The Sound of Waves / Their Eyes Were Watching God

In The Sound of Waves by Yukio Mishima and Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston the natural world and the larger society surrounding a small community act as determining factors in the characters' growth and ultimate ability to express themselves and find loving relationships.

The Sound of Waves is a romance/coming-of-age story set in a Japanese fishing village. The plot is a modern adaptation of Daphnis and Chloe, the Greek pastoral romance. Shinji, a poor, young fisherman on the island of Uta-Jima (Song Island) meets and falls in love with Hatsue, the daughter of a rich shipowner. There are many obstacles to their love and suspense is maintained as to whether or not the people of the island will accept them and let them be together.

For those of us who have lived next to water, Mishima's lyrical descriptions of a life lived on the sea, within the sound of the waves, will be extremely compelling. In a few sentences, Mishima contrasts the life of the young man, Shinji, with the lives of city youths and describes the island setting as one which gives the community difficult circumstances yet idyllic lives that are always in tune with nature and may develop into extraordinary character. Along with many positive characteristics, like people anywhere, some of the islanders display negative traits; there is jealousy, insecurity, competitiveness, and an attempted rape. We also see bravery (working in boats on the sea, and diving for abalone) as well as humor (in one scene Terukichi, Hatsue's father, reacts fabulously to an insult in the public bath).

Mishima contrasts the simple life of the island with the lives of those outside it (American soldiers camps, burned out hills, luxury liners, bustling cities with bars and prostitutes) without ever straying too far from the main story on the island. The author grapples with the question of how much contact with 'civilization' is necessary to satisfy a man's curiosity without becoming too much that it destroys his ability to truly live in tune with nature.

While the story may follow a boy-meets-girl/can-boy-and-girl-be-together? formula, the simply and beautifully described observations of the characters' inner and outer worlds ensures that the story never becomes a syrupy or sappy romance. It is a beautiful book which I strongly recommend.

The abilities to express oneself and find love are also important themes in Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston. The novel follows the life of Janie as she moves through relationships with four men --- Johnny Taylor, Logan Killicks, Joe Starks, and Tea Cake Woods. Killicks and Starks represent control, while Taylor and Woods represent passion.

Johnny Taylor and Janie kiss as teenagers in a stunningly beautiful passage about Janie’s budding passion. When Janie's grandmother sees them, she immediately has Janie married to an older, wealthy man, Logan Killicks, against Janie's wishes. However, Taylor remains a catalyst in Janie’s life:

"She thought awhile and decided that her conscious life had commenced at Nanny's gate".

Logan Killicks, by virtue of his labor, is a propertied man who has achieved material success and can provide "protection" and financial security for his young bride. But his material success contrasts with his emotional inadequacy, and he is unable to express his hurt or disappointment to sixteen-year-old Janie. Instead, they talk about daily chores like chopping wood and peeling potatoes, rather than true emotions or even passion.

Janie runs to Nanny in tears, who then explains to Janie her view of the world: white men subjugate black men, who, in turn, subjugate black women -- thus characterizing them as mules. While both white and black men denigrate women, Nanny hopes that Killicks, with his wealth, will not do this to Janie.

One day Killicks demands that Janie work beside him in the fields, and tells her he has found a "gentle mule" to suit her. At that point, Janie runs away from Killicks to be with Joe Starks.

When Janie first sees Joe Starks, she thinks of Mr. Washburn, a successful white man who pampers his wife with material things. She thinks Joe Starks is, "kind of portly like rich white folks. Strange trains, and people and places didn't scare him neither" (32). She realizes he's not her idea of passion and doesn't "represent sun-up and pollen and the blooming trees" of Janie's dreams. However, he is confident and self-assured, and speaks about the "far horizon" and "change and chance". He tells her:

"You behind a plow! You ain't got no mo' business wid uh plow than uh hog is got wid uh holiday! You ain't got no business cuttin' up no seed p'taters neither. A pretty doll-baby lak you is made to sit on de front porch and rock and fan yo'self and eat p'taters dat other folks plant just special for you."

Janie takes her chances by running off with him, but soon finds that, like Killicks, Starks is primarily interested in property, prestige, and security. He wants a wife who stays at home and helps him run his store, and keeps Janie on the fringes of community life in Eatonville society where she is only allowed to communicate with others at a very superficial level.

Janie quickly realizes that Joe's voice depends "largely on shutting up hers". When Joe is elected mayor, Janie is asked by community members to say a few words, but Starks quickly interrupts:

"Thank yuh fuh yo' compliments, but mah wife don't know nothin' 'bout no speech-makin'. Ah never married her for nothin' lak dat. She's uh woman and her place is in de home."

In response: “Janie made her face laugh after a short pause, but it wasn't too easy. ...It must have been the way Joe spoke out without giving her a chance to say anything one way or another that took the bloom off of things.”

