Yukio Mishima

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. . . .

period of childhood is a stage on which time and space become entangled

What was it I understood at that moment, or was on the verge of understanding? Did the motif of later years—that of "remorse as prelude to sin"—show here the first hint of its beginning? Or was the moment teaching me how grotesque my isola

isolation would appear to the eyes of love, and at the same time was I learning, from the reverse side of the lesson, my own incapacity for accepting love? . . .

Until then I had mistakenly thought I was only poetically attracted to such things, thus confusing the nature of my sensual desires with a system of esthetics.