The Decay of the Angel ( Tennin Gosui?

) is a novel by Yukio Mishima and is the fourth and last in his Sea of Fertility tetralogy.Contents [hide] 1 Explanation of the title 2 Plot 2.1 Honda finds T ru (ch. 1-10) 2.2 The adoption (ch. 11-20) 2.3 Momoko (ch. 21-25) 2.4 The end (ch. 26-30) 3 Characters 4 Major themes 5 References to other works 6 References to actual history 7 Notes 8 References

[edit] Explanation of the title

In Buddhist scriptures, Devas ( tenbu) are mortal angels. The five signs of the decay of an angel are: The flowery crown withers, Sweat pours from the armpits, The robe is soiled, They lose self-awareness, or become dissatisfied with their station, and The body becomes fetid or ceases to give off light, or the eyelids tremble.

T ru, whose purity lies only in his malicious self-satisfaction, is a degenerate parody of the idealised Kiyoaki. [edit] Plot

A retired judge, Shigekuni Honda, adopts a teenage orphan, T ru Yasunaga, whom he believes to be a dead schoolfriend's third successive reincarnation. [edit] Honda finds T ru (ch. 1-10)

The novel opens on Saturday, 2 May 1970, with a seascape off the coast of the Izu Peninsula. T ru Yasunaga is an orphaned 16-year-old boy working in Shimizu as a signalman, identifying ships by telescope and notifying the offices at Shimizu harbour. He works a 24-hour shift every third day, from a high platform on the Komagoe shore, built on top of a strawberry farmer's water tank. Honda, walking along the shoreline, notices it in passing.

Later, that night, T ru is visited at his post by his friend Kinue, a mad girl who believes that she is incredibly beautiful and that all men are after her. Kinue tells him a long story about how a boy molested her on the bus. After midnight, at his house in Hong , Honda dreams about angels flying over the Miho Pine Grove, which he had visited that day.

At 9am, T ru's shift ends and he takes the bus home to his apartment. He has a bath, and we see that he has the same three moles as Kiyoaki. In Chapter 7, it is explained that Honda's wife Rie has died and that Keiko, a happily single lesbian, has become a platonic companion for him. They have gone travelling together to Europe, and hold canasta parties. Honda is preoccupied with his dream life and with the past, and has trouble with his housekeeper and maids. In her old age, Keiko is devoted to the study of Japanese culture, but

her knowledge is second-hand and superficial, and Honda calls it a "freezer full of vegetables".

They visit the Miho Pine Grove, a tourist-trap Honda already saw and disliked. They have their picture taken, sticking their heads through holes in a board painted to make them look like Jir ch and his wife ch , who were bosses of Shimizu Harbour in the 19th Century. They see the giant dying pine, where, according to Zeami's Robe of Feathers, an angel supposedly left her robe, and had to dance for the fisherman who stole it in order to get it back. They also go to Mio Shrine.

On the drive back home, they stop at the signal station Honda saw several days ago. He is strangely drawn to it, and they go inside to look around. Because T ru is only wearing an undershirt, Honda sees the moles on his side. Back in the car Honda announces his intention to adopt the boy. [edit] The adoption (ch. 11-20)

In Keiko's hotel room on Nihondaira, Honda explains to her the significance of the moles and tells her the whole story of Kiyoaki's two previous reincarnations. She reluctantly accepts

this story. Honda makes her promise to tell no-one, especially not T ru. On 10 August, T ru becomes aware that he is being investigated by detectives through a story of Kinue's, and later that month he is visited at home by the superintendent, who announces Honda's intention to adopt. By October, T ru has moved to the house in Hong and is receiving lessons in table manners and other social skills. Honda is eager to protect him from premature death and tries to inculcate the cynicism that Kiyoaki, Isao and Ying Chan lacked.

Three tutors are employed for T ru. In late November the literature tutor, Furusawa, takes him to a local coffee-house and tells him a political parable about the nature of suicide and authority. T ru suddenly feels dislike for him and engineers his dismissal. Relishing the feeling of power this gives him, he casts around for a more amusing victim. [edit] Momoko (ch. 21-25)

In late spring of 1972, two friends of Honda try to arrange a marriage between T ru and their daughter, Momoko Hamanaka. After dinner, Momoko shows T ru photo-albums in her room and he makes up his mind to hurt her. The two families go on holiday to Shimoda; it is there that Honda realises that T ru is secretly hostile to Momoko.

As the demure relationship progresses, T ru analyses Momoko and, while talking to her in the K rakuen Garden a year or so after their first meeting, he decides to make her jealous by acquiring a second girlfriend. At a go-go hall on his way home from school, he picks up a 25-year-old who calls herself "Nagisa" (Miss Brink) and they have sex a few days later. Nagisa gives him a medallion with her monogram on it. Momoko does not notice it until they go swimming together, and she gives the "N" an innocuous interpretation. It is only when Nagisa approaches T ru in the coffee-house that her jealousy is aroused.

Momoko throws the medallion into a canal and insists that T ru must leave Nagisa. T ru claims that he cannot do it alone, and dictates a letter for Momoko to send to Nagisa. In the letter, Momoko is made to lie that her family is in financial difficulties and that she needs to marry T ru for his money. Momoko hopes to inspire guilt in Nagisa. After the letter is delivered, T ru goes to Nagisa's apartment, snatches it from her, and takes it to Honda. The marriage is off.

Several months later, in early October 1973, Honda and T ru visit Yokohama, and at the harbourside have a conversation. T ru realises that Honda has guessed that the letter was fake,

and that he takes satisfaction in the guile his adopted son displays. T ru is furious at being seen through so easily, and throws his diary into the water. At the end of 1973 he finishes school, and is accepted into university. [edit] The end (ch. 26-30)

In the spring of 1974, T ru enters his majority and drops all pretences. He becomes violent with Honda and intimidates him into getting his way on everything, moving Kinue into a hut at the bottom of the garden, spending money freely and abusing the maids. On 3 September 1974, Honda is caught spying on couples in the park, and the incident makes the newspapers; T ru moves to have him declared senile.

On 20 December, T ru goes to a Christmas party at Keiko's. To his amazement, he is the only guest. Keiko reveals Honda's true motivations for adopting him, and cheerfully explains that if he does not die in 1975, he must be a fraud. T ru returns home and demands Kiyoaki's dream diary. On 28 December, T ru tries to commit suicide by drinking methanol, but it only blinds him, and he survives. Honda discovers that Keiko has betrayed him, and he breaks off contact with her. T ru loses all motivation and spends his

days with Kinue in her cottage. Honda eventually concludes that T ru was not, in fact, Kiyoaki's reincarnation.