Joe is also insecure about her sexuality. When he was courting Janie, Starks told her: "'Kiss me and shake yo' head. When you do dat, yo' plentiful hair breaks lak day' ". However, once they are married, he forces her to wear a head rag to cover her luxurious hair:

“This business of the head rag irked her endlessly. But Jody was set on it. ... That was because Joe never told Janie how jealous he was...She was there in the store for him to look at, not those others. But he never said things like that. It just wasn't in him.”

This follows a pattern in Nanny's life in which a man associated her hair with sexuality. Before he left to fight in the Civil War, Nanny's white master (Janie's grandfather) ran into Nanny’s cabin and “'made her let down her hair for de last time. He sorta wropped his hand in it...' ".

Joe (Jody) isn’t completely impervious to Janie’s feelings and wishes. For example, when a mule owned by a local citizen is being ill-treated, Starks rescues it after he hears Janie's concern for the animal. Immediately, everyone thinks that Starks has bought the animal for work until he says," 'Didn't buy 'im fuh no work. I god, Ah bought dat varmint tuh let 'im rest'". The townspeople then see Janie as a "'uh born orator'" when she says,

"Jody, dat wuz uh mighty fine thing fuh you tuh do. 'Tain't everybody would have thought of it, 'cause it ain't no everyday thought. Freein' dat mule makes uh mighty big man outa you. Something like George Washington and Lincoln. Abraham Lincoln, he had de whole United States tuh rule so he freed de Negroes. You got uh town so you freed uh mule. You have tuh have power tuh free things and dat makes you lak uh king uh something."

In response, Starks "never says a word," but "bites down hard on his cigar and beams all around" and thus never tells her he saved the animal because of her concern for it. Starks believes that he does everything possible for his wife by treating her well.
While in many ways, Starks regards Janie as just another of his possessions, her inner voice comes alive:

“...one day she sat and watched the shadow of herself going about tending store and prostrating itself before Jody, while all the time she herself sat under a shady tree with the wind blowing through her hair and her clothes.... After a while this vision got so common she ceased to be surprised....In a way it was good because it reconciled her to things.”

Janie starts challenging Joe in her mind and then one day publicly emasculates him: "'When you pull down yo' britches, you look lak de change uh life'". The humiliation destroys Starks's public image and he slaps her. He becomes sick soon after and, as he lies dying, Janie tells him,

"...you ain't de Jody ah run off down de road wid. You'se whut's left after he died.... Ah run off tuh keep house wid you in uh wonderful way. But you wasn't satisfied wid me de way Ah was. Naw! Mah own mind had tuh be squeezed and crowded out tuh make room for yours in me."

Joe dies and Janie frees her hair from the hated head rag. A new suitor, Tea Cake Woods, appears and Janie lets Tea Cake Woods take her emotionally and physically back to how she felt in the passionate days of Johnny Taylor's first kiss. Tea Cake shows Janie a non-materialistic, day-to-day existence of love and respect between people who are not in a constant state of competition and control. He prefers to acquire experiences rather than material possessions or success. And he shares with Janie by doing things like teaching her to play checkers:

"He set it up and began to show her and she found herself glowing inside. Somebody wanted her to play. Somebody thought it natural for her to play".

Tea Cake asks Janie to come with him as he works on the muck in the Everglades and live on his salary rather than her inheritance from Joe. She works with him without hesitation and rejoins the community that was denied her in her earlier marriages. But his jealousy awakes and, while on the muck, he beats Janie: “Before the week was over he had whipped Janie. Not because her behavior had justified his jealousy, but it relieved that awful fear inside him. Being able to whip her reassured him in possession. No brutal beating at all. He just slapped her around a bit to show he was boss.” When Tea Cake, whom Janie loves dearly, slaps her in a more violent manner, the act has an erotic tone to it for those within Tea Cake and Janie's community, who seem to perceive the slap as a socially acceptable expression of possessive love and authority. But it is clear that Tea Cake also beats Janie because he does not know how to express his fear of losing her to someone else who is a lighter skinned African American like Janie.

Warning: PLOT SPOILER for Their Eyes Were Watching God follows. It's an exquisite, lyric novel that you may wish to read before you continue with this review.

The white community is always in the background, and, even as a hurricane approaches, Tea Cake decides to stay on the muck and continue working to make money, even though many people and all of the animals are leaving the area. Although nature itself is telling everyone that danger lies ahead, Tea Cake decides to trust the white people in charge—and their seawall--and Janie defers to his "better" judgment: “The black folks in the quarters and the white people in the big houses further around the shore heard the big lake and wondered. The people felt uncomfortable but safe because there were the sea walls to chain the senseless monster in his bed. The folks let the people do the thinking.” But as the roar of the hurricane approaches, the attitude of the workers changes: "The time was past for asking the white folks what to look for through that door. Six eyes were questioning God". Janie barely survives, but Tea Cake dies from a rabid dog's bite. Thus, Hurston punishes Tea Cake for his silent deference to white society's judgment.

