With Honda's increasing realization that Toru is not the real reincarnation of Kiyoaki comes acceptance of the arbitrary nature of reality. "It was an accident, an utterly senseless accident, that Kiyoaki and Isao and Ying Chan had all appeared beside Honda... Eternity does not come into being because I think I exist," the old man reflects. Struck by the final challenge of Satoko's denial of Kiyoaki's existence, Honda sits in the abbey garden:

There was no other sound. The garden was empty. He had come, thought Honda, to a place that had no memories, nothing.

Eternity is only present in the emptiness and silence of total abandonment.

MISHIMA'S NOVEL, like much Japanese fiction, is weak on plot and characterization. The story is contrived and unsatisfying; the characters are more agents who elaborate certain intellectual ideas than real people who interact in human fashion.

Yet Mishima writes with a powerful insight of the problems of man's relationship to the world and to reality. The clarity of his perception is stunning, as the various characters of the book unfold their complex metaphysical relationships. Long passages describing intense self-scrutiny hold the reader in an almost morbid fascination, until he must be relieved at the end to see Honda give up his vain attempts at understanding.

Mishima said that he put everything he knew about life and art into The Sea of Fertility. Thus his suicide came not as a denial, but a culmination and fruition of a process of realization. "Suicide," he once said, "is art." For him it was by no means a retreat from the suffering of the human condition, but the logical and appropriate conclusion to life itself.