At about this time, Honda is afflicted by pains which he does nothing about for months. On 22 July 1975, just before a hospital appointment, Honda goes to Gessh Temple for the first time since February 1914. Satoko, who is now the Abbess, admits him, but during their conversation he mentions Kiyoaki, and she claims that she never knew anyone of that name. Honda replies 'Perhaps then there has been no

here was ample reason to expect "The Decay of the Angel" to be a failure. There was a candid suspicion abroad in the West that Yukio Mishima's final work might appear no more than a gesture, a literary ritual as incomprehensible to us as his laststand and certainly grandstand act, committing suicide to stop the rush of history.

His death, a literary suicide if ever there was one, spoke volumes of fiction. The corpse of Socrates embodied philosophy, made physical his elaborate mental life;

Mishima's dagger, ripping open his abdomen, condensed into gore whole decades of novelistic obsession. "I did not yet understand," he wrote of his childhood in a very early work, "why from among Andersen's many fairy tales, only his 'RoseElf' threw deep shadows over my heart, only that beautiful youth who, while kissing the rose given him as a token by his sweetheart, was stabbed to death and decapitated by a villain with a big knife." This morbidly sweet self-revelation is part autobiography, part fiction, as the title of the volume from which it comes tells us, "Confessions of a Mask." It is the voice of a masked man who will deliberately confound art with life, weld them together, and paint their messy fusion with his blood.

His career was short. When he died in 1970 he was 45. Yet his collected works now being published in Japan will take up an edition of 36 volumes. Prolific, protean, uneven, bewildering, ambitious, unsatisfied with being Japan's foremost new novelist, he doubled his bid for immortality. At the deadline, the due date for submitting "The Decay of the Angel" to his publisher and the date set for his suicide, the final pages were punctiliously deposited in the hallway of his house as he left to round off literature with a sword. This most Western of contemporary Japanese novelists--Western in his absorption of our literary culture and in his reliance on the technical modes of Western form we call the novel-drove off with four young men, carrying a samurai sword and

knives, no guns, no explosives, to seize the general of Japan's Eastern army in his own headquarters and to oppose with masked voice and ritualized death the decay of Japan--that is, its Westernization.

One by one since then, all four volumes of his cycle of novels, "The Sea of Fertility," have appeared in English, translated by various hands in quick succession. "Cycle" is felicitous: the cycle of rebirth through karma that structures Hindu and Buddhist thought structures this tetralogy. Still, karma-reincarnation--samsara? For Westerners? Critics and readers coughed uneasily even while expressing awe at the author's genius. Mishima himself, however, who was exceedingly anxious to be read outside the East, did not believe in reincarnation any more than his audience will here, any more, for that matter, than Henry James, Emily Bront or Edgar Allan Poe believed in ghosts. The question for him, as for them and for us, was what one could do with a supernatural notion.

After the grandiloquent romanticism of "Spring Snow," a work of brilliant historical coloring and erotic introspection, each subsequent volume of "The Sea of Fertility" had seemed increasingly problematic. Would the cycle as a whole be a dud? Strident, schematic, sketchy, the series appeared to be moving toward monologue, catalogue and travelogue. Every

so often the unifying character--a man named Honda--kept charging off like a Japanese Quixote against the windmills of Eastern metapsychology. The trouble was not simply that reincarnation, which struck most critics as the overall theme, was of limited interest, but that its handling appeared a labor of lust, a contrivance for the presentation of four lives in four novels, four square pegs forced down a shapeless hole of speculation.

Who really cared whether Isao, the young rightwing fanatic in the second novel, was the reincarnation of Kiyoaki, the sensitive lover in the first? Or whether the melon-breasted lesbian Princess Ying Chan in the third was the reincarnation of both? Well, Honda cared, the omnipresent Observer. But Honda was everywhere portrayed as a man singularly "short on imagination." Here was the problem. For it is Honda's imagination that finally controls the meaning of "The Sea of Fertility," and he is a fussy legalistic metaphysical detective. His resum s of Hindu and Buddhist hairsplitting blocked the reader's path to enlightenment at every other fork in the plot.

Was this not intended as a realistic chronicle of modern Japan? But reincarnation is not realistic. How then had Mishima hoped to stitch together his Emperor's new clothes, these 60 years of social upheaval, with a thread so fragile? In

sum, how could this freewheeling cycle of novels pedaled by hocus-pocus, by characters who unwittingly reveal three moles under their armpits, signifying reincarnation, ever come to rest without artistic catastrophe?

But Yukio Mishima was, in life as in death, and in fiction especially, a master of gorgeous, and perverse surprises. His last fiction, "The Decay of the Angel," turns out to be, in its own right, a surpassingly chilling, subtle and original novel. Most amazingly, Mishima vindicates those questionable strategies of the earlier volumes, finally twisting the frayed threads of themes and the split hairs of metaphysics into a rope to hang the reader on.

Simply stated, the plot in the final volume turns upon the consequences of an adoption. Honda, nearing 80 now, childless, very rich and more perverse than ever, comes upon a youngster named Toru, a cool observer like himself, whom he believes to be still another reincarnation of his boyhood friend. He adopts the young man. Toru watches ships. Honda watches Toru. Then Toru watches Honda. And the trap closes.

For with Toru, his adopted son, Honda at life's end comes up against a demonic being. The English title originally announced for this last volume was "Five Signs of a God's

Decay." The substitution of "angel" for "god," mediating between religions East and West, neatly suggests for us Westerners the fall of the angel Lucifer. Toru's work in the world is to create a grand design of evil (as one by one the five signs mark his degeneration). Inhuman, and in all likelihood possessing traits which Mishima once hated in himself, he has that nearly limitless power over the human world, limited by himself alone, that Goethe noted of demoniac figures in his autobiography. ("Nemo contra Deum nisi Deus ipse.")

The pace of the novel is unhurried ("Why hurry?"), the drama is suspended through measured observation in the manner of the New Novel, and narrative progress is all but paralyzed at one point by a synoptic four-page anatomy of the five signs of an angel's decay. Some readers will give up before they are half through. They will be wholly mistaken. They will miss the malevolent pas de deux of the century. Two dragons, the old man and the youngster, equally alert, equally dispassionate; their struggle as they close for the kill, their curious weapons, their confidence and courtesy, their preternatural malice and sustained evil: "The Decay of the Angel" is a death rattle in prose.

It is not merely that Honda has at last miscalculated. Generation by generation, volume by volume, his obsession

has carried him closer to debilitation and corruption. In "Spring Snow," young Honda was a witness, the vicariously doomed observer of a doomed love affair. Nearing 40 in "Runaway Horse," he became Honda the Lawyer, a man of vicarious anxiety, defending a very young conspirator who plotted political assassination to reawaken Japan's samurai spirit. Approaching 60 in "The Temple of Dawn," Honda the Lawyer became Honda the Voyeur. "He stole a glance at Ying Chan's lap from above. Whereupon her knees that had been open closed like sensitive mimosa leaves." His lechery for ultimate knowledge drove him to gaze musingly at Indian shrines, porerationally over spiritual texts, and study a naked princess through a peephole at his perverse leisure.