Janie is forced to shoot Tea Cake who had become rabid and was about to bite her. She is put on trial before an all-white, all-male jury with many of Tea Cake's friends watching. During the trial, Janie speaks effectively and is immediately acquitted and released. She then returns to Eatonville where she has a friend, Pheoby: “The people all saw her come because it was sundown. The sun was gone, but he had left his footprints in the sky. It was the time for sitting on porches beside the road. It was the time to hear things and talk. These sitters had been tongueless, earless, eyeless conveniences all day long. Mules and other brutes had occupied their skins. But now, the sun and the bossman were gone, so the skins felt powerful and human. They became lords of sounds and lesser things. They passed nations through their mouths. They sat in judgment.”

When Pheoby comes to her, Janie tells her story, and Pheoby replies: “Lawd!...Ah done growed ten feet higher jus' listenin' tuh you, Janie. Ah ain't satisfied wid mahself no mo'. Ah means tuh make Sam take me fishing wid him after this." Thus, at the end of the novel, Janie's voice is heard and recognized by Pheoby, who will share it with her community. The unity within Janie allows her to share with others.

** edited to fix a few typos

Thank you for this comparison. I started reading Their Eyes Were Watching God once, but the dialect slowed me down and I found it hard to get into the story. I will have to try it again some time, because your plot summary makes it sound really interesting. Huckleberry Finn is written in dialect, too, and after few pages I got into the flow of it. Shakespeare, too, though he takes more practice.

I did read the end of your review, despite the spoiler warning, but I don't think knowing the ending will spoil the story for me. This sounds like a book of characters and ideas rather than one that depends for its effect on surprising twists and turns in the plot. In fact, knowing that there are dramatic and emotionally wrenching scenes in the book will make me more likely to pick it up and persist with it in the future.

When I was a teenager, I read a novel by Anya Seton that I really loved. It had a similar structure to Their Eyes Were Watching God. It was set in the 1700s, I think, and the story followed the main character through her series of marriages until she finally found a man who treated her as a person rather than as a possession or a glorified servant. Maybe someone else remembers this novel and can supply the title. I'd like to reread it.

Thanks for this review! Their Eyes Were Watching God is one of my favorite novels of all time, but I've never heard of The Sound of Waves before - I'm looking forward to checking it out.

margad, the Anya Seton novel you describe sounds very like The Winthrop Woman.

Native Roses, very interesting comparison! I wouldn't have thought of it myself, but highlighting the role of the surrounding communities and the effect they have on the protagonists' lives does bring up some intriguing commonalities. My older niece read 'Their Eyes Were Watching God' for school last year and loved it. Perhaps I should introduce her to 'The Sound of Waves'.

The Winthrop Woman is the one! Thanks, marietherese, I've been wanting to reread it, and now I know what title to look for.

I have lots of opinions of Their Eyes Were Watching God - most of suspect validity. One is that the multiple rolls the language plays in the book. It is, of course, a cultural study and cultural commentary. But, the way it's presented makes the beginning of the book torture. I felt like Hurston just slammed the language on the reader, and with an awful character - Joe Starks. The combination of the difficultly of the language and Joe Starks ego are really going to throw readers off. Once Starks disappears (also in cameos when he's out of the picture) the language takes on new and colorful rhythm.

Why did Huston torture us? I think it was intentional and Hurston was playing games here. Janie had to grow up under Joe's tortuous presence and I domination; and I think Hurston intended us to learn the language through the same lens. That way we can commiserate a little. And if we swim instead of sink, we are rewarded. Once we get to the meat of the book we've learned how to read the language and see some it's subtleties. The 2nd part of the book becomes much richer.

I see this book more as a window into Janie's world then as a story about her. The world itself has a life, it's organic, and it grows. At the end of the book the story kind of left me empty, but the world, and voice of that language still linger.

edited to fix a typo

Interesting theory, dchaikin.

I know that it was common during the period Hurston wrote to present phonetically spelled dialect. With Huckleberry Finn, for example, I felt like Twain wanted us to fully enter into the world of his characters, and it seemed as though we could not do that without being able to hear in our minds' ears the way his characters spoke. He was writing for a largely Eastern and New England audience, many of whom would never have heard the speech of people like his characters. Today, we have television and the movies, so most English-speakers do have an idea of the range of accents of other English-speakers, even people from places they have never visited.

I wonder whether Hurston felt she was writing primarily for a black audience or a white? If for a white, she may have felt (a) that the dialect was necessary to immerse white people in a world they knew nothing about from the inside, and (b) as you suggest, that her readers needed to experience something of the struggle people like her characters faced on an everyday basis.

