Thirst for Love by Yukio Mishima

​A Mishimaesque character study. The novel follows the widow Etsuko, who accepts her father-in-law's invitation to join the family in the multi-generational family home in rural farm country Maidemmura; she later becomes the father-in-law's mistress. Her father-in-law, the widowed patriarch Yakichi, was an upper class executive. He has three sons, whose families live with him. Kensuke, the oldest, is sickly, indolent, and cynical, and lives with an admiring Chieko; Yusuke, the youngest, is in Siberia, and leaves behind a wife and daughter; finally, there is Ryosuke, the middle child and deceased husband of Etsuko. Living with the family are their servants Miyo and Saburo.

The family exists as a bubble in Maidemmura--they are rich transplants from Tokyo and exist in a separate social and economic milieu with distinct mores, tastes, accents, and behaviours. They have an understated disdain for the other rural inhabitants in Maidemmura. Mishima details the familial politics that happens in the bubble; there is gossip, particularly on the side of Kensuke and Chieko, and providing a refracted image of Etsuko through their discussions.

Etsuko is also made known through the narrative and descriptions—"Etsuko walked as if she were pregnant. It was an ostentatiously indolent walk" (p. 7, this perhaps refers to Etsuko's violation of social norms of propriety for a woman in Japan in that age)—and the reader's privileged access to her own inner monologue. One interesting application of the latter is on page 16-17, when we read Etsuko's diary along with Yakichi and his peeping eyes—what is written in the diary is a foil and a disguise for Etsuko's actual thoughts (this reminded me of James Scott's hidden transcript). Mishima also makes use of the flashback (this is a cinematic convention brought into literature, as per critical commentary on Scott Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night) to describe Etsuko's failed, loveless marriage with Ryosuke. Her marriage is a story of desperate attachment to a cheating husband; the husband is later rendered helpless due to typhoid (which for Etsuko, becomes an opportunity) and dies a gruesome death.

Etsuko's thirst for love attaches itself to the young, handsome, and vital Saburo, who comes from the countryside to work as a farmhand on Yakichi's property. Saburo is close to nature and uncorrupted by urban life, much like the lovers in Mishima's Sound of Waves; however, unlike the two lovers, being "undeveloped" manifests in an absence of any ideas about love. The reader is offered access to his thoughts at certain points in the novel and they are unremarkable. He has none of the urbanite Etsuko's sophisticated accumulations about love and longing; he exists as an object of desire.

Mishima teases the reader by keeping mum about the nature of their romance: the novel begins with Etsuko's purchase of two woolen socks (is this a gift to a lover?), describes Etsuko's encounter with Saburo in a green plot of land by a creek (the spot of their first romantic tussle?)—these hints are concluded by Mishima's explicit denial of his suggestions, a variation of "nothing happened."

Etsuko, calm and collected, is later captured by jealousy, turning shrill, uncontrolled, and vengeful—the novel ends in Mishimaesque fashion, in a puddle of violence: love is bound to death, blood bound to desire.

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