Hart has degrees in English literature and creative writing and is a copyeditor and published writer. In this essay, she looks at Mishima's concepts of the disparity in power between the natural and the mechanical world as portrayed in his story.

Akio, the protagonist in Mishima's short story "Fountains in the Rain," is a very calculating young man. He has contrived a plan much like an engineer might plot the dimensions of a proposed building. But there is a major flaw in Akio's calculations, a blind spot brought on by his own obsessions. Akio has failed to see the difference between the mathematical precision of the mechanical world and the emotional ambiguity of nature.

Most of Mishima's protagonists are "anti-heroes, physically or psychologically wounded," states Philip Shabecoff for the New York Times. They are "tormented by obsessions with beauty or sex or mutilation and martyrdom." Shabecoff describes...