The Voyeur, who has all along been the problem, turns out to be the solution. In "The Decay of the Angel" the author pushes the lancet of his art right into Honda's blistering consciousness. For Honda's peephole is not simply an aperture in a wall. His peephole is his mind. More, it is mind itself; it is the reader's mind; it is all possible historical and personal perception. And to this risky realization the last years of his life force Honda, and the reader, both resisting, right to the final page.

"Honda had by himself reached that honing of the senses achieved by few in this world, to live death from within. . . .

He had fallen into one trap when he had been born into this world, and there ought not to be another trap waiting at the end of the way. He must laugh at it all. . . . He must pretend to hope. . . . Without the crime and the guilt and the mortality he would not have had the courage for that climb." Nor would the reader.

With Honda, the reader has lived through four lifetimes of scandal. "He now saw that the scandal had given him his first dark prompting. . . . Suicide. . .blindness. . .illness. . .pregnancy, had all pointed to the same spot. It was true; they had frozen into a cluster and forced him up that burning road." We need know nothing at all about the author's death and life to be persuaded simply by the evil generated in the work, that this world of magnificent energy and monstrous dissipation is not the maundering of a myopic crank.

Nevertheless, that is what Mishima very likely did seem to many. In the man there was much that was bruised and repellent, and much too that was vulnerable and fascinating: his marvelous clowning and moody self-pity, his generosity with friends and aloofness from them, his narcissism and posturing, his homosexual contacts and family life, his weightlifting and body-building his erudition and artistic discipline, his treasured samurai sword and unarmed private

army, most of all his persistent will to integrate his art with action ("I want to make a poem of my life").

"When are you going to kill yourself?" a young student once demanded respectfully. But when the time came, Mishima's avowed motive--"to bring an end to misgovernment by admonishing authority even to the forfeiture of life" (this phrase is from a pamphlet quoted in "Runaway Horses")--that public motive was only part of the story. Mishima knew that, and wanted us to know it, for our knowledge was part of his literary strategy. Death had an erotic tinge for him. Obscenity was a ceremony, self-love became self- slaughter, and seduction turned into propaganda. In the Japanese context, Mishima's seppuku--or as we say, hara-kiri--had political and historical overtones. Yet he could hardly have expected anyone to miss the obscene halo he gave it throughout his work, the glow of "something extraordinarily bright and luxurious."

His eyes saw double, always. Even as it ends in catastrophe, "The Decay of the Angel" closes in luxury and brightness. "The Sea of Fertility," the name of a barren crater on the moon which Mishima chose as the title for his cycle, was no idle irony. The alert Honda's emptiness of memory at the close in an impasse of vision, it is an achievement because it is a surrender, it is fertile as well as barren, and barren as well as

fertile. The old Observer has moved slowly to this surrender, triumphing over his disoriented brain and debilitated flesh.

As in the case of other prophetic novelists, Mishima's best work is not always his neatest and most controlled. His universally admired "After the Banquet," for all its perfect literary manners, is not ultimately so generous as the tiny, diseased "The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea," nor as provocative as the overwritten and analytic "The Temple of the Golden Pavilion." Like these, his final novel, "The Decay of the Angel," has its pitfalls and its faults. They will be felt, most immediately perhaps in the style-- sharp, almost clawing. Though the translation is forceful, it is evident that he translator, the redoubtable Edward Seidensticker, must have been skating on layers of icy Japanese prose that presented him with unusually difficult challenges to English balance and good sense. For instance: "The view that all the benevolence and malevolence directed at him were based upon error brought a blinding of self-respect, and self-denial as the final conclusion to cynicism."

No matter. The cycle is completed and we can see now what Mishima did with his supernatural notion. Taken together, these four novels constitute an epic, the dynamism of whose characters and action is the classical, if perverse, amor fati. No foreknowledge "would keep them from flinging

themselves after their destinies." Mishima's epic, however, is not simply a chronicle of failed lives, historical decay and social disaster, nor is it merely a suicide note about spiritual rot. His theme--let us say it aloud--is not reincarnation. His subject is incarnation--in the Western sense, too. His theme (if anything so large as an epic must be said to have one) is the assumption by spirit of fleshy being, hence our engagement in human suffering and our final disengagement from it.

Yes, no doubt those annoying Buddhist and Hindu concepts catalogued for the reader, both in the earlier volumes and in "The Decay of the Angel," might have been better integrated into the moment-by-moment evolution of the drama. But the annoyance they caused there was fruitful. Honda's rational confidence in their significance, and the Western reader's esthetic annoyance at their insignificance, were both ultimately misplaced. When in the last chapter, Honda staggers to confront the last living representative of the lost age of romance, Satoko--once beloved of his friend Kiyoaki, but now the holy Abbess of the Gesshuji--he is overwhelmed. There the author burns holes in even his own assumptions, to say nothing of ours. In the very last pages the entire cycle destroys itself and then turns right around and regenerates itself by contemplating, with a tranquillity that is nothing short of ferocious, the questionable reality of its own long, long fiction.

Yukio Mishima's work and his way of death consciously enforce that antinomy: action in the service of an illusion.

Alan Friedman is author of "Hermaphrodeity" and "The Turn of the Novel."

The Decay of the Angel is the last book in Mishima s longest work, the tetralogy The Sea of Fertility. The book s title in Japanese is Tennin Gosui, which literally means Five Signs of the Decay of the Tennin: a tennin in Buddhist theology is a supernatural being roughly equivalent to a Christian angel, but vulnerable to death. The signs or omens of a tennin s decline, five in number, give the book its title.

Mishima s contention in The Decay of the Angel is that eternal beauty is the prize of those who cut time short , and that in order to achieve a beautiful life, one must die a beautiful and young death, before decay has set in. The main character, who has missed his chance to do this, meditates:

Some are all the same endowed with the faculty to cut time short at the pinnacle. I know it to be true, for I have seen examples with my own eyes. What power, poetry, bliss! To be able to cut it short, just as the white radiance of the pinnacle comes into view... Endless physical beauty. That is the special prerogative of those who cut time short. Just before the pinnacle when time must be cut short is the pinnacle of physical beauty. Clear, bright beauty, in the knowledge that the radiant white pinnacle lies ahead.