Interesting.

margad: I think both your a & b are valid but for a mixed audience. Outside the dialogue the language is regular English. Also, her crowd was urban NY (Harlem) not rural FL and that is probably who she was writing for - perhaps it was more focused to black Harlem than the rest of NY.

Another possibility, especially if she was writing primarily to a black audience is the shift in dialect or accent may have meant something about the kind of characters she was depicting. Now I'm going to get in trouble for this, but here goes. Amos and Andy spoke in one kind of accent which represented the down home working man. The Kingfish was more flamboyant, made many more mistakes in usage trying to sound more cultured than he really was. Is it possible this is what Ms. Hurston was doing, separating her characters within lines that would be invisible to non-blacks, but would stand out like a sore-thumb to her audience?

Well, I guess it's all conjecture. I don't think she was writing primarily for a black audience. To me it felt like she was basically documenting the black community in FL for the benefit of those not familiar with it.

Thinking my post #10 through some more, it doesn't really make sense. Hurston surely had a black audience in mind here - a black female audience. While reading it, I didn't feel she was writing for others familiar with that dialect. Maybe I'm wrong. But, I felt she was writing for readers who are more comfortable in the narrative outside the dialogue, where the language is plain English. I guess this just brings me back to post #8.

Another thing I'm aware of is that novelists often write primarily for themselves as a way of thinking an issue through and coming to terms with their experience of life, and only secondarily to reach a particular audience. They may have an audience in mind and revise specifically in order to reach that audience, but what drives them to write in the first place is the need to think something through. It's a little like Einstein's thought-experiments, perhaps, but focusing on the way people think and feel and interact rather than on physics. It may be that, in order to put herself inside her Florida characters, Hurston needed to write out the dialogue in a way that helped her hear the way they spoke very precisely.

Regarding post 12: My copy was overfilled with essays, there were four of them (A foreward, an afterward and two in a "PS" section). One of them made the observation that Hurtson had tried to capture the world of Eatonville in earlier books, but that she first found real success here - the first novel she wrote from a woman's point-of-view. I definitely think she needed to pour her own life into the book.

Wow, this is really interesting. I found the language to be lovely and compelling all the way through...now I'm not sure whether I was being inattentive, or just having a difference of artistic taste. Guess it's time to re-read!

Very likely a difference in taste, Emily. I tend to be an impatient reader. But it's also true that the majority of modern readers do get impatient with dialect. It takes more time and effort for the brain to recognize words spelled in an unfamiliar way, and therefore slows down the reading process. Not all readers mind that - I sometimes wish I could slow myself down and appreciate the nuances more in what I'm reading.

When I was a child and new to reading, I was much less impatient. I might find one book less interesting than another, but I almost never stopped reading before the end. And it seemed easier then to become immersed in setting and story. I read more critically now, and spots of clumsy grammar, overdone description, characters behaving implausibly, etc., often annoy me when once they would not have. It probably makes me a better writer, but it certaintly does not make me a better or happier reader!

Another possibility that occurs to me, assuming Hurston grew up in Florida and left later in life, is that she felt a deep nostalgia for the accents and rhythms of the speech of her childhood and wanted to recapture those both for herself and her readers.

I’ve been following this post with great interest for the past six weeks, even though I had not, as yet, read either book.

NativeRoses’ excellent review of The Sound of Waves really piqued my interest. That’s what kept me coming back to this post time and again. I finally found the time to read Yukio Mishima’s book a few days ago and posted my review here on LibraryThing. If you take the time to read it (click on the link to “Sound of Waves” above and it should take you to the page where my review will be first…at least for the next few days). You may be interested to know that I was disappointed. I did not feel that this modern literary classic has held up well to the test of time.

Like Margad, I started reading Their Eyes Were Watching God once, but the dialect slowed me down and I found it absolutely impossible to finish. So, I was happy to read dchaikin’s comments about this and I will give the book another chance sometime in the near future.

I think the quality of this discussion here about both books and their thematic overlap has been excellent. That’s why I joined this group. In my opinion, it is the best group here on LT!

After I’ve read both books, I hope to return here again and make some meaningful contributions.

Thanks for linking to your review, msbaba. I found a couple of sentences in it especially interesting:

You say, “The Sound of Waves” was Mishima’s own delusional vision of a perfect Japanese past that was quickly slipping away. It was a theme he returned to repeatedly over the next fifteen years of his life before committing seppuku (ritualistic suicide) because, in his words: "I came to wish to sacrifice myself for the old, beautiful tradition of Japan, which is disappearing very quickly day by day."

