I read Yukio Mishima’s Sun & Steel almost a decade ago. I read it while working at the hot shop for AO Glass during the summer. I’d read a page between gathers of glass and try to explain the insanity between those pages to my co-workers who would mostly laugh at the loin-cloth wearing mad man on the cover. And a mad man he well and truly is; the depths of Mishima’s insanity, and clarity, and genius, remain truly and wildly and awe-inspiringly profound.

I am glad to be nothing like him, but I might wish to emulate some of him. I’ve begun rereading that book every now and again, part manifesto, part autobiography, part suicide note, and I’ve never gotten all the way through it a second time.

When I first read it I was coming hot off the heels of reading some Soetsu Yanagi and William Morris, mostly The Craft Reader by Glenn Adamson. I was reading very much with an anonymous buddhist craft lens. I’d be curious to see how my new perspective colors the work of Mishima, and the work of those other dirty-handed men.

I suspect I’d find Mishima far more insane and lost than I did in 2015, Soetsu Yanagi a lot hungier, and Morris much, much more beautiful. 

What I remember most about The Sun & Steel is Mishima’s appreciation of how exercise manages to clarify the human experience and make it nearly universal. It’s a peak into enlightenment, really. I have a strongly different take on englightenment and peace now than I did then, but I still think working out will help me understand whatever it is that is True.