The meaning of the title is clear. Mishima himself was the angel threatened by decay. He knew that the death-signs were slowly becoming visible on his body, that the flesh was becoming corrupt. Mishima believed that writing could only do so much. The body had its own urgent language, one inexpressible in words. His seppuku was a carefullyorchestrated gathering of forces, sexual, aesthetic, political, literary, all converging on that same morning in November, with the aim of fixing beauty forever. Description As the dramatic climax of The Sea of Fertility, The Decay of the Angel brings together the dominant themes of the three previous novels: the meaning and decay of Japan's courtly tradition and samurai ideal; the essence and value of Buddhist philosophy and aesthetics; and, underlying all, Mishima's

apocal ptic vi ion of t modern era, which saw the dissol tion of the moral and cultural forces that throughout the ages nourished a people and a world.The time is the late 1960s. Honda, now an aged and wealthy man, discovers and adopts a si teen-year-old orphan, Toru, as his heir, identifying him with the tragic protagonists of the three previous novels, each of whom died at the age of twenty. Honda raises and educates the boy, yet watches him, waiting. From the Back Cover
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The Sea of Fertility (Hojo no umi) Yukio Mishima (1970). Mishima's final work, the tetralogy The Sea of Fertility, comprised of the volumes Spring Snow (Haru no yuki), Runaway Horses (Honda), The Temple of Dawn (Akatsuki no tera) and The Decay of the Angel (Tennin gosui), is universally considered his masterpiece. The story spans modern Japanese history from 1912 to the present (1970) and tells an intricate and philosophically complicated tale of sexual, spiritual and political passion, the bonds of loyalty and friendship, and the mystery of fate and reincarnation. The central character linking the four novels together is Honda, an unimpressive and middlebrow Everyman, who slowly becomes convinced that he is fated to witness the continuing rebirth and death of his beloved childhood friend, Kiyoaki. Though the four novels are organized thematically and structurally around the central beliefs of reincarnation---that human existence is inherently meaningful and human personality eternal---the final moments of the cycle's last novel obliterate all hope within a nihilism of cosmic proportion. Mishima often remarked that he would probably die when The Sea of Fertility was completed and on the day

he delivered the final installment to his publisher he committed a spectacular public suicide by ritual seppuku. The final novel, The Decay of the Angel, brings the superattenuated Honda together with Toru, a young orphan he takes to be the next incarnation of Kiyoaki/Isao/Ying Chan. Bored by aimless pleasure-seeking travels with Keiko, Honda returns to an increasingly westerni ed Japan. When he first sees Toru, he feels an instant connection with the youth; he takes him to be a mirror image of his own purposelessness. A glimpse of the three moles under Toru's arm further convinces Honda that his destiny has finally been revealed: to raise the multiplyincarnated soul as an adopted son. But Toru is a tragically bad choice for an heir. An emotionally empty and near-psychotic thug, Toru believes himself to be a nonhuman entity whose sole purpose is to wreak destruction on all around him. He delights in perversity, tormenting Momoko, the young woman Honda has selected as a suitable marriage prospect, insulting Keiko, and finally trying to both murder Honda and commit him to an insane asylum. Even more devastating, Toru turns out to break the profile of incarnation: despite his constellation of moles, Toru lives beyond the age of twenty. With the philosophical system it has taken a lifetime to construct threatened, Honda finally visits Satoko, now the revered Abbess of Gesshu Temple. Honda expects his audience with the highly enlightened Abbess to bring history full circle and restore meaning to his life before he dies from rapidly spreading cancer. But when he mentions the name of Kiyoaki Mitsugae, Satoko not only denies ever knowing such a person, she asks Honda how he can definitively be sure such a person ever existed. In a few words she not only destroys the

"truth" of transmigration but puts all of human existence in question. Led away by novice, the shaken Honda is left at the end of The Sea of Fertility in a da lingly beautiful, but utterly empty garden. Mishima's tetralogy is often compared to other time-spanning narrative cycles like Proust's Remembrance of Things Past or novels set against moments of historical significance like Stendahl's The Red and the Black. However, it differs from these in that history is neither a background nor symboli ed through the actions of characters. While various important periods in modern Japanese history figure in The Sea of Fertility, the work is more a meditation on history itself than a simplistic illustration of it. So too, despite the complicated discussions of staggeringly esoteric Buddhist doctrine, the work is less a commentary on such philosophies than a series of their enactments. Considered among the literary masterpieces of modern world literature, The Sea of Fertility cycle is also popular among readers, especially the first novel. Spring Snow has been made into a film (Haru no yuki with a theme song by Utada Hikaru, one of Japan's most popular singers. It was also awarded the pop culture honor of being seriali ed as a manga by Riyoko Ikeda, author of the classic, The Rose of Versailles. The Sea of Fertility is a tour de force of the major themes in Mishima's oeuvre: the opposition between contemplation and action, the carnal and the spiritual, the amorality of aestheticism, and the compelling and mystical beauty of death. As in all his work, oppositional forces or figures are juxtaposed or brought into seemingly irresolvable conflict. The title, the poetic but inapt name for a major feature of the Moon's geography, was explained by Mishima as an image of

meaning superimposed on emptiness. Though death and suicide are often explored in Mishima's works, they are always understood as inherently meaningful: as the ultimate signature of human will or experience. It is only in The Sea of Fertility that Mishima unequivocally endorses an absolute and total nihility. (show less
Yukio Mishima - The Decay of the Angel

The endings a pu le. Look away if you dont want to read about it. The set-up is this: at the end of Spring Snow, Kiyoake Matsugae walks with the last of his strength to the Gessh ji, a nunnery situated on a mountain near Obitok. His love Satoko is inside, and has taken orders. He wants her back, but she refuses to see him. Kiyoakis friend Honda accompanies him on this journey, which he makes several times, exacerbating the pneumonia which he knows will kill him. Sixty years and three novels later, Honda, his own death approaching, goes back to visit Satoko, by now abbess at the Gessh ji. She recognises him, but claims never to have heard of Kiyoaki. How to interpret this? Its part and then I woke up, but lets ignore that. The denial in the final pages isnt enough to completely overturn the preceding four novels (besides, Satoko may be lying, or making a point, or have lost her marbles , but it does make it unavoidable to ask: just what is going on here? A question Id have been quite happy to contemplate at the end of Runaway Horses, but which The Temple of Dawn made me lose interest in almost entirely. The Decay of the Angel is a big improvement on its predecessor, but it doesnt make up all the lost ground. In my entry on The Temple of Dawn, I wondered what it was that its protagonist Ying Chan added to the series. The Decay of the Angel has an answer, of sorts. Heres Keiko talking to T ru, whom Honda supposes is Ying Chan reincarnated:

