The Weight of Time: Modern Identity and Existential Estrangement in Mishima Yukio’s Ao no jidai

This contribution presents an analysis of Ao no jidai (The Age of Blue, 1950) by Mishima Yukio, focusing on the protagonist Kawasaki Makoto’s complex relationship with time, desire, and identity. By closely examining his confrontations with three pivotal characters — Teruko, Otagi, and Yasushi — the study reveals how Makoto’s obsessive planning and emotional detachment serve as strategies to escape temporality, vulnerability, and genuine connection with otherness. Drawing on Jean-Paul Sartre’s ontology of freedom, this contribution interprets Makoto’s existential trajectory as a distorted form of liberty, aimed at preserving a fixed self-image rather than opening to the risks of transformation. Each key interlocutor, in fact, reflects a different mode of temporal and existential engagement — from Teruko’s cynical gestures of refusal to Otagi’s pragmatic openness, to Yasushi’s spontaneous vitality — and together they expose the limitations of Makoto’s defensive subjectivity. Ultimately, despite its marginal status in Mishima’s oeuvre, Ao no jidai offers a profound meditation on temporality, showing how the refusal to inhabit time as becoming ultimately leads not to coherence but to existential failure.