I remember reading about Mishima's suicide when I was a teenager. It was shocking to me not so much because he killed himself (I knew that people in my own country did that, far too often), but because he performed it as a ritual seppuku, something that at one time had a positive meaning in his culture, and which he apparently believed still had value. To me, suicide (except perhaps as a political statement, like the Buddhist monks who immolated themselves in Vietnam) seemed an acknowledgment of weakness, an admission that one didn't have the personal coping skills to keep struggling along and trying to figure out how to live in a way that gave one happiness and (perhaps more important) a sense of meaning and satisfaction with one's contribution to the world. At the time, I didn't see Mishima's suicide as a political statement, because of the association of seppuku with atonement for failure. It didn't seem as though Mishima was saying he thought he had failed anyone (other than, perhaps, himself).

Maybe it was a political statement, though, if he idolized a "Golden Age" of Japan's rural past and wanted to make the strongest possible protest against the direction he felt his country had taken. I remember thinking that his act of seppuku seemed to be a making a statement that he wanted to return to Japan's more militaristic past, when ritual self-slaughter was part of a way of life he admired (something I found repugnant). But in view of the style and tone of The Sound of Waves (which I haven't read), maybe that is not at all what he was trying to say. It's possible the past he wished to return to was an imagined past of a pre-militaristic Japan when people lived close to nature and in harmony with each other. If so, the manner of his suicide seems like a tragically bad metaphor. I would guess that none of the peaceful rural characters in his novel would consider killing themselves in so ritualized a manner, or even have access to the appropriate blades.

In a way, I wonder if Mishima's novel (especially in the context of his life and death) might be especially worth discussing at a time when the whole planet is threatened by overpopulation, habitat loss and global warming. Would it be better to retreat to a pre-industrialized past if we could succeed in recreating something resembling it, or are we are better off jettisoning the illusion that the past was ever idyllic?

Thanks, too, msbaba, for your nice words about Books Compared! I've been thrilled by the quality of the reviews and the discussion here, which have exceeded anything I imagined when I impulsively started the group.

Thanks for your comments Margad. I had no knowledge or memory of Mishima’s Seppuku until I read “The Sound of Waves” a last week. I always do a little academic online research before writing my reviews here on LibraryThing. That is how I found out about the manner of Mishima’s death.

I am an emeriti academic research librarian with lifetime access to hundreds of full-text online academic subscription databases containing journal article and reference sources. It was easy for me to do a little more checking about the motive and background for Misima’s suicide by Seppuku. Here below are some quotes that may be of interest to you and others following this particular Books Compared discussion.

All the quotes below come from a fairly long article in the online version of one of the key academic literature databases, “Gale Contemporary Authors.” I quote below only a small portion of this large article. At the end of the 6th paragraph is the quote I used in my last post.

START QUOTES --Mishima's last work, considered by many his magnum opus, was The Sea of Fertility tetralogy, the final portions of which he completed and submitted to his publishers on the day of his suicide. In a letter written to an American friend just before his death, Mishima explained: "I wrote everything in it, and I believe I expressed in it everything I felt and thought about through my life. I just finished the novel on the very day of my action in order to realize my Bunbu-Ryodo." (Bunbu-Ryodo is a synthesis of the culture arts and the warrior arts.)…

When Japan was defeated by the Allies in World War II, the country was forced to adopt a new constitution that stripped the emperor of his power. Under foreign influence Japanese culture began to change in ways that both pleased and horrified Mishima. His home, once described as "almost determinedly un-Japanese," was full of English antiques. Even his writing contained more references to classic French literature than to Japanese. But Mishima grew to hate the Westernization that he felt was causing the dissolution of old Japanese ideals.

In 1968 he formed a private army of eighty-three university men who were also interested in the martial arts and who believed in the way of the samurai. The goal of the Tate No Kai, or Shield Society, was to return Japan to the samurai tradition, "which he saw as an ethical and esthetic system truer to the spirit of Japan than a modern army," noted Philip Shabecoff. "Although his private army... led many Westerners to believe that he sought to review Japanese militarism, he actually loathed the militarism represented by the Japanese Army of pre-World War II years. He regarded that militarism as a foreign import alien to the Japanese spirit."

One of the ancient samurai rituals that Mishima and his followers believed in was seppuku, a form of suicide reserved for the samurai warrior. In this painful ritual, the subject kneels and slices open his abdomen, releasing the intestines. "Standing behind the subject is a samurai with a sword," New Yorker explained, "whose function is to behead the subject at the first sign of pain, or even the slightest alteration of the traditional posture."

Seppuku, Richard Halloran pointed out, is "the ultimate protest against that which one cannot accept, the ultimate affirmation of that in which one believes, and the ultimate reconciliation between the two." Many Westerners confuse seppuku with hara-kiri, but there is a difference between the two. Although the two Japanese ideographs that compose the words are the same, their order is reversed and they therefore take on distinct shades of meaning. Hara-kiri literally means "to cut the stomach," whereas seppuku "connotes an inner being or the spirit of a man," roughly with the same sense that Americans intend when they use the inelegant term `guts.' " So seppuku could be most accurately defined as "the cutting of the spirit."

