Quote:"The most startling insight into Mishima's motives is revealed in an interview with an old lover in an S&M club (where the author resists an invitation to pee over another member). Mishima picked up the then 20-year-old student in a gay bar. Sex took the form of role-play. Mishima enjoyed acting out a seppuku complete with the appropriate props, a death poem, a sword for his lover to clutch and, from his briefcase, a length of red cloth, the "blood and guts? The young man watched amazed as Mishima got hard at once and as he died, he came. Without touching himself at all. I had never seen anyone do that before. Mishima appeared entirely un- interested in his lover: I think I was just a witness to something he wanted to do in front of an audience. After three dates of role-play and no sex, he dropped the author."

Quote:"In Kyoto I never experienced an air raid, but once when I was sent to the main factory in Osaka with some orders for spare parts for aircraft, there happened to be an attack and I saw one of the factory workers being carried out on a stretcher with his intestines exposed.
What is so ghastly about exposed intestines? Why, when we see the insides of a human being do we have to cover our eyes in terror? Why are people so shocked by the sight of blood pouring out? Why are a man's intestines ugly? Is it not exactly the same in quality as the beauty of youthful, glossy skin? What sort of face would Tsurukawa make if I were to say that it was from him I had learned this manner of speaking - a manner of thinking that transformed my own ugliness into nothingness? Why does there seem to be something inhuman about regarding human beings like roses and refusing to make any distinction between the inside of their bodies and the outside? If only human beings could reverse their spirits and their bodies, could gracefully turn them inside out like rose petals and expose them to the spring breeze and the sun..."