Kiyoake Matsugae was caught by unpredictable love, Isao Ilumina by destiny, Ying Chan by the flesh. And you? By a baseless sense of being different, perhaps? (p. 206 She is making the same complaint about T ru that I made about Ying Chan: what are you here for? Of his predecessors he most closely resembles Isao, for his extraordinarily confident sense of self, but he entirely lacks the others purpose. He is frequently described as evil (Keikos contemptuous phrase is a legal sort of evil (p. 205 , but it is a very localised evil. Adopted by Honda, who spots his three moles on a chance visit to the shipping look-out post where he works in almost total isolation, T ru at first plays along with the plans for his education. He learns from Honda how to eat soup, how to speak in polite society. His first exercise of power is to have his tutor Furusawa dismissed for being a political radical, his second (a deliberate upping of the stakes to pull a similar trick on fiance Momoko. Finally he takes over Hondas house, beating the old man and filling all the servants positions with women he can sleep with. There is even a rota. T ru is a nasty piece of work, but there is an unreality about him which is worth considering. Over the course of The Sea of Fertility, Honda has become corrupted, not in his professional life as a lawyer, but in his personal life as a peeping tom. T ru becomes the portrait to Hondas Dorian Gray, his worst phase coming as a result of Hondas manipulations (which are hardly benign: he wants power over his protg, wants to crush his spirit, and to watch him die . Could the reincarnated protagonists all be reflections of the stages Honda goes through? Kiyoake, pure and innocent; Isao, pure and political; Ying Chan, lustful after sex; T ru, lustful after souls. A gradual and a total degradation. Posted by Chris at 9:13 PM Labels: books Decay of the Angel is the story of Honda's involvement with a young man who appears to be a fourth incarnation in this series. Toru Yasunaga is a boy of sixteen, brilliant but poor, who works in a signal station adjoining a large harbor. Honda discovers him one day when out walking with a lady friend; when the boy reaches up to remove something from a shelf, the birthmark is revealed. AFTER carefully investigating the boy's background, Honda decides to adopt him, convinced that this is his friend born still again. But lingering doubts remain: He is unable to ascertain the date of the princess's death, and fears that the boy may have been born too early. Toru enters Honda's household, and is reared into the Western manners of the modern Japanese. Honda tells him, "Good breeding means a familiarity with the Western way of doing things. We find the pure Japanese only in the slums and in the underworld." Yet Honda has a deeper motivation for this deliberate polishing of the boy's character: He hopes to avert fate, to save the boy from the tragic death which befell each of the other three incarnations of Kiyoaki, by immersing him in the banalities of polite society. In Honda's mind, the being that he has encountered in Kiyoaki and the rest is an angel of the Six Worlds of Desire. To save Toru from the angel's recurring fate he must steal its wings, for "the world does not approve of flying."

Toru, however, is no angel, but coldly and thoroughly evil. From the first moment in his new father's house, he begins scheming to destroy him and the others around him. Toru has himself an awareness of his own fate, but that awareness is demented by the fate itself--for he may be an angel, but a decaying one. Told the real reason for his adoption by a friend, Toru attempts suicide but succeeds only in blinding himself. WHEN HIS son lives past the destined age of twenty, Honda reali es that he must be a counterfeit. Old now, and infirm, he travels to the abbey where his friend's lover Satoko is now the abbess. She receives him warmly, but denies any knowledge of him or his friend Kiyoaki. Honda is crushed. The abbess suggests to him that perhaps his memory has faded somewhat, that Kiyoaki never indeed existed. "If there was no Kiyoaki, then there was no Isao," he says. "There was no Ying Chan, and who knows, perhaps there has been no I." The ephemerality of existence recurs throughout the novel. In the opening chapter, Toru ga es out at the harbor and watches a ship appear in the fog: The whole composition changed. With a rending of the whole pattern of being, a ship was received by the hori on. 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... We are too accustomed to the absurdity of existence. The loss of a universe is not worth taking seriously. Throughout the book, reality is twisted and torn by the unique perceptions of individuals. Toru marries the madwoman Kinue, who turns her own horrible ugliness into the delusion of stunning beauty; her own reality "became malleable, selective, a seeing of what was desirable and a rejection of everything else." But through it she attained "perfect happiness." Kinue's madness, and her assumed beauty, are equated with Toru's self-awareness and Honda's perception of unyielding fate. "Don't you suppose a beautiful, well-shaped girl has the best chance of becoming an angel?" she asks Toru. "Only a beautiful woman can really know..." With Honda's increasing reali ation that Toru is not the real reincarnation of Kiyoaki comes acceptance of the arbitrary nature of reality. "It was an accident, an utterly senseless accident, that Kiyoaki and Isao and Ying Chan had all appeared beside Honda... Eternity does not come into being because I think I exist," the old man reflects. Struck by the final challenge of Satoko's denial of Kiyoaki's existence, Honda sits in the abbey garden: There was no other sound. The garden was empty. He had come, thought Honda, to a place that had no memories, nothing. Eternity is only present in the emptiness and silence of total abandonment. MISHIMA'S NOVEL, like much Japanese fiction, is weak on plot and characteri ation. The story is contrived and unsatisfying; the characters are more agents who elaborate certain intellectual ideas than real people who interact in human fashion. Yet Mishima writes with a powerful insight of the problems of man's relationship to the world and to reality. The clarity of his perception is stunning, as the various characters of the book

unfold their complex metaphysical relationships. Long passages describing intense selfscrutiny hold the reader in an almost morbid fascination, until he must be relieved at the end to see Honda give up his vain attempts at understanding. Mishima said that he put everything he knew about life and art into The Sea of Fertility. Thus his suicide came not as a denial, but a culmination and fruition of a process of reali ation. "Suicide," he once said, "is art." For him it was by no means a retreat from the suffering of the human condition, but the logical and appropriate conclusion to life itself. The inevitable decay of manifest beauty and the impossibility of purity in a world dominated by economistic and humanistic values are themes that recur throughout Mishimas later novels, and especially in his major opus The Sea of Fertility. In the final volume of the tetralogy, The Decay of the Angel (Tennin Gosui, 1970 , a masterpiece of subdued beauty and utter bleakness, time has run its course, life forces have come to their ends, a world has been lost. The idealism, dedication and romanticism displayed by the protagonists of the first two volumes have been replaced with vapidity, scheming calculation and narcissism. The book is filled with lyrical meditations on finality and decay, such as the passage wherein the observer-protagonist Honda describes one of the sceneries from the Kitano picture scroll in a haunting soliloquy on the subject of the death of angels: The gold dust of all-powerful beauty and pleasure drifts down. Absolute freedom soaring in emptiness is torn away like a rending of flesh. The shadows gather. The light dies. Soft power drips and drips from the beautiful fingers. The fire flickers in the depths of flesh, the spirit is departing. The brightly checkered floor of the pavilion, the vermillion balustrades, have faded not at all. Relics of grandeur, they will be there when the angels are gone. Beneath shining hair beautiful nostrils are turned upward. The angels seem to be catching the first fore-scent of decay. Petals twisting beyond clouds, a ure decay coloring the sky, all pleasures of sight and spirit, all the joyous vastness of the universe, gone. The angel (tennin of The Sea of Fertility is of course the repeatedly reincarnated (or apparently reincarnated young protagonist of the four novels, but it is hard to escape the notion that their fate is supposed to mirror the history of modern Japan as Mishima perceived it (the third volume, The Temple of Dawn, appears to be an exception with its settings in Thailand and India, but the sensuousness and archetypically female traits of the protagonist Ying Chan may be linked to the notion of hedonism and national emasculation as characteristics of post-war Japan (trends actively promoted by the American occupational authorities, as shown by John Dower in his study Embracing Defeat , which crops up elsewhere in Mishimas writings . Thus the pathos apparent in the photograph described at the beginning of Spring Snow has by the end of The Decay of the Angel been replaced with an air of pathetic dissolution, as in the sceneries of shallow affluence observed by the aged Honda on his way from Tokyo to Nara: Waiting with several women and children at a bus stop was a pregnant woman, warm in a bold Western print. The faces wore a certain stagnation, as of tea leaves floating on the torrents of life. Beyond was a dusty tomato patch. The Daigo district was a clutter of all the dreary details of new construction, to be seen throughout Japan: raw building materials and blue-tiled roofs, television towers and power lines, Coca-Cola advertisements and drive-in snack bars. The historical pessimism and the theme of decaying beauty are not specific to Mishimas later period (usually considered to have begun with the publication of the short story Patriotism (Y koku in the summer of 1960 . In fact, it harks back to his very earliest works published