Apparently Mishima began to plan his suicide several years in advance. Shabecoff reported that during the spring of 1970, "Mishima said that he worked so hard on body building because he intended to die before he was 50 and wanted to have a good-looking corpse." Perhaps to prove his perfect physical condition, Mishima posed in 1969 for a photographic study of various postures of death, including death by drowning, by duel, and by hara-kiri. In addition, a few weeks before his suicide he displayed at a Tokyo department store a series of photographs of himself in the nude. The author was also prepared mentally for the final act. In a letter to Ivan Morris just before his death, Mishima wrote: "After thinking and thinking through four years, I came to wish to sacrifice myself for the old, beautiful tradition of Japan, which is disappearing very quickly day by day."

On November 25, 1970, Mishima and four of his followers from the Shield Society entered the headquarters of Japan's Eastern Ground Self-Defense Forces, took its commander, Lt. General Kanetoshi Mashida, hostage, and demanded that soldiers be assembled on a parade ground below. As twelve hundred men quickly gathered, Mishima went out on a balcony, his kamikaze-style headband fluttering in the breeze, and shouted: "Listen to me! I have waited in vain for four years for you to take arms in an uprising. Are you warriors? If so, why do you strive to guard the constitution that is designed to deny the very reason for the existence of your organization? Why can't you realize that so long as this constitution exists, you cannot be saved? Isn't there anyone among you willing to hurl his body against the constitution that has turned Japan spineless? Let's stand up and fight together and die together for something that is far more important than our life. That is not freedom or democracy, but the most important thing for us all, Japan."

When his words were greeted with angry heckling by the soldiers, Mishima shouted "Tenno Heika Banzai!" ("Long live the Emperor!"), stepped back from the balcony, and proceeded to perform in exact detail the traditional seppuku ceremony. Time related the dramatic event: "Mishima stripped to the waist and knelt on the floor.... Probing the left side of his abdomen, he put the ceremonial dagger in place, then thrust it deep into his flesh. Standing behind him, Masakatsu Morita, 25, one of his most devoted followers, raised his sword and with one stroke sent Mishima's severed head rolling to the floor. To complete the ceremony, Morita plunged a dagger into his own stomach, and yet another student lopped off Morita's head. Shedding tears, the three surviving students saluted the two dead men and surrendered to the general's aides." The New Yorker pointed out later that Mishima's seventeen-centimeter incision displayed "a degree of mastery over physical reflex, and over pain itself, unparalled in modern records of this ritual."

Ironically, this man so obsessed with death had been greatly admired for his charisma and vitality. Throughout his life he had followed a hectic schedule of writing, acting, singing, directing, exercising, running his private army, and pursuing an active social life. John Nathan described the energetic author: "Mishima has a rare capacity for enjoying himself, and he loves nothing better than a party. He has only to walk into a room full of people and it belongs to him. He is not a large man, but his presence is so palpable it can be stifling.... Mishima weighs into a party with gusto, delighting over the food, mixing experimental drinks, neighing hoarsely at all the jokes, including his own.... Mishima is clever, amusing, astute, catty."

Although many critics pointed out the paradox of Mishima's captivation with both life and death, East and West, Masao Miyoshi averred that the author "was an amazingly consistent person, who never forgot his wartime catechism--the myth of Japan as a ritually ordered state, the samurai way of life characterized by manly courage and feminine grace, and the vision of imminent death as the catalyst of life." Richie agreed: "Mishima is a man who compares things as they are with things as they have been or could be and who, in the face of public indifference and private doubt, has the strength of character to live by those standards he himself finds suitable. When he also has the strength to die by them the act is astonishing because... suddenly the man is all of a piece.... Mishima's suicide was the final stone in the arch of his life."– END QUOTES

The story of Mishima’s life and death is all very interesting…but for me, at least, not interesting enough to want to read Mishima’s “The Sea of Fertility” tetralogy.

But…I am going to read “Their Eyes Were Watching God” by Zora Neale so can add more to this post! I bought the book last week and I imagine I will start it sometime in the next week or two. So, you will hear back from me here relatively soon.

I hope you enjoyed the added information about Mishima. By the way, I just looked Mishima up in the index of my (beloved!) copy of Kay Redfield Jamison’s “Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament.” Jamison is a manic-depressive and a professor of Psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. She is considered to be THE world’s expert on this disease. She is also the world’s expert on this disease and its link to creativity. In my estimation, Jamison should also have a doctorate in World Literature, she knows it THAT well! The book is brilliant on neuroscience, psychiatry, and world literature! The book is one of my all time favorites. I should go back and reread it and then review it here on LT. I see now that there are few reviews here for that book which was published in 1993. For better reviews, click on the Amazon link and read the highest rated reviews. That should give you a flavor for what type of book this is.

