Josephine Palmer

“There, in my murder theater, young Roman gladiators offered up their lives
for my amusement; and all the deaths that took place there not only had to
overflow with blood but also had to be performed with all due ceremony. I
delighted in all forms of capital punishment and all implements of execution.
But I would allow no torture devices nor gallows, as they would not have
provided a spectacle of outpouring blood. Nor did I like explosive weapons,
such as pistols or guns. So far as possible I chose primitive and savage
weapons—arrows, daggers, spears. And in order to prolong the agony, it was
the belly that must be aimed at. The sacrificial victim must send up longdrawn-
out, mournful, pathetic cries, making the hearer feel the unutterable
loneliness of existence. Thereupon my joy of life, blazing up from some secret
place deep within me, would finally give its own shout of exultation,
answering the victim cry for cry. Was this not exactly similar to the joy ancient
man found in the hunt?”
― Yukio Mishima, Confessions of a Mask