The Death of Yukio Mishima
When the plane took off, I had the sense that something magical was happening.
It wasn’t just that this heavy lump of metal had managed to defy gravity: the fact that a sedentary guy like me, with no relationship with Japan, should have set out on this journey because of a couple of postcards was what really made me think I was under some sort of spell.
I was sitting next to a Gulf Arab woman who’d dolled up her chador with what seemed to be very expensive high heels. She soon started playing a virtual golf game on the screen in front of her seat, while I alternated between jotting down notes and reading a novel.
Titus had asked me to bring him back three little-known varieties of tea and also to find out everything I could about wabi-sabi. He’d only managed to get his hands on three or four books, which offered very little information about the beauty of imperfection.
Using the name of Gottfried Kerstin, the old man didn’t just want to meet the terms of his contract with his small self-help publisher.
“I want to publish the most complete book ever written on wabi-sabi. So I need you to get me some original material. If it sells well, I’ll give you a share of my earnings.”
I told him there was no need for that, and that I’d be really happy to help him in exchange for his looking after Mishima, but he insisted that we were partners in this venture.
He’d even given me three of the books he’d found on wabi-sabi after he’d scanned the chapters that interested him into his computer.
Flying toward Doha, however, I wasn’t yet ready to immerse myself in a world that was imperfect, ephemeral and unfinished. My life was shaky enough as it was.
Instead of reading Titus’s books, I opened a novel by Haruki Murakami that I had been wanting to read again—A Wild Sheep Chase. I thought it was a masterpiece.
The story begins by recalling the life of the main character in the early nineteen-seventies.
As he and his girlfriend are out on a walk—it happens to be November 25, 1970, the day renowned Japanese writer Yukio Mishima commits suicide—they start bickering over the silliest matters, as tends to happen when, for whatever baffling reason, a relationship begins to fall apart.
She tells him about a recurrent nightmare in which a vending machine keeps eating her change.
In the middle of this trivial conversation, Murakami brings the story back to the deep magic of old Japanese legends and talks about birds flying off, swallowed up into the cloudless sky, as the girl draws indecipherable patterns in the dirt with a twig.
This is where his greatness lies: in his ability to mix humdrum details that seem to be leading nowhere with sublime touches.
At one point the girl tells the narrator: “Sometimes I get real lonely sleeping with you.”
I was shaken by these words, because they stirred up something I’d often felt with Gabriela: the feeling that, for some mysterious reason, she was moving away from me—usually after we’d made love.
The sex was great but, once she’d come, she’d just lie there staring at the ceiling.
If I asked her what she was thinking about, she said: “Nothing.” Which was probably true.
I kept reading on.
The day of Yukio Mishima’s death something died for that couple in A Wild Sheep Chase, without their ever understanding what had happened.