Thank you, msbaba, for looking up this article on Mishima for us. I had in fact confused seppuki and hara kiri - though I think I did at one point appreciate the difference, and had just forgotten.

There is something deeply fascinating in the life of this complex writer - it sounds as though the man himself was far more complex than his novels. That he made so strong a distinction between the militarism of Japan in WWII, which he abhorred, and the militarism of the samurai tradition, which he admired, is extremely curious to me. I have never read any of his books, and I wonder if he was ever able to articulate that in any way in his work, or whether he simply wrote as if WWII had never happened (or should never have happened).

The perfectionism in his obsession with physical fitness almost seems to foreshadow the perfectionism of his ritual death, which similarly requires a mastery of mind over body. And he seems to have been perfectionistic in his judgments about his country, as well.

I read this thread yesterday and stewed on it overnight. As I can see it, the main debate seems to concentrate on the dialect in the novel and why it was written the way it was. I don't think Hurston wrote the dialect as a test or a struggle for people to get through to get to the reward. I think she wrote it for authenticity - to present her characters as accurately as they were. I believe she wrote the book in an autobiograph sense - which is to say that I don't think it was her "story" - but it was the evolvement of her thoughts. She was married and divorced and I think she wrote the story as a way to figure things out for herself.

keren7, well said. I threw my idea out here when I was still stewing over how difficult the language was and how difficult it made the book. Rereading my post, it feels overstated it and I agree the language is there for authenticity and atmosphere. I don't think I meant to imply a intentional test with a reward, but, even if I did, I don't agree with that idea now.

After washing my idea off a bit, I'm not quite ready to toss it in the wastebasket. I think Joe Sparks really colors the book. Before him, there isn't a great deal of talking. Well, actually, I can't recall how much Janie's grandmother talked, I think there was a monologue to two in there. But, Joe takes over the book and does a lot of talking. Then, he's gone and we are in a new story with a new Janie and new voices need to do the talking now.

Also, there is that window in Eatonville while Joe is either absent or quiet, and the the community is chatting - was it just me, or does the language liven up a bit there.

I guess that it seems like Zora put a lot of effort into the language, and I'm looking for a reason. Putting it there for atmosphere is significant, but, for whatever reason, I'm draw towards exploring another purpose (or purposes). Why doesn't the narrator keep it up, why the sharp divide between dialogue and narrator? Certainly one reason is because she wants to make it clear who her audience is (it's not Eatonville,FL). Well, if her audience relates the narrator better than the dialogue, then... well, this implies other possible motives for the language again, or maybe it doesn't...

But, this is only one aspect of the book.

I think it's also relevant that the time period in which Hurston wrote and published the book was one in which readers were far less impatient than today's readers, who have been exposed to decades of TV sound bites and the more passive medium of film - and now the internet. It was not at all unusual to write dialogue in dialect during the first half of the last century. I think people were in the habit of reading more slowly then and had an easier time taking in the meaning of passages that required a degree of reflection or interpretation. I know I am a much more impatient reader today than I was 20 or 30 years ago.

Margad-sama, thank you for my first invitation to join a group -- i accepted though i am afraid i probably won't participate much for I must use my time not writing to publicize my books as the Xmas season approaches but, seeing this forum thought i might contribute something. Hurston's Mules and Men I find has only been mentioned 3 times on the site and 2 are by me! I quote the following from my teaser post on a feminist forum

When I first read a standard collection of American folklore, I put markers in pages with something interesting. Later, I discovered half were from one book by Zora Neale Hurston. I bought "Mules and Men" and read it and all of Zora's books I could find. Later, I was astounded to find far more discussion and sales of "Their Eyes Were Watching God" than "Mules and Men" and attributed it to prejudical reading practices, namely - 1) Novels are always favored over nonfiction because that has been the fashion for decades and most reviews and readers sheepishly follow it. 2) Books having to do with women have been favored over other books, even if they might be more worthy, over the past two or three decades.

I could write pages on dialect esp. in translation (see my robin d. gill Orientalism & Occidentalism) but when it comes to zora's attitude about language, you might do well to find a copy of Spunk, which has a dialect dictionary appended to one story. For Mishima, I will wait and see if there is a Mishima-specific forum, for my comments would not concern one book. I think we might do well to have a hurricane book comparison forum. I'll seed one soon in this group if there is not one out there somewhere.
Re Margad's last . . . Amen. And the readers 150 years ago were even more patient. They were so delighted with reading-as-a-work-out that dialect writers used odd spelling to make it harder. It was even common in the major magazines . . . Apologies for beating around the bush.

