The River of Writing

This river helps me to cultivate my fields with the mercy of its waters, supports my living and at time floods and nearly drowns me in its prolific streams. The River also demands from me infinite patience and daily hard labor through the changing seasons and passing time. How alike are writing and farming! One’s spirit must be on guard at every moment against storms and frosts. After such a long and vigilant watch over my field of writing and after such endless toil of imagination and poetry, can I ever be sure of a rich harvest? What I have written departs from me, never nourishing my void, and becomes nothing but a relentless whip lashing me on. How many struggling nights, how many desperate hours, had to be spent on those writings! If I were to add up and record my memories of such nights I would surely go mad. Yet I still have no way to survive but to keep on writing one line, one more line, one more line…

Yukio Mishima, Catalogue to the Tobu Exhibition