"Enough false pride!" said Kashiwagi with a scornful smile. "I just wanted to make you understand. What transforms this world is—knowledge. Do you see what I mean? Nothing else can change anything in this world. Knowledge along is capable of transforming the world, while at the same time leaving it exactly as it is. When you look at the world with knowledge, you realize that things are unchangeable and at the same time are constantly being transformed. You may ask what good it does us. Let's put it this way—human beings possess the weapon of knowledge in order to make life bearable. For animals such things aren't necessary. Animals don't need knowledge or anything of the sort to make life bearable. But human beings do need something, and with knowledge they can make the very intolerableness of life a weapon, though at the same time that intolerableness is not reduced in the slightest. That's all there is to it."
"Don't you think there's some other way to bear life?"
"No, I don't. Apart from that, there's only madness or death."
"Knowledge can never transform the world," I blurted out, skirting along the very edge of confession "What transforms the world is action. There's nothing else."
Just as I had expected, Kashiwagi parried my statement with a chilly smile, which looked as if it had been plastered on his face.
"There you go!" he said. "Action, you say. But don't you see that the beauty of this world, which means so much to you, craves sleep and that in order to sleep it must be protected by knowledge?"
Different interlocutors, and different arguments, yet a familiar topic all the same. As is the finale:
The cry of some startled birds brought me to my senses. Or else it was a bird that flew close to my face with a great fluttering of its wings. As I lay there on my back I gazed at the night sky. The birds soared over the branches of the red pines in great numbers and the thin flakes from the fire, which were already becoming scarce, floated in the sky above my head. I sat up and looked far down the ravine towards the Golden Temple.
A strange sound echoed from there. It was like the sound of crackers. It was like the sound of countless people's joints all cracking at once. From where I sat the Golden Temple itself was invisible. All that I could see was the eddying smoke and the great fire that rose into the sky. The flakes from the fire drifted between the trees and the Golden Temple's sky seemed to be strewn with golden sand.
I crossed my legs and sat gazing for a long time at the scene. When I came to myself, I found that my body was covered in blisters and scars and that I was bleeding profusely. My fingers also were stained with blood, evidently from when I had hurt them by knocking against the temple door. I licked my wounds like an animal that has fled from its pursuers. I looked in my pocket and extracted the bottle of arsenic, wrapped in my handkerchief, and the knife. I threw them down the ravine.
Then I noticed the pack of cigarettes in my other pocket. I took one out and started smoking. I felt like a man who settles down for a smoke after finishing a job of work. I wanted to live.
Found an interesting analysis by way of a footnote somewhere else1:
The idea of the significance of the samurai that lay in the bond, now sundered, that had once united man and his beliefs, lies at the core of the novel's ideational universe; informed by Mishima's own idiosyncratic iconography, this central emblem ramifies outward as the work's primary integrating structure.
The elements constituting that iconography are by now well known to the English-reading public, largely through Nathan's brilliant biographical study. At its core is the equation of beauty, love, and death, a triad that Mishima understood as destiny: what was truly beautiful, and therefore capable of love, must perish or lose that beauty forever. This same equation demands the death of the once enigmatic and alluring sailor in The Sailor who Fell From Grace With the Sea (Gogo no Eiko 午後の曳航, 1963) who becomes safely landlocked into a mundane shore existence.
The Golden Temple, too, having outlived its beautiful destiny of a fiery demise in the wartime bombing that failed to materialize in Kyoto, is doomed to destruction by the same inexorable logic. In having outlived its glorious end, the temple has become like the samurai who has shamefully failed to perish in battle and whose continued existence is an affront to a cherished ideal.
While thus unusually successful in creating an emblem or metaphor for his pervasive sense of fragmentation-the sort of vital and informing metaphor that often seems to mark the difference between sanity and insanity-Mishima was scarcely unique in feeling that the old values had disappeared forever in the new postwar Japan. Nor was he the only writer to produce a character - and here the pun is used advisedly - whose continued existence in the postwar era stands as a testimony of a Japan that ought, properly speaking, to have died.
Which brings us to the Mishima Incident on November 25, 1970 (apologies for cribbing from Wikipedia):
At around 12:10 pm, Mishima returned to the Commandant General's office with Morita from the balcony and muttered to himself, " I probably spoke for about 20 minutes. It seems my message didn't get across." He then stood in front of General Mashita and said, "We have no grudge against you. We did it to return the JSDF to the Emperor. I had no choice but to do this," and unbuttoned his uniform.
Mishima received the tantō that Masayoshi Koga (小賀正義) (Chibi-Koga) was pointed at the General Mashita through Morita, and handed Morita his own unsheathed Japanese sword, "Seki Magoroku", in return. Then, on the red carpet about three meters away from the General Mashita, with his upper body naked, holding the tantō in both hands, sat seiza-style facing the balcony, then tried to dissuade Morita from committing suicide by telling him, words: "Morita, you must live, not die.", "You stop dying."
In conclusion: every story tells a story that has already been told.
1 - Often books speak of other books.
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