Keigu, I'd love to learn a little more about Mules and Men. It is nonfiction, evidently, and I am guessing from the title that it may have something to do with the post-Civil-War promise (never fulfilled) to give every ex-slave 40 acres and a mule. But maybe not. Mules were important farm animals in the rural South until tractors replaced them, which happened surprisingly late in some communities.

I am delighted by the tidbit about people using odd dialect spellings 150 years ago specifically to give readers a more strenuous workout! Perhaps the idea is a little like the brain-teasers and crossword puzzles one finds in newspapers and magazines today.

Feel free to contribute your Mishima comments here. The idea of "Books Compared" is quite broad - compare two books, three books, all the works of a particular author, or a range of books - whatever kind of comparison sparks a literary insight!

Just a few observations about Hurston -- she was highly criticized by the (mostly male) literati of the Harlem Renaissance for using dialect in her writing because they felt she was portraying African-Americans as ignorant and "backward." But she embraced and celebrated her heritage -- she grew up in Eatonville, FL and went back there, not only to visit, but to gather the folktales that the townspeople were telling on the porch of Joe Clark's (obviously a model for Jody Starks) general store. While THEIR EYES is not strictly an autobiographical novel, it certainly reflects elements of Hurston's life.

She wrote the novel in the Caribbean while she was "recovering" from her marriage -- by all accounts, her own included, she had truly loved her husband (who I think was a doctor), but the marriage had constrained her own ambitions. Hurston never could manage a sustained relationship -- she was way too independent and intent on making her own way, even at the end of her life when she was living in near poverty in Stuart, FL (she was buried in pauper's grave -- it was Alice Walker who finally put a gravestone on it in the 1970s).

Janie's relationship with Teacake is fraught with ambiguity -- he opens her up to her own self-knowledge and allows her to reconnect with her youthful freespirited self. But he doesn't really allow her to return the favor -- he's jealous and he beats her because he's afraid of losing her. And, he's subconsciously intimidated by her lightness/whiteness. His deference to white power comes to the fore as the hurricane threatens -- the Seminoles leave, the Bahamians leave, even the crows leave, but Teacake won't leave because the boss remains: Tea Cake responds, “Dat ain’t nothin’. You ain’t seen the bossman go up is yuh?” The hurricane (and the rabid dog bite) turns his instinct to protect into one to conquer and abuse. Janie has to kill him to save herself.

MULES AND MEN is Hurston's collection of African-American folklore -- she was an anthropology student at Barnard (the first African-American) and Columbia working under Franz Boas. Determined to save the oral culture of her people, she went back to Florida to "collect" folktales. Later she also collected the rituals and stories of Haitian Voodoo in TELL MY HORSE. Her experiences are told in a wildly engaging fashion in her autobiography DUST TRACKS ON THE ROAD (in which she embroiders her own stories with what she herself calls "lies").

The best way to get a really good overview of Hurston is to get your hands on the 2 volume Library of America's edition of her work: Folklore Memoirs and Other Writings and Novels and Stories .

I think we might do well to have a hurricane book comparison forum. I'll seed one soon in this group if there is not one out there somewhere.

Keigu -- Let's do a hurricane comparison forum. I did a paper on Florida hurricanes in novels last year -- love to have some other hurricanes to compare with. Here's my list of Florida hurricane books (both novels and otherwise):
http://faculty.mccfl.edu/jonesj/Flbib/FLHurricanes.htm

Great idea, Jane. I'm eager to see what hurricane books people will compare!

I will have to put Mules and Men on my to-be-read list. I love folk tales.

i would put mules and men on the to-be-read-first-list. after that you will want to read her autobio. some have criticized it for not being ferociously anti-racism etc. which infuriates me -- i was entranced by her paragraph on her relation with the moon as a girl and about the man who turned into a gator , when she recounted the magic of childhood (i wish we had a whole book of it!). to add a bit to what jane writes, tall tales were called lies and told competatively and lying also included what might now be called the dozens or cut-down contests and hurston selected subjects of great interest (tall tales combining local wildlife and biblical ones to create great just-so explan. myths or cutting down the other person as blacker than oneself -- the hyberbole is superb). Since something is lost in the translation of these talks to print i feel that any editing zora did is justified and wished other editors would do the same, but it is helped by her shakespearean? style you'll find a lot to love in her.

Jane, since you already have the list, maybe you should start up the forum! I would love for you to see the art created by a hurricane (maybe wilma) at my website http://www.paraverse org -- i have only a few links to it and forget what pages they are on, so doing paraverse.org on google images might do better. Ah, my mom wrote the bk on Key Biscayne and Cape Florida and is a good source for hurricane info. (I'm going to try to touchstone her: joan gill blank. Her book popped right in! Your library?