Ansel Christensen > Recent Status Updates

Incredibly enjoyable to read considering it is poetry.

I just finished chapter 9… I just need a breather. What a stretch. So bizarre. Interesting how as the perspective shifts from Navidson to Holloway—who is said to be a poor photographer and director—the prose and formatting disintegrates. It is not easy. I crave more of the narrative and spending 20 minutes decoding a footnote of a list of random directors that is entirely unrelated is definitely an experience.

Satoko just became a nun. Countess Ayakura and Marquise Matsugae still want her to come back and hide her now bald head under a wig. Pretty strange.

YES! Kiyoaki confessed to his father and his father just beat him! His mother and grandmother entered and he confessed to them. Then he disappeared from the scene! It was so cool. His family—who Kiyoaki has made seem inept and entirely unaware throughout the book—immediately ignores him as a helpless child and plans to deal with the situation. The father and grandmother are suddenly masterful and wise. So cool.

This book is by far at it’s best when Mishima is writing his own philosophy and abstract thoughts down through the thin veil of Honda talking and thinking. Also Kiyoaki’s dreams are so intriguing in a way wholly different from the rest of the book’s interest. The hookup on the beach makes the initial one so much more comfortable because the beach was actually cute. Kiyoaki is still confounding me.

Still struggling with how I feel. Kiyoaki is at least somewhat human instead of an incel dweeb. His encounter with Satoko is very gross and while it is played off as consensual and loving his role is disturbing. I wonder if my enjoyment would be much less if I weren’t male.

Satoko’s marriage received the imperial sanction and Kiyoaki just became sure he loves her. Kiyoaki is fantastically immature but perhaps this great shock will bring him to understand his true feelings for Satoko—perhaps those feelings are truly love. That said, an emotionally stunted, outrageously privileged teenager becoming enraptured by someone purely because they’ve become off limits is highly probable.

It is genuinely hilarious how much of a dweeb incel Kiyoaki is. I just read the letter he sent to Satoko and can’t help laughing at how petty this man-child is. I think it’s funny now but worry it will tire.

Pretty good writing, but Edward Abbey seems like douche