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
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.