Transparent Cocoon-on The Conception Of The Sea Of Fertility

This thesis tries to analyze The Sea of Fertility based on the characteristic of the conception first of Mishima’ s novels.The Sea of Fertility is a special novel in Yukio Mishima’ s works.It has been conceived for ten years,with a total length of more than 800,000 words.The whole book is composed of four stories on different themes:Spring Snow,Runaway Horses,The Temple of Dawn and The Decay of the Angel,which are linked by the mystery of reincarnation and the character Honda who witnessed the birth and rebirth of four protagonists shows a combination of the internal Japanese spirit and the external western literary skills.In addition,on the day Mishima finished the final volume,he committed harakiri.Thus,some people regard the novel as his literary suicide note.Being his last book,The Sea of Fertility contains Mishima’s thinking on the world,life and literature all his life.This thesis starts from analyzing the overall structure of the novel,investigating the conceptional design of four stories and concluding how these four independent stories are integrated through the physical feature,prophetic dreams and the reincarnation relationship of the protagonists.And then we will get to the connotation and characteristics of the central conception of PURITY embodied in the continuation of life in the four independent stories.PURITY is the common feature of the four characters as one continuous life.The novel describes the fate of the youth representing PURITY in different fields such as love,revolution and passion so as to reveal the PURITY is opposite of modern society.PURITY is also a feature of Japanese spirit.The novel is patterned on the way Japanese spirit exists in a westernizing of society and shows Mishima’s thinking about how PURITY exists in those days.The second part of this thesis goes deep into the details of the text.In this part,I will point out the writing techniques used to build the conceptional fiction such as intertext,contrast,combination of imagination and reality,and the change of style by close reading,so as to present as much as possible the expected effect,a delicate text centered on a conception,that Mishima wanted to get by using these techniques.The third part of the thesis uses Yukio Mishima’s biographies,novels,letters and self-narratives to explain the inheritance of Japanese literature and Western novel techniques in Mishima’s writing,as well as the transplantation of author’s fragmented self-memory existing in The Sea of Fertility and his forecast of the end of different life choices.From Confessions of a Mask to Sun and Steel,Mishima has written many texts narrating his own understanding of novel,flesh and death.The creation view which emphasizes expressing conception through the novel is also closely related to Mishima’s way of self-cognition and his dualistic understanding of body and spirit.Yukio Mishima was nominated for the Nobel Literature Prize twice,and his literature works have been translated and published continuously in China for half a century.Besides,his unique aesthetics,violent suicide,militarism ideology and ambiguous sexual orientation also continuously won him enormous public attention beyond literature.Yukio Mishima’s work not only shows how a sensitive artist faced human and the world,but also reflects what a man who experienced the Second World War and the postwar modernization thought about the tradition and modernity.Mishima called the novel he wrote based on the creation view of explaining an idea by telling stories as the conceptional novel.The purpose of writing conceptional novel is to express oneself.Therefore,such characteristics emerge in his novels as sacrificing plots,emphasizing comments and psychological descriptions as well as delivering his own ideas through characters’ dialogues and monologues,which also bring readers fancy reading experiences.