during the war years, such as the already mentioned Hanazakari no Mori, wherein we encounter passages such as the following: Now Beauty is a gorgeous, runaway horse. But there was a time when it was reined in and stood quivering in its tracks and neighing shrilly at the misty morning sky. Only then was the horse clean and pure, graceful beyond compare. Now severity has let go the reins; the horse stumbles, regains its footing, plunges headlong. It is no longer immaculate, mud cakes its flank. Yet there are times even now when a man will see the phantom of an immaculate white horse. It is likely of significance that the comparison of beauty to a white horse does not only relate to the concept of purity, but also brings to mind more specifically the horse of the emperor which, according to court traditions, has to be pure white. This imperial steed would reappear a quarter of a century later in Eirei no koe, bearing the man who is a god. Thus beauty is connected with purity, which in turn is linked to tradition and the perceived incarnation of the godhead, the numina now wrapped in the grey dusk of decay and disintegration, waiting for someone of sufficient purity to tear the dark clouds apart with a flashing sword. ----------

The Decay of the Angel

"We are too accustomed to the absurdity of existence. The loss of a universe is not worth taking seriously." The final part of the tetralogy, The Decay of the Angel, is a gelid, poisonous novel. There's a funereal air to Mishima's prose, with countless suggestions of exhaustion and disintegration. Moreso even than The Temple of Dawn, this is a novel of old age and death. And its conclusions about human nature are yet more cynical. "The ugliest of machines, very youthful, very exaggerated, romantic, self-advertising." Toru Yasunaga is young, brilliant, beatiful, and heartless, a sixteen year old "who was quite certain that he did not belong to this world." Toru is an orphan who, at 16, works as a signalman, watching ships enter a harbor. Living in a small room, Toru opens the novel with no needs or desires, only an unshakeable sense of his own difference, a sense that he is not, in fact, human, only "a hydrogen bomb equipped with consciousness." His only intimation of destiny comes when he is visited by an old man who seems, just at a glance, to understand him completely. "Honda was much too old to have solemn thoughts about the nature of human life. He was at an age when he could justify malicious games. Whatever the malice, death was near, to make amends. He was at an age when youth was a plaything, humanity a collection of clay dolls, an age when, putting ceremony to his own uses, he could turn honesty and sincerity into the play of the evening sky." Honda begins the novel aged 76, "old and stained with sin." His wife is dead, his sole companion is Keiko. Chancing upon Toru on a trip, he is struck by the three moles under the youth's arm - moles in the same place as those belonging to Ying-Chan, and Isao and Kiyoaki

before her. Certain he has found the next reincarnation, Honda adopts Toru as his heir, determined to educate him in a way that will prevent him from having to die at age twenty, like his predecessors. But even at their first meeting, Honda recogni es in Toru his own form of evil: self-awareness. Can Toru really dispel Honda's belief that angels, to be beautiful, must also be unknowing? Honda's program of educating Toru, his attempts to inculcate conformity and awareness, ends up empowering Toru beyond Honda's ability to control. Before long Toru is hitting Honda on the head with a poker and forcing his maids into sex. His first thought when he sees a picture of Momoko, a possible marriage candidate, is "The wait has been worth it. Here is someone worth injuring." The struggle for control escalates as Toru approaches his twentieth birthday, and Honda enters his eighties. The narrative here is honed to a knife-point, with no subplots and few secondary characters. It consists of little more than a mental duel between Honda and Toru. "Perhaps I was dreaming of another world. I felt as if a moment containing death had brushed past the two of us, high-school students in pale sweaters on a bridge. The sexual fullness of love suicide crossed my heart. I am not one to call for help, but if help were to come, I thought, it would come only with the end of consciousness. There would be joy in the rotting of consciousness there in the evening light." As Toru's courtship with Momoko progresses, he becomes obsessed with spiritually wounding her. As his plan - involving an older woman and a forged letter - progresses, Toru's diary comes to replace the narrative. In this section, Mishima has created a painfully accurate view of the kind of ubermensch self-delusion engaged in by solipsistic, intellectual teenagers, complete with unintentional hyperbole and pained calculation. Toru makes statements like "No rain has fallen to give me existence within the world" and "Probably at the end of unbearable pain I shall seek to become a god." while his cruelty to Momoko only increases. Despite this section's abundance of cliched sentiments, there are still passages of startling beauty that reveal Mishima's mastery of subtle description "There were autumn cicadas in the evening groves, and the roar of the subway came through the calls of the birds. A yellow leaf dangled from a spiderweb on a branch far out over the swamp, catching a divine light each time it revolved. It was as if a ti ny revolving door were floating in the heavens. We gazed at it in silence. I was asking what world would be opening beyond the dark gold each time it turned. Perhaps, as it revolved in the busy wind, it would give me a glimpse of the bustle in a miniature street beyond, shining through some tiny city in the air." These moments come like oases in a desert of sadism. As in The Temple of Dawn, everyone here is at once a monster and only all too human. The only characters even close to innocence are portrayed as unsympathetic victims: Momoko's confidence in her family and her love is seen in the same light as Toru's psychotic friend Kinue's delusional sense of her own beauty. The betrayals and implacable cruelty are portrayed with complete detachment. Consider the sad and absurd scene in which the 80-year-old Honda manages to make it back to the same public park where he used to spy on young couples having sex. Honda encounters one of his old "peeping partners" and succeeds in finding a trysting couple, but here, as everywhere else in the tetralogy, little is as it seems: the man they watch turns out to be an old man himself, and springs a knife on the girl, stabbing her in the leg before running off. Honda, too slow and weak to escape, is first accused of the crime, then has his voyeurism turned into tabloid

