The Decay of the Angel

 The Decay of the Angel (1972)

Yukio Mishima

Perhaps, he sometimes thought, he was a hydrogen bomb equipped with consciousness. It was clear in any case that he was not a human being.

            On November 25^th, 1970, Yukio Mishima, after inking the final word of The Sea of Fertility tetralogy, drove with a select few members of his private army/boy’s club to the Japan’s Eastern Army Headquarters. There they kidnapped a general, bound him to a chair, and standing on a balcony before the gathered crowd Mishima delivered a speech about duty and honor and purity. The crowd, not understanding what they were witness to, jeered him and he retreated inside. As he unbuttoned his coat Mishima turned to one of his acolytes and said: “I don’t think they even heard me.” And then, in the grand culmination of his life and his art, he committed suicide by ritual disembowelment.

            The Decay of the Angel is much different from the cycle’s previous three novels. For starters, it’s a lot better than the previous two. Spring Snow and The Decay of the Angel were great, Runaway Horses and The Temple of Dawn were not. Here Mishima strips away all pretenses: he obliterates the complex ruminations on Buddhist and Hindu theology that weighed heavily on the previous books, forgoes appeals to beauty, and disregards philosophy. Instead his final vision is a black hole of loathing and disgust. Reading this book is as if someone infected with an exotic plague sat next to you on the bus and you watched, horrified, as one of his festering sores burst and oozed yellow pus down his neck.

            The novel is set in the late 1960s and Shigekuni Honda is now an old, old man. He is decrepit and alone. His life is frivolous, and he is given to repulsive, voyeuristic pleasures. Honda and his friend, Keiko, travel the world together, and in various different countries Keiko, a lesbian, picks up a young girl and has sex with her in a hotel room while Honda watches. They are a strange, hedonistic couple. Honda’s brand of hedonism is entirely vicarious. He doesn’t do anything himself; instead he just sits and patiently waits for other people to act. He’s a man so wrapped up in his own mind that he is incapable of action.

            Honda becomes convinced that his childhood friend Kiyoaki Matsugae’s soul has been reincarnated in a fourth vessel: the body of an orphaned ship-watcher named Toru Yasunaga. They are both voyeurs: Honda watches teenagers have sex in a park, Toru watches ships come in. He looks at their flags through a thirty-power telescope, records their comings and goings in a logbook, and phones the harbor when a ship comes in. Honda adopts the boy, sends him to school, educates him in “proper manners”, etc. Toru buys a new Mustang.

            Toru, however, is completely unlike his previous incarnations. He’s barely a pale shadow. Whereas Kiyoaki was a dreamer, Isao a fighter, and Ying Chan beautiful, vivacious (with big boobs and acquiescent, caramel-toned thighs) Toru is a nothing. He’s intelligent, and could probably get anything he wanted if he applied himself, but he is given to sadism, cruelty, and torture. He calculatedly destroys lives and relishes the destruction. Toru is a sort of spiritual hyena. He eats carrion, laps up the steaming blood from his emotional casualties, and moves on to the next target of opportunity.

            Honda has a plan in adopting Toru: he wants to spare him from the young death that has taken all his previous incarnations. By turning Toru in to a proper young man Honda hopes to remove the conflicts of purpose and identity that marked the brief, turbulent lives of Kiyoaki and Isao (and whatever conflicts ravaged Ying Chan and her compliant cantaloupe titties). He will make Toru fit in to society rather than run against it. He abandons this plan after enduring abuse and humiliation at Toru’s hands, and instead focuses on simply outliving Toru. Who knows why? To prove he was right?

            The significant difference between Toru and his predecessors is that they were all motivated by grand ideals (beauty for Kiyoaki, purity for Isao, and who knows whatever motivated chesty Ying Chan) but Toru only wants Honda’s money. Toru has never known the shocking excitement of an overwhelming passion. He’s vain, crass and greedy. When Keiko, Honda’s only friend, invites Toru over for a Christmas dinner she sets upon dismantling and vivisecting the orphan. She exposes Toru as a fraud, and declares him nothing more than a “mean, cunning little country boy of the sort we see sprawled all over the place” and that Toru’s death won’t be worth mourning. “There’s not a thing in you to make a person imagining your death feel that a shadow has come over the world,” she tells him. That’s a takedown for the ages. Afterwards Toru reads Kiyoaki’s dream diary, the yellowed catalog of all the long-dead boy’s sleeping visions. Toru burns the book and attempts suicide by drinking methanol. He lives, but is rendered blind. When asked about the book he states that burned it, because he “never dreams.” Toru, now without vision in so many different senses, retires to a granny flat behind Honda’s mansion. Honda then takes a pilgrimage to the convent where Kiyoaki’s one-time lover, Satoko, is now the Abbess. The visit is not what Honda planned and here the novel disintegrates into a sort of sad, golden light where there is no memory and no self. Honda challenges his sense of identity and Mishima challenges the very idea of his novel. I will state for the record that the “dissolving narrative” trick is one of my least favorite sorts of ending (see Gravity’s Rainbow) but here Mishima handles it with a warm, stately grace.

