The Decay of the Angel by Yukio Mishima
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
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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
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.
Three ten. There were no ships in sight.
Very strange. The whole vast space was abandoned.
There were not even wings of gulls.
Then a phantom ship arose and disappeared toward the west.
The Izu Peninsula was shrouded in mist. For a time it ceased to be the Izu Peninsula. It was the ghost of a lost peninsula. Then it disappeared entirely. It had become a fiction on a map. Ships and peninsula alike belonged to “the absurdity of existence.”
They appeared and disappeared. How did they differ?
If the visible was the sum of being, then the sea, as long as it was not lost in mist, existed there. It was heartily ready to be.
A single ship changed it all.
The whole composition changed. With a rending of the whole pattern of being, a ship was received by the horizon. An abdication was signed. A whole universe was thrown away. A ship came in sight, to throw out the universe that had guarded its absence.
Multiple changes in the color of the sea, moment by moment. Changes in the clouds. And the appearance of a ship. What was happening? What were happenings?
Each instant brought them, more momentous than the explosion of Krakatoa. It was only that no one noticed. We are too accustomed to the absurdity of existence. The loss of a universe is not worth taking seriously.
Happenings are the signals for endless reconstruction, reorganization. Signals from a distant bell. A ship appears and sets the bell to ringing. In an instant the sound makes everything its own. On the sea they are incessant, the bell is forever ringing.
A being.
It need not be a ship. A single bitter orange, appearing no one knows when. It is enough to set the bell to ringing.
Three thirty in the afternoon. A single bitter orange represented being on the Bay of Suruga.
Hidden by a wave and appearing again, floating and sinking, like a ceaselessly blinking eye, the bright dot of orange floated slowly off toward the east through the ripples in near the shore.
Three thirty-five. Somberly, a black hull appeared from the west, from the direction of Nagoya.
The sun was behind clouds, like a smoked salmon.
Tōru Yasunaga looked away from the thirty-power telescope.
There was no sign yet of the cargo ship Tenrō-maru, due to make port at four.
He went back to his desk and absently scanned the Shimizu shipping notices.
Expected arrivals of nonscheduled ships, Saturday, May 2, 1970.
Tenrō-maru, Japanese, 16:00. Taishō Shipping Company. Agent, Suzuichi. From Yokohama. Berth 4–5, Hinodé Pier.
2
SHIGEKUNI HONDA was seventy-six. He often traveled alone now that his wife Rié was dead. He chose easily accessible places that would not overtax him.
He had visited Nihondaira Heights below Fuji, and on his return had stopped by the Mio Grove and seen such treasures as the cloth, probably from Inner Asia, said to be a fragment of the angel’s robe; and as he started back toward Shizuoka he found himself wanting to be alone for a time on the shore. There were three runs every hour of the Kodama Express. It would be no great matter if he were to miss his train. The return trip to Tokyo took only a little over an hour.
Stopping the cab, he walked with the help of a cane the fifty yards or so to the Komagoé shore. He asked himself, as he gazed out to sea, whether this would be the Udo Beach identified in the fourteenth century by Ichijō Kanera as the precise spot of the angel’s descent. He thought too of the Kamakura coast of his youth. He turned back. The beach was quiet. Children were playing, and there were two or three anglers.
His attention on the sea, he had not noticed earlier, but now his eye caught, the rustic pink of a convolvulus below the breakwater. In the sand along the breakwater a great litter of garbage lay scoured by the sea winds. Empty Coca-Cola bottles, food cans, paint cans, nonperishable plastic bags, detergent boxes, bricks, bones.
The dregs of life on land cascaded down and came against infinity. The sea, infinity not met before. The dregs, like man, unable to meet their end save in the ugliest and filthiest of fashions.
Straggling pines along the embankment sent out blossoms like red starfish. To the left a radish patch put out forlorn little four-petaled white blossoms. Small pines lined the road. For the rest there was a solid expanse of plastic strawberry shelters. In vast numbers, under quonset huts of plastic, strawberries trailed their fruit over stone terraces among a profusion of leaves. Flies crawled along the saw-blade edges of the leaves. Quonset huts, as far as he could see, unpleasantly white, jammed in, one against another. Honda noticed—he had not before—a small tower-like structure among them.