fodder. Written a certain way, this could be broad comedy, but Mishima keeps everything under precise control. Nor does the prose play up the absurdity of what happens: in Mishima's hands, the scene unfolds at a slow, resigned pace. The depredations of the post-war period aren't overlooked either: the text is littered with numerous dismissive references to factory goods and Coca-Cola cans, often littering the beaches of Japan. As for the "real Japan," its "intensely native elements" have become caricatured even to the Japanese characters themselves, and Honda feels disgust as Keiko develops a superficial interest in traditional dress and visiting shrines. And of course, the recurring theme of suicide is taken up: Honda rhapsodi es over those able to "cut the thread short" and kill themselves at the pinnacle of their youthful beauty, while Toru's language tutor Furusawa - whom the evil orphan later has dismissed - tells him a parable about a mouse that dreams of being a cat and commits suicide by jumping into a bowl of suds to make itself unappeti ing to real cats, dying to "establish itself." The insane and delusional are seen as having the only real freedom: Honda is even pleased at the notion that Kinue and Toru's child - and, legally, Honda's grandchild - will likely inherit its mother's insanity, which is at least something other than the reason that choked Honda's life. As for Toru, everything comes to a head when he is invited to dinner with Honda's old friend, Keiko. The earthy Keiko seems half angel herself, but if so, she is an angel of death: in The Temple of Dawn she destroyed any hope of Honda reali ing his passion for Ying-Chan, and here, too she plays the destroyer, although, in her climactic scene with Toru, she speaks with a stern moral authority. This is one of the great scenes of the tetralogy, a vision of cynical old age destroying the conceits of youth. Mishima demonstrates - perhaps even better than Crime and Punishment - how a sociopathic personality can be undone not by fear and guilt, but by its own sense of self-importance. In a strange way, Keiko is Honda's conscience, reminding him of truths he can't bear to face, performing right actions he himself is incapable of. "Probably he would make his visit as he was about to die. Satoko had been a person whom Kiyoaki must meet at the risk of his life; and a young and beautiful Kiyoaki calling out still to Honda forbade a meeting unless Honda, witness to the cruel impossibility, gambled his own life. He could meet her if he met death too." And then, it's over. Honda sets out one last time to see Kiyoaki's love Satoko, still alive, now the Abbess of Gesshu. In this scene, which is the heart of the novel, and indeed, of the tetralogy itself, the reader seems to have stepped back into the pages of Spring Snow, back to the Temple of Gesshu, where we last saw Satoko. Now, Honda undertakes the same pilgrimage Kiyoaki did some sixty years before. This is what readers of the tetralogy have been waiting for. Mishima feinted in this direction in The Temple of Dawn, where, during his meeting with Tadeshina, Honda considered a visit to the "still beautiful" Satoko. What will be the resolution to the mystery of Kiyoaki's transmigration? In this final pages of this novel, Mishima does something completely unprecedented. It's not my place to say what, but it does nothing less than invert the preceding 1400 pages of the tetralogy. It's tempting to view such a move as a mere gimmick, and I have to confess that I felt a kind of anger as Mishima shattered everything I'd come to believe about these characters. Mishima's statements about "cosmic nihilism" could do nothing to prepare me for

the ending of The Decay of the Angel, and it's possible to envision readers who fell in love with the characters of Spring Snow throwing this book across the room. That said, the ending, when viewed carefully, is not a cop-out, not a gimmick. It is completely believable, which only makes it the more devestating. Readers expecting a sturm und drang ending, or else one filled with reconciliations and revelations, won't see this coming. Honda, who has spent so much of his life analy ing Buddhism through words, finally experiences it. There is "cosmic nihilism," to be sure, but - as Honda should know from his texts - the world is recreated in the same moment it is destroyed. That this ending, with its stark power and beauty, comes at the end of a novel of bitterness, cruelty and disappointment only makes it the more affecting. And Satoko, who seemed on the verge of destruction in her last appearance, is given the last word. "That too is as it is in each heart."

Conclusions
"Was there any way to live honestly with Japan other than by rejecting everything, than by rejecting present-day Japan and the Japanese people? Was there no other way of living than this most difficult one, in which ultimately one murdered and then committed suicide?" -The Temple of Dawn I'm not going to say anything as ridiculous as that reading The Sea of Fertility made me understand Mishima's motives for the last day of his life. However, I'll just say that I believe the motivation lies less with notions of 'traditional Japan' than it does with an eccentric, highly personal view of the nature of right action. These novels examine the basis for action in numerous forms, through romance, through political resistance, through Buddhist philosophy, and through social manipulation, and seem to conclude that purity of action is what you make it: physically ugly characters like Kinue in The Decay of the Angel make themselves into paragons of beauty through sheer effort of will; and the seeming incongruity between the effete sensualist, Kiyoaki, and the austere fanatic, Isao, is resolved when it is seen that both construct their own ideal, defend it from the pressures of reality, and eventually give their life for it. Is it possible to kill yourself ironically? Does losing your life through decisive action confirm the purity of your motives, negating the troublesome fog of affectation that permeates most ideals? I believe Mishima would have liked to think so. The truth is this: he was getting old. Mishima was fanatically obsessed with youth, with the body, and physically trained himself to peak condition. The Sea of Fertility mirrors the obsession with the impossible, with the everretreating light of youth and beauty. Even Honda loves Ying-Chan not so much for herself as for what she represents to him. But no matter how much you work your muscles, they will, over time, begin to sag. So why not "cut the thread short" before the encroaching degradations of old age? Everyone that cannot do this, that chooses to live, is either a voyeur - the path of "self-awareness" - or a fool. If you're still alive you're a liar. Anyone over 20 is shown to be an inhibited, depraved hypocrite, or else a pawn of the former. The only saints are the dead and the insane.

The theme of these novels is far from the simplistic "Through Western influence and occupation, Japan has lost its past greatness and idealistic strength." In fact, the political content of the novels is mostly a screen for Mishima's personal issues. To the extent that notions of an irretrievable past do figure in the tetralogy, it is only in romances like The League of the Divine Wind, and even there, the elements of traditional culture are heavily subordinated to a fantasy of beautiful mass suicide. Mishima is perceptive enough to reali e that his romantici ations are just that. He recogni es that mourning the loss of the pure Japan is tending the flames of a fantasy, but neither can he live with the modern period's complete debasements. It would be simplistic and heavy-handed to conflate the spirit of Kiyoaki with the spirit of Japan itself, but it might be said that both seem, to Honda and Mishima alike, to be ever more beautiful in the light of memory, and ever more decayed in the present day. Commentators who fixate on kendo and seppuku are missing the point. From a technical standpoint, The Sea of Fertility's writing is masterly. There are a few needless digressions - the Buddhist history and terminology is the one element which just doesn't work, and seems awkwardly grafted on rather than integrated in any real way (you can see what Mishima was driving at with the 'Laws of Manu', but it's far too heavy-handed and discursive , but everything else flows. All four novels are filled with memorable, striking images. Spring Snow, in particular, is absolutely bursting with poetry. Mishima also has the ability to end novels in a fashion where the reader feels as if they've just been punched in the face. Although his style is frequently digressive and explanatory, when it comes to endings, he never lingers, never prattles, and often finishes squarely on a moment of sustained intensity - maximum climax, little denouement. His narrative strategy is usually to follow troubling developments with a "calm before the storm" period in which it seems the main line of action has been resolved, only to immediately explode with a sudden action or unpredicted revelation. Think how unbelievably well Mishima's range is demonstrated in, for example, Honda's letter to Isao in Runaway Horses, in which, over the course of several pages, Honda details a mature, reasoned response to the fanaticism of The League of the Divine Wind. He points out that the League wasn't the only group at the time trying to bend Japan to its beliefs, making mention of the Christians and other fringe elements whose similar passion Isao seems unmoved by. Then, Mishima immediately switches the narrative viewpoint to that of Isao, who interprets the letter as the cowardice of an old man unacquainted with either action or life. Think how deftly Mishima is able to instantly shift to Isao's reception of the letter and make each party seem believable and persuasive. Superb control. That the same man who wrote this scene, who could understand both characters' mindsets so perfectly, eventually decided to follow his young protagonist into political revolt and suicide, says a lot about Mishima's capacity for "self-awareness" - the very quality Honda despises in himself. Think about it: if you're serious enough to die for, ostensibly, the ideal of Japan - well, you're not kidding, are you? No one can accuse you of pretense (although there's always Ken aburo Oe's remark that Mishima's suicide was "a means of entertaining foreign readers."). It's unlikely that Mishima felt his siege could really alter the course of the nation - even his speech mentions returning Japan to its ideal and "dying in the process." Clearly, this was a suicide mission from the start. Thus, in the same way Spring Snow manages to be both a sweeping romance in the classical sense and an ingeniously subtle querying of the purity of such romances, so Mishima's suicide

