Yukio Mishima's story of harakiri fascinated me. I read his seminal work The Temple of the Golden Pavillion when I was a teenager. I found a connection between Mishima's Golden Pavillion and J D Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye, which reportedly inspired a wayward kid to assassinate John Lennon.
I read a lot of books as a teenager.
I read Gulag when I was just about 18. I read it to drive away from the anxiety and fear.
My father was sick at AIIMS, down with a stroke that nearly paralysed him. I took several books to read at the hospital.
The doctors would come around and look at the books and exclaim: "You reading them!" I would answer: "Trying to." Thomas Hardy and Charles Dickens were my favourites in the early days of my foray into novels. I continued reading voraciously for a few more years until scotch, sirens and Santana and his ilk took away the chunk of my remaining time after gruelling office hours.
There were no such things as eight hours at leisurely work, eight hours at fun and eight hours of sleep, a standard routine for workers today. My routine was more like 12 hours of work, two hours of cooking as I was staying on my own, a couple of hours for reading and the remaining hours for dreaming.
After Mark David Chapman shot and killed John Lennon, I read The Catcherin the Rye for the second time. I also repeated Yukio Mishima's book. I was awed by the tale of Mishima's harakiri, a ritual form of sacrifice through disembowelment.
A Japanese online friend recently corrected me in a social post that the 'master or sensei in Japanese', as he is known, committed seppuku, a refined word for violent suicide. But I am still not clear – does the subject decapitate himself, or does a helper do it for him after self-embowelment? I read Confessions of an Opium-Eater, Fanny Hill, Sigmund Freud's books on psychoanalysis, Simone's Second Sex, T E Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom, D H Lawrence's Lady's Chatterley's Lover and last but not the least, Henry Miller's Sexus, Nexus and Tropic of Cancer. These books made me think hard about my life. For many years, I was fascinated by harakiri. It appeared like the best way to leave the world. I went to a sprawling mall in Tokyo full of Samurai swords, but I retreated quietly, tiptoeing like a cat after the price tags mocked me. Fanny Hill introduced me to the mystery of woman's pleasure dome, and Henry Miller had me experimenting on physical delights. I failed in the exploits of Marlon Brando's Last Tango in Paris. But reading and watching the masterpiece was an experience of one of its kind.
A version of this article appears in the print on June 03, 2022, of The Himalayan Times.