Yukio Mishima, in his novel Thirst for Love, tells the story of a young woman, Etsuko, and her longing for a young gardener, Saburo. In fact, it is not a true "thirst for love" which drives Etsuko, for when she is finally on the apparent verge of winning the young man's affections, she reacts with violent rejection rather than acceptance. Mishima's novel, then, is about Etsuko's inability to love, to accept love, or even to begin to understand the difference between love and violent lust. The novel focuses on the brutality of physical longing, and there is no sign in the book that Etsuko---or any other character, for that matter---has any notion of what real love is or how to get it. The violent response of Etsuko to her object of desire shows that from the author's point of view, love is either unattainable or blatantly appalling. Etsuko is driven to love, to seek love, but love in its actuality is repulsive.
Donald Keene, in his Introduction to the book, argues correctly that this sense of repulsion in the presence of love, or even the possibility of love, is the force that drives Etsuko as it does other characters in other books by the author:
Etsuko's compulsion to love, her need to inflict pain in love, and her revulsion when suddenly she feels she is loved, suggest figures set in entirely different contexts in other works by Mishima (vii).
Etsuko's powerfully contradictory feelings about love reflect the paradoxes which overwhelm her general emotional philosophy, if such a word can be used to define her irrational impulses. She sees herself as a being superior to the rural characters around her, yet when her longing is expressed, it takes as its object an unsophisticated gardener. She is drawn to him with uncontrollable and obsessive longing, yet she feels nothing but violent repulsion when there seems to be a chance of securing her desire. She is both drawn and repelled by the gardener, the people in the country, a...