In The Sound of Waves, Yukio Mishima creates an exquisite story which has strong idealistic and mythic features. Although Mishima writes of young love and tranquility in The Sound of Waves, his later works are categorized as aggressive and containing violent sexual actions. Even Mishima himself referred to The Sound of Waves as "that great joke on the public" (qtd. in Ishiguro 385). However, one cannot compare this novel to Mishima’s other literary pieces; in order to classify it as romanticized, one must evaluate the usage of imagery, an idealized setting, mythical allusions, and characterizations which establish the romantic-driven qualities in The Sound of Waves.
It is apparent that nature plays a major role throughout The Sound of Waves, as the reader would expect from a Japanese based novel. The reader is first introduced to Shinji at the “flight of stone steps” with “peace blossoms blooming in the shrine garden, dim and wrapped in twilight” (Mishima 6). Mishima’s usage of nature helps reinforce the purity of love between Shinji and Hatsue. On their first encounter, “the sea below them [brims] with a last afterglow” (50) and “the stars [begin] to glitter” (51). Hatsue’s kiss is even compared to seaweed and the “sharp, fresh saltiness” (67) of the sea; these symbols emphasize a parallel between romance and romance.
Mishima also creates the aspect of nature relating to emotion and frequently references weather imagery to convey the thoughts and emotions of Shinji. In particular, when Shinji sees Hatsue naked at the observation tower. During their meeting, a storm is brewing and the waves are “ragging and ripping out...” (70); this mirrors the sexual tension of Shinji. According to Napier, "the language of this passage underli...
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...s, the reader can conclude that Mishima has created a novel, which contains idealized and mythic features, which emphasize the love story between Shinji and Hatsue. Mishima develops a relationship between nature and romance, creates an idealized setting and gives heroic traits to nature and Shinji. Overall, The Sound of Waves contains several unrealistic, but hopeful events, such as nature saving Hatsue from rape; therefore one can classify this novel as romanticized.
Works Cited
1. Mishima, Yukio. The Sound of Waves. Trans. Meredith Weatherby. New York: A.A. Knopf, 1956. Print.
2. Napier, Susan J. Escape from the Wasteland: Romanticism and Realism of Mishima Yukio and Oe Kenzaburo. Cambridge Mass.: Council on East Asian Studies Harvard U, 1991. Print.
3. Shabecoff, Philip. "Everyone in Japan Has Heard of Him." NY Times. N.p., 2 Aug. 1970. Web. 26 May 2014.
Mori, Taisanboku, et al. Poets Behind Barbed Wire. Eds. Jiro Nakano and Kav Nakano. Honolulu: Bamboo Ridge Press, 1983.
Composers use comprehensive variety of language techniques to engage their audience by creating convincing and extraordinary images. Distinctively visuals are created through the use of extravagant techniques and complex word choice, so it helps the audience to visualize the text and therefore share and also intensify their understanding of the texts. Two short stories composed by ‘Henry Lawson’ that use techniques and word choice to portray distinctively visuals are ‘The Drover’s Wife’ and ‘In A Dry Season’, these two texts are strongly opposite to the visual ‘Flatford Mil’ by English artist John constable. Both ‘The Drover’s Wife’ and ‘In A Dry Season’ use distinctive visuals to intensify the responders understanding of place, the situation of the story, where the stories are set. People, the characters of the story and how they progress throughout the story. Ideas, themes and ideology that the composer is trying to express to his audience. Henry Lawson creates images of isolation, stoicism and the struggles for survival in the unforgiving rural Australian outback in his two well-known short stories ‘The Drover’s Wife’ and ‘In A Dry Season’. On the other hand, the visual, ‘Flatford Mil’ creates images of peacefulness, clamness and freedom through the composer’s use of colours, brush strokes and positioning.
Fallows, James. "After Centuries of Japanese Isoation, a Fateful Meeting of East and West." {Smithsonian} July 1994: 20-33.
Mishima, Yukio. The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea. Trans. John Nathan. New York: Vintage, 1994.
Ogawa, D. (1993) The Japanese of Los Angeles. Journal of Asian and African Studies, v19, pp.142-3.
John Hollander’s poem, “By the Sound,” emulates the description Strand and Boland set forth to classify a villanelle poem. Besides following the strict structural guidelines of the villanelle, the content of “By the Sound” also follows the villanelle standard. Strand and Boland explain, “…the form refuses to tell a story. It circles around and around, refusing to go forward in any kind of linear development” (8). When “By the Sound” is examined in regards to a story, the poem’s linear development does not get beyond the setting. …” The poem starts: “Dawn rolled up slowly what the night unwound” (Hollander 1). The reader learns the time of the poem’s story is dawn. The last line of the first stanza provides place: “That was when I was living by the sound” (3). It establishes time and place in the first stanza, but like the circular motion of a villanelle, each stanza never moves beyond morning time at the sound but only conveys a little more about “dawn.” The first stanza comments on the sound of dawn with “…gulls shrieked violently…” (2). The second stanza explains the ref...
Shirane, Harue, and Tomi Suzuki. Inventing the Classics: Modernity, National Identiy, and Japanese Literature. Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 2000. eBook.
Carroll, Michael Thomas. "The Bloody Spectacle: Mishima, the Sacred Heart, Hogarth, Cronenberg, and the Entrails of Culture." Studies in Popular Culture 15.2 (1993): 43-56. Rpt. in Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism. Ed. Thomas J. Schoenberg and Lawrence J. Trudeau. Vol. 161. Detroit: Gale, 2005. Literature Resource Center. Web. 9 Apr. 2014.
Harootunian, Harry. Toward Restoration: The Growth of Political Consciousness in Tokugawa Japan. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1970.
Imagery of all kinds is abundant in this passage as Meursault, the main character, pays great attention to and describes in detail the beach environment that surrounds him. Visual imagery is present as he conveys the intense heat by telling how it seemed as though the sky had cracked open and was raining flame, and by personifying the ocean, recounting how it breathed blistering hot air onto the beach.
M.L Stedman’s novel The Light Between Oceans challenges readers to recognise ideas about how the environment shapes and readjusts the identity of the main protagonist, Tom. It follows the tragic story of lighthouse keeper Tom Sherbourne and his wife Isabel who, after discovering a baby in a shipwrecked boat, must face the terrible consequences of their decision to raise the child as their own. Stedman traces the journey of his characters through the microcosmic setting of life on Janus Rock as well as the macrocosmic setting of Australia in the wake of World War One. The incandescence of Janus Light, the oil lamps, electric lamps, the candles and the darkness they stave off, all serve to illuminate the characters and their changing era. Through use of characterisation, figurative language such as metaphors, and setting, the author is able to structure the book as resting on a series of triangles, with different characters becoming the fulcrum at different times. This unity of environment intertwined with characters lives offers representations of shifting attitudes and values of the main protagonist before the resolution of the novel.
Keene, Donald. Anthology of Japanese literature, from the earliest era to the mid-nineteenth century. New York: Grove P, 1955.
• Mishima, Yukio. The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea. Trans. John Nathan. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1965.
During the Tokugawa era, the Japanese view of the West was undeniably negative. Aizawa’s “New Theses” begins by describing the “alien