Yukio Mishima - The Decay Of The Angel

Table of Contents

Cover

Copyright

About the Author

By Yukio Mishima

The Decay of the Angel

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Footnote

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Epub ISBN: 9781407053677

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Published by Vintage 2001

8 10 9 7

Copyright © 1974 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

Originally published in Japan as Tennin Gosui by Shinchosha, Tokyo, Japan.

Copyright © 1971 Yukio Mishima.

The English translation originally published by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, in 1974

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About the Author

Yukio Mishima was born into a samurai family and imbued with the code of complete control over mind and body, and loyalty to the Emperor – the same code that produced the austerity and self-sacrifice of Zen. He wrote countless short stories and thirty-three plays, in some of which he acted. Several films have been made from his novels, including The Sound of Waves; Enjo , which was based on The Temple of the Golden Pavilion ; and The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea . Among his other works are the novels Confessions of a Mask and Thirst for Love and the short-story collections Death in Midsummer and Acts of Worship .

The Sea of Fertility tetralogy, however, is his masterpiece. After Mishima conceived the idea of The Sea of Fertility in 1964, he frequently said he would die when it was completed. On November 25th, 1970, the day he completed The Decay of the Angel , the last novel of the cycle, Mishima committed seppuku (ritual suicide) at the age of 45.

BY YUKIO MISHIMA

THE SEA OF FERTILITY, A CYCLE OF FOUR NOVELS

Spring Snow

Runaway Horses

The Temple of Dawn

The Decay of the Angel

Confessions of a Mask

Thirst for Love

Forbidden Colors

The Sailor who Fell from Grace with the Sea

After the Banquet

The Temple of the Golden Pavilion

Five Modern Nô Plays

The Sound of Waves

Death in Midsummer

Acts of Worship

1

THE MISTS in the offing turned the distant ships black. Even so it was clearer than yesterday. He could pick out the ridges of the Izu Peninsula. The May sea was calm. The sunlight was strong, there were only wisps of cloud, the sea was blue.

Very small ripples broke on the shore. There was a certain distasteful quality, before they broke, about the nightingale colors at the bellies of the ripples, as if they had in them all the unpleasant varieties of seaweed.

The churning of the sea, day after day, a daily repetition of the churning sea of milk in the Indian legend. Perhaps the world would not let it rest. Something about it called up all the evil in nature.

The swelling of the May sea, endlessly and restlessly moving its points of light, a myriad of tiny spikes.

Three birds seemed to become one at the top of the sky. Then, in disorder, they separated. There was something wondrous about the meeting and separating. It must mean something, this coming so close that they felt the wind from each other’s wings, and then blue distance once more. Three ideas will sometimes join in our hearts.

The black hull of a small cargo ship, its funnel mark a mountain over three horizontal lines, gave, in the heaping up of its mass, a sense of grandeur and sudden growth.

At two in the afternoon the sun withdrew into a thin cocoon of clouds, a whitely shining worm.

The horizon was a blue-black hoop of steel perfectly fitting the sea.

For an instant, at a single spot in the offing, a white wave sprang up like a white wing and fell back again. And what would that mean? It had to be some grand signal, or perhaps a grand whim.

The tide came slowly in, the waves were rising, the land lay before the most powerful of assaults. The sun was behind clouds and the green of the sea took on a somehow angry darkness. A long white line stretched across it from east to west in a sort of gigantic inverted triangle. It seemed to twist itself loose from the flat surface and, near at hand, toward the apex, fan-like lines lost themselves blackly in a black-green sea.

The sun came out again. Again the sea gave smooth lodging to the white light, and, at the ordering of a southwest wind, numberless shadows like the backs of sea lions moved northeast and northwest, limitless schools of waves aloof from the shore. The flood was held under strict control by the distant moon.

Mackerel clouds half-covered the sky, their upper line quietly severing the sun.

Two fishing boats were putting out to sea. There was a cargo boat farther out. The wind was stronger. A fishing boat came in from the west, as if to signal the opening of a ceremony. It was a poor little boat, and yet, wheelless and legless, it advanced with a proud grace as if sweeping in full-skirted.

By three the mackerel clouds were thinner. On the southern sky clouds fanned out like the tail of a white turtle-dove to throw a deep shadow over the sea.

The sea: a nameless sea, the Mediterranean, the Japan Sea, the Bay of Suruga here before him; a rich, nameless, absolute anarchy, caught after a great struggle as something called “sea,” in fact rejecting a name.

As the sky clouded over, the sea fell into sulky contemplation, studded with fine nightingale-colored points. It bristled with wave-thorns, like a rose branch. In the thorns themselves was evidence of a smooth becoming. The thorns of the sea were smooth.