Time & Perspective Quote by Yukio Mishima

The strangest truth about travel, Mishima suggests, is that the trip feels most controllable before it begins. Preparations let you own the journey with a tyrant’s intimacy: you can map every turn, anticipate every mood, domesticate the unknown into lists and little purchases. “Last nook and cranny” has the fussy, almost comic precision of someone peering into a suitcase with a flashlight, trying to illuminate the parts of life that refuse to be lit.

That’s the intent: not to romanticize wandering, but to expose how fantasy masquerades as mastery. The real journey is porous - delayed trains, wrong turns, boredom, other people. Preparation is a private novel you write in advance, a world in which every scene arrives on cue and the self remains unthreatened. It’s also a kind of seduction. Planning produces the clean dopamine of certainty, the belief that desire can be arranged like folded shirts.

The subtext turns darker in Mishima’s orbit. His work is haunted by the gap between aesthetic perfection and the mess of lived time, between choreographed ideals and bodies that age, falter, and surprise. Preparation becomes a small-scale version of that larger struggle: the wish to seize experience before it can escape, to possess life as an object rather than endure it as motion.

Context sharpens the edge. Writing in postwar Japan’s rush toward modern order and efficiency, Mishima spots the modern habit of treating experience as something to curate. The preparation isn’t just practical; it’s a control ritual - a rehearsal for freedom that can feel better than freedom itself.