My Reading List: Thirst for Love, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, & Spring Snow (the first of the cycle of novels titled Sea of Fertility) all written by Yukio Mishima. I love the Kinokinuya Bookshop chain. You can get any book there, either off the shelf or by fast mail. Any book. Michel de Montaigne's 1580 "Apology for Raymond Sebord'...in French, English, Hindi, or Mandarin...anything. The facility-base is astounding and has nothing to do with the crass limitations of new technology, or of borders.
What Mishima did, with his Sea of Fertility 'tetralogy', was set in place a 'cycle of novels' so that when you've read through the bunch, you can approach the first one, Spring Snow, with an informed knowledge that can take you through it all again, and the rest, at the next level of understanding.
This is why he said when he started the work that the day he finished it all, he would kill himself; and he was true to that, and did that. Fuck, I'm not going to do that, but I appreciate the fact that he did do that.
It's only when faced by such people I realise I am not a very good writer at all; but it doesn't diminish the joy one iota. I am becoming, again, as between years 12 and 30, a great and passionate reader, which is where the joy begins and belongs and endures as real knowledge.
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