is an attempt to cut away distance and self-awareness, to merge with the immediate. He could have won the Nobel Pri e if he hadn't done it. But which is really more worthwhile: fleeting recognition from a bunch of Swedish senecescents, or the achievement of complete unity between life and art, word and deed? Mishima was the Japanese Don Quixote, a man who stepped into his own illusion with eyes wide open. But even if you've heard of him, the chances are The Sea of Fertility was mentioned only in passing - as the book Mishima was working on before he died, for example. Or else, only Spring Snow was mentioned in any depth. When the literary masters of the twentieth century and their respective masterworks are discussed, Mishima's name is usually absent. Although only reading the books will truly convey it, I hope this essay has helped express what I believe: that The Sea of Fertility is one of the most underrated, criminally underknown works of the twentieth century. This isn't just "Japanese Literature" (whatever that is), it's on par with any of the great Modernist works from anywhere else. The reviews mention the Sea's Proustian scale, but it isn't simply the length that evokes Proust, it's the depth of character insight, the concern with the passage of time and recaptured moments. The Sea of Fertility is also a master key to Mishima's other work. From malevolent, almost Niet schean children (The Sailor Who Fell from Grace With the Sea) to forbidden young love (The Sound of Waves), oppressively beautiful temples and intensely introspective young men drawn towards evil (The Temple of the Golden Pavilion), a concern with homosexuality and bisexuality (Confessions of a Mask, Forbidden Colors) and, of course, ritual suicide as an act of supreme beauty and fidelity (Patriotism) - all of the motifs of Mishima's novels are reprised here and shot up in technicolour. It's no wonder he felt exhausted after finishing. With Mishima, unlike other writers who died young, there's no sense of "what could have been;" his ouevre was decisively finished. And, after the ending of The Decay of the Angel, what really is there left to write? But, I don't see it on anyone's list of the top 100 books of the 20th century, or even of all time. Why has Mishima been neglected? It's not for lack of interest - his life story and spectacular end completely eclipse the lives of even the most colorful of his European and American contemporaries (Hemingway seems quaint in comparison). Is it because the Buddhism turns people off? (I get the sense that a work with a basis in Christian symbolism would be embraced a lot more readily) In its concern with terrorism and religious fanaticism, it even takes on topical relevance. There's something here for everyone, and while it's tough going at times, that never turned anyone off trendier avant-garde works before. Perhaps it's the fourbook structure: some readers might not reali e that Spring Snow, Runaway Horses, The Temple of Dawn, and The Decay of the Angel are, in effect, a single novel (maybe a compendium edition would help). Which leads to...

Should You Just Read Spring Snow?

As of October 2005, Spring Snow has been made into a movie. Not having seen it yet, I can't comment, but I feel that out of all the volumes, Spring Snow is by far the most accessible. In

fact, many readers might not make it very far into Runaway Horses before giving up, finding it too different from what came before. I believe that The Sea of Fertility is far greater than just the sum of its parts, but it's up to the individual reader whether they'll go on or not. While I have no doubt that Spring Snow will make a successful film, I very much doubt that the entire tetralogy will be filmed. Not that it's unfilmable by any any stretch of the imagination (although Mishima depends for much of his effect on dense internal monologues and moments of reali ation that can feel contrived when visuali ed with concrete images); indeed, there is much great scenery (the Japanese countrside, the cities), much sumptuously described clothing, the backdrops of both World Wars, murder, romance, satire, sex, suicide, and scandal. One word: epic. It's a shame David Lean (or Akira Kurosawa) never got his hands on this material. Now that film series are an established artform rather than just a minefield of cash-in sequels, it's conceivable that, given the right personnel, The Sea of Fertility could be made into some of the best films ever. But it still probably won't happen. Why? Simply put, it's too dark. When going for the box office, there is a certain priority given to going for the widest possible appeal. And this tends to dictate against material that is too dark or troubling. The ending to The Sea of Fertility can't exactly be called unhappy, but it's not what most would think of as a conventional happy ending, either. The tone Mishima summons in the final pages is difficult to describe, much less bring to the screen, but those expecting Kiyoaki and Satoko to be somehow reunited would be in for a let down. Also, something like Runaway Horses is, despite its emphasis on character, far too political. It's difficult to imagine many people lauding a film in which the Japanese ultranationalist protagonist triumphantly commits suicide after murdering a man he identifies with capitalism and the West. If you continue reading The Sea of Fertility, Mishima will take you to darker places than are hinted at in Spring Snow. You will come to view the Spring Snow characters in a different light, but this is as Mishima intended, although it might seem frustrating. The final design is immensely more satisfying and awe-inspiring, but, simply put, Spring Snow can pass as a stand-alone novel even though the final page implicitly portends a sequel. I'm not saying that a superficial reading of Spring Snow alone couldn't be an enjoyable reading experience, but when The Sea of Fertility is allowed to unfold, so many of that novel's details and minor characters come to to the fore in unexpected ways. Not reading the entire tetralogy means that moments like the startling shock of recognition in Runaway Horses when the reader reali es that Isao's pheasant hunt has come to exactly mirror one of Kiyoaki's dreams in Spring Snow would be lost. Spring Snow itself is smarter than a conventional romance novel, and there are hints and subtexts that suggest all is not what it seems, or at least there are deeper layers of deception and rationali ation underlying the characters' motivations. But, again: it's more accessible than what follows. It's your choice. Do you want a diversion through one of the greatest romances of the

twentieth century...or all that, and one of the greatest examinations of the human dilemma in this or any century? Take your pick.