... is the first book in the "Sea of Fertility" tetralogy by Yukio Mishima. It is an austere, impossible yet inevitable, destructive love story between Kiyoaki and Satoko, with Tokyo in 1912 when the ancient Meji world collides with the West as the background.
"For everything sacred has the substance of dreams and memories, and so we experience the miracle of what is separated from us by time or distance suddenly being made tangible. Dreams, memories, the sacred - they are all alike in that they are beyond our grasp. Once we are even marginally separated from what we can touch, the object is sanctified; it acquires the beauty of the unattainable, the quality of the miraculous. Everything, really, has this quality of sacredness, but we can desecrate it at a touch. How strange man is! His touch defiles and yet he contains the source of miracles".
"As for me, I've always wanted to know the secret that enables love to evade the bonds of time and space as if by magic. To stand before the person we love is not the same as loving her true self, for we are only apt to regard her physical beauty as the indispensable mode of her existence. When time and space intervene, it is possible to be deceived by both, but on the other hand, it is equally possible to draw twice as close to her real self."
"He had lost Satoko. And with that he was content. For by now he head learned how to quiet even his subsequent resentment. Every show of feeling was now governed with a marvellous economy. If a candle has burned brilliantly but now stands alone in the dark with its flame extinguished, it need no longer fear that its substance will dissolve into hot wax. For the first time in his life, Kiyoaki came to realise the healing powers of solitude".
