it is like Sakura, when she turns into dust in a moment after showing her ultimate beauty. Therefore, after her husband's death, Etsuko once wanted to be martyred, but she was not martyred for her husband's death, but out of jealousy of her husband.
She had long been looking forward to the death of her cheating husband, and only in this way could she redeem herself. As a result, Ryosuke's death brings not sadness and despair to Etsuko, but irrepressible joy and fanaticism: she can finally find happiness again. So when her husband's body is about to be taken away, Etsuko feels unprecedented liberation and joy, the great depression of jealousy is released, and she becomes entangled with her father-in-law Mikichi, and what she really wants is to gain control over family relations from it.
When she fell in love with the simple rural youth Saburo, she did not get the imaginary response. Sanro does not know what love is, and does not understand the meaning behind Etsuko's strange behavior, and Etsuko can only rely on consciousness to maintain the illusion of her own happiness. This "happiness" is not so much an irony as it is a form of self-deception.
When she finally woke up from self-deception, she killed Saburo with her own hands in order to liberate herself. Behind this act, not to maintain the imaginary love, but because she did not feel loved, preferring to destroy it, with the meaning of the generous death of a samurai.
At this point, this hysterical woman due to sexual dissatisfaction expressed her "hunger and thirst", after the fanatical pursuit, everything eventually returned to nothingness, there is no remedy for this world, only the destruction of the most beloved things, in order to maintain its eternal pure beauty.
<h1>The tragedy of Etsuko is full of metaphors for Japan's post-war era and is the tragedy of all mankind</h1>
"Hunger and Thirst for Love" is full of decadence, perversion, and bloodshed, and is shrouded in a haze of war.
The story is based on what Yukio Mishima heard from his aunt. Her aunt worked in the countryside, which was an area that Yukio Mishima had never dabbled in. He once said: "I have long wanted to write a novel about pastoral life, but I was born in Tokyo and have a lot of trouble with dialects. So I set up evacuation to the countryside during the war, 'forced into a group of city people in the countryside', thus avoiding unnaturalness. This novel also takes advantage of this reality. ”
Therefore, Mishima wrote about the people in the city into the countryside, but this is not his fictitious imagination, but the reality of post-war Japan. Etsuko's tragic fate of not being loved is inseparable from the impact of real life in post-war Japan on culture. The intervention of Western culture and its destruction of traditional Japanese culture have created an insurmountable gap between the two, which is the deep root cause of the tragedy of the characters.
Japan has a unique code of conduct, and in the 17th century, the Tokugawa family established a hierarchical system based on Confucian loyalty and obedience. However, after the war, the United States implemented a series of political, economic, educational, and cultural reforms in Japan. On October 11, 1945, General MacArthur of the United States announced five directives for postwar reforms to Japanese Prime Minister Kishiro Motohara, dismantling the distribution of male and female roles and social functions in Japan's ancient and modern society and family. For a time, people are lost in the high prosperity of material things, lose their spiritual support, cannot find the meaning of life, and lose the ability to identify themselves. Therefore, it can be said that Etsuko's desire for love is also the true idea of Yukio Mishima's desire to return to Japanese tradition.
In Yukio Mishima's view, the anxiety of the younger generation in Japan at that time was not material life, but the inability to clarify the meaning of life. He combines the terrible reality of Japan's post-war life with the fate of small characters, calls for the fading Japanese samurai spirit in the dualistic confrontations of survival and destruction, salvation and destruction, and expresses a strong yearning for the traditional Japanese aesthetic.
Etsuko's seemingly bizarre behavior is actually a hunger and struggle for reality. She lives in a defeated Country of Japan, struggling to find her inner truth in the chaos of war. As Yukio Mishima himself said, "The Etsuko in The Hunger and Thirst for Love is actually a man. She is the spokesperson of Yukio Mishima and a metaphor for that era, expressing Yukio Mishima's anxiety and vacillation about reality and his desire to find his own sense of existence and meaning in life.
In fact, the confusion facing Etsuko is Yukio Mishima's reflections on the meaning of existence. Yukio Mishima, like Etsuko, does not have to worry about material life, and her biggest worry is that she cannot clarify the meaning of living.
Although she has always been controlled by an unknowable fate, she has been trying to break free from the cage of fate throughout. It can be said that she is the only strong person in this novel. It is a pity that such a strong person does not realize that his real enemy is still himself.
Aristotle said: When a man is alive, let him not be said to be happy. In "The Hunger and Thirst of Love", Etsuko's journey of finding love is actually the process of finding the meaning of life and the existence of life. Not only because she has the survival pain of the Japanese after World War II, but also because she is thinking about the meaning of life, when this thinking has no answer, it will produce frustration, so it can be said that the tragedy of "Hunger and Thirst for Love" is not the tragedy of Etsuko alone, but also the eternal survival tragedy of all mankind.