Mishima is one of those writers that you’ve heard from some time ago, like a friend of a friend who lives in the same city that your mate tells you to hang out with but you never do, because you have other things to do and other people to hang out with. One day you send the dude a message and you’d be the last blokes in the pub before the bartender tell you to move on. Yet, the next day, you don’t know whether you want to call him again.
I have always been meaning to read Mishima, despite knowing little about him. But the little I knew should have been enough to venture into his novels — that he died taking his own life via sepukku — a painful and deliberate death. He died after he sent his manuscript to the publishers for The Sea of Fertility to complete his tetralogy. It is thus difficult to think of any other writer who really would give up his life for his own art — or any other artists in mind.
Regardless, Mishima is a prolific writer and I only picked up Thirst for Love because it was in the bargain bin in the Big Bad Wolf sale in Malaysia, like when one day you figured you had nothing better to do and decided to give your mate’s mate a call. But really, at this point Mishima’s life interest me more than his work that I just read. I may be off on a tangent here, but it’s difficult for me to separate the writer’s work from the writer himself.
Reading Thirst for Love, I can’t help drawing comparisons for antiheroines in literature. Think Madame Bovary, Becky Sharp in Vanity Fair, Anna Karenina — these women are deeply flawed and instigators of maelstroms around them. It is not fair to rank them as they all belong to different times and places, but the pattern they all have in common is that they are trying to make do in a world where women have clear disadvantages. In Thirst for Love, Etsuko relied on the goodwill of her deceased husband’s father, Yakichi for provision but with the town treating her as both a plague and laughing stock — a woman to hide their husbands from.
Yet Etsuko enjoys the advantages of being the kept woman, that she enjoys the best fruits of the season from Yakichi’s orchards and a somewhat dubious status as the mistress of the house. But it is not a position rightfully earned is it? In some ways, I question why Etsuko put herself through the life of a demeaned woman, fully aware of the stigma against her and resenting basically everybody around her. Did she take the most convenient option? Unfortunately, I’m not in the best position to speculate her chances of marrying better, or being independent. Perhaps her upbringing did not allow that sort of mentality — she is not really a city girl, and she was brought up traditionally.
To study Etsuko is also to look broader into her relationships, particularly with her late husband more so than her flame, Saburo, the rough-and-tumble gardener she has her thing for. It is ironic to find out that her late husband treated her no better than how a cleaner treats garbage — her intense jealousy she feels towards Saburo was the product of her husband’s infidelities and abuse. Yet, she had the upper hand when he was struck ill and her husband became dependent on her. Sickeningly, this gives her a perverted form of happiness as finally, she had her husband all to herself and she felt needed.
But Etsuko is far more complex than that. Her relationship with Saburo, though self-contrived had fatal consequences. It all started with the two socks. She understood little that Miyo, the house-servant had long been infatuated with Saburo, who was only a happy-go-lucky type of guy and didn’t feel any attachments. When Saburo was within her grasp, she cowered and spurned the fantasies that she had of him. Man, relationships are complicated.
For this reason, it is hard to like the book because none of the characters are likeable. Etsuko is fascinating as a femme fatale but she did not do enough to be memorable until the final pages. It is a book that leaves you with a sickening feeling at the end, but the pace of the story languishes and lurches to its conclusion. Yet, we can still enjoy Mishima’s poetic writing of the Japanese countryside muddled with this petty human drama.