            The Decay of the Angel is infused throughout with a sense of revulsion towards age, decay, rot, senility and decrepitude. To Mishima the worst fate imaginable is a death by old age preceded by a interminable senescence, and he equates aging with some of the worst sins: self-absorbed hedonism, inactivity, perversion, evil. Central to Mishima’s philosophy is a sort of body/mind reckoning wherein the two must be reconciled and harmonized and the defeat of one means the defeat of the other. To create beauty one must be beautiful.

            I consider myself a pretty optimistic guy, or at least I try to be. My self-perception and the reality might be two entirely different things, however, but in general I would say that my world view is optimistic, and I long for a more free and equal future, and I believe that technology and information will make us and our society better, I try not to be an asshole needlessly, etc. I like to hope so. If I were an Albert Camus novel (in my dreams) I would be more The Plague and less The Stranger. Every once in a while, though, a book crosses my path that is so toxic with malice and full of contempt for the human race that I can’t help but feel my latent misanthropy bubbling to the surface. Journey to the End of the Night was like this, as was Mishima’s venomous The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea. I try to suppress it, and think positively, but scratch me a little and you’ll find at my core a deep loathing for my fellow man. It rises in moments of extreme emotional duress, like when I spend all of my waking/working hours cleaning up after morons and groveling before peasants, and when I get off of work I’m too tired to even read or think and my house reverberates with the soundtrack to BulletFucker 8, which my roommates are invariably playing loudly at three a.m., or when I have to talk to another person, and I look into their beady Neanderthal eyes and realize that my words are having zero impact, and I look at the poor, sad lump they’re pushing around in that stroller and I feel disgust and anger coagulating the blood inside my veins. So what I’m trying to say is that every day is a losing battle with my misanthropic urges. Imagine constantly vomiting. The other night I found myself at a local shopping center. I had to go to the Apple store, which is trial enough. This particular mall, Fashion Valley, is my least favorite place on Earth. It’s cartoonishly crass, vile, and so obviously not meant for people at my income level (extra low) that I can’t help but feel like an intruder into some elitist enclave. Fashion Valley is where the spawn of petro-theocracy princelings head to blow their blood money, or where a Marketing Consultant drives his trophy wife in his Maserati so she can shop at Prada and Hermes. I was only there briefly, very quickly concluding my business, but I couldn’t help but be overwhelmed by disgust for the human race and the ruins of our culture (if we ever had such a thing). I was consumed with the image of the mall burning to the ground, watching a great column of smoke and ash billowing in the night sky, and how beautiful that would be. Our species is hopeless, and if the time comes when we have to build enormous domes to protect ourselves from the acidic atmosphere and the cannibalistic, radioactive mutants, or we have to construct and embark on massive space vessels to colonize Mars or the planets of Epsilon Eridani, we will catastrophically fail. We won’t have the fortitude or the guts. We’re doomed.

            It’s been hard for me to write this. One, I was busy with a pretty accelerated community college class for losers and irredeemable jackoffs. That took up a lot of time, and my poor book blog fell by the wayside. It was an interesting and worthwhile class. I’m rarely challenged by anything, and I greatly appreciated the opportunity to be challenged, frustrated, and worked over. Two, I’m kind of running out of things to say about Yukio Mishima. Mishima was much different than most writers, a man of grand ideals and gestures, of morose self-loathing, hard facades, and artistic gestures. He was very much larger than life, when these days most writers are like Dave Eggers: smaller than life. I can’t pretend to be smart enough to understand any of this, and tackling a work of art as torrential, imperfect, hot-blooded and singular as The Sea of Fertility sometimes feels, when I am in one of my more self-pitying moods, like an endeavor far above my pay grade. I feel myself mentally prostrated, supplicating, in awe and wonderment. Shattered. Infected. This must be how the religious feel.