『豊饒の海』における空間化する時間

抄録

The cyclical experience of time by the four main characters in Mishima's tetralogy is obviously a literary projection of the Buddhistic concept of reincarnation. It is purly Buddhistic that reincarnation is the mystic transmigration of a soul from one human being to another, rather than a genealogical transmission, namely from father to son. In contrast, Honda, the antagonist who lives through these four generations of reincarnation, represents a linear experience of time which is analogous to the Judeo-Christian concept of time. The third concept of time which tightly unifies this gigantic novel in its entirety is the Indian religious philosophy of Yuishiki. The Yuishiki doctrine is based upon the spatialization of time, in which time is only cognizable at this present moment, and as soon as that moment slips into the past, it is not time any more, but probably something like a dot which is more spatial than temporal. With this philosophy, Satoko, the tragic heroine in the first novel, can be the only survivor of the inexorable, irreversible flow of time at the end of the tetralogy.