Just in from the prefectural highway on which the cab had stopped, it was a two-story hut on a disproportionately high concrete platform. It was too tall for a watch shelter, too poor for an office building. Three sides were almost unbroken expanses of window.
Curious, he stepped into what appeared to be the yard. White window frames were heaped in great disorder on the sand. Fragments of glass faithfully caught the clouds. Looking up, he saw in a second-floor window what seemed to be shades for telescope lenses. Two huge iron pipes, rust red, protruded from the concrete platform and buried themselves in the earth. Uncertain of his footing, Honda made his way across the pipes and started up a flight of decaying stone steps.
At the foot of the iron stairs leading to the shelter was a shaded signboard.
In English:
TEIKOKU SIGNAL STATION
And in Japanese:
SHIMIZU OFFICE OF THE TEIKOKU SIGNAL
AND COMMUNICATIONS COMPANY
Notice of arrivals, departures, and moorings
Detection and prevention of accidents at sea
Land-to-sea communications
Marine weather information
Receiving and dispatching of ships
Various other matters related to shipping
The peeling white paint of the characters, here and there worn thin, with the name of the company in an antique hand, pleased Honda. The smell of the sea poured forth, quite without restraint, from the list of duties and functions.
He looked up the stairs. All was quiet.
Below and behind him, to the northwest, beyond the prefectural highway and the town, where pinwheels caught the light over carp streamers on new blue-tiled roofs, lay the complex of Shimizu Harbor, a crisscrossing of cranes on land and derricks on ships, white silos of factories and black hulls, iron bleached by the sea winds and thickly painted chimneys, one mass stopping at the shore, the other coming in from the several seas; there in the distance was the mechanism of the harbor laid bare, meeting at the appointed spot, glaring across the line. And the shining dismembered snake of the sea.
Fuji rose far above the hills. Only the summit was visible, as if a great sharp white boulder had been flung up through the uncertainty of the clouds.
Honda stopped to look.
3
THE CONCRETE PLATFORM was a water tank.
Water was pumped into it from a well and stored for irrigating strawberries. Teikoku Signal had seen the possibilities of the high platform and put up a wooden shelter. It was ideal for sighting ships from Nagoya to the west or Yokohama to the east.
Normally four signalmen worked eight-hour shifts. One of them had long been ill, however, and the other three took turns at twenty-four-hour duty. The first floor was the office of the superintendent, who from time to time came from the downtown office. The three signalmen had only a bare-floored room, some four yards square and surrounded on three sides by windows, on the second floor.
Attached to one window was a desk
Even now identification was by naked eye. So long as vagaries in cargoes and currents ruled the movements of ships, they would continue to come in too soon or too late, and a certain nineteenth-century romanticism would not disappear from welcoming parties. There was a need for more precise observations to tell the customs and quarantine officials and the stevedores and pilots and laundries and provisioners when to put out their welcoming flags. There was a still greater need for a just arbiter to decide which was to take precedence when two ships came in together and competed for the last berth.
That was Tōru’s work.
A fairly large ship had appeared. The horizon was already obscure, and it took a quick and well-trained eye to determine a ship’s origins. Tōru went to the telescope.
In the clear atmosphere of midsummer or midwinter, there would be an instant when a ship would move rudely in over the high threshold of the horizon; but in the mists of early summer such an appearance was a gradual separation from the inchoate. The horizon was like a long, white, soggy pillow.
The size of the black cargo ship seemed right for the 4,780-ton Tenrō-maru, and the stern bridge also corresponded to what the registry had told Tōru. The wake was white and clean, as was the bridge. There were three yellow derricks. What was the round red mark on the black funnels? Tōru strained his eyes. He made out the character for tai, “large,” in a red circle. Taishō Shipping, no mistake about it. All the while the ship kept up a speed of twelve and a half knots, and threatened to outrun the telescope. It was like a fly crossing a round window screen.