Follow the Author
Yukio Mishima
Follow
The Decay of the Angel: The Sea of Fertility, 4 Paperback – 14 April 1990
by Professor Yukio Mishima (Author), Edward G Seidensticker (Translator)
4.7 out of 5 stars 132 ratings
Edition: Reissue
See all formats and editions
Kindle
$14.99Read with Our Free App
Yukio Mishima's The Decay of the Angel is the final novel in his masterful tetralogy, The Sea of Fertility. It is the last installment of Shigekuni Honda's pursuit of the successive reincarnations of his childhood friend Kiyoaki Matsugae.
It is the late 1960s and Honda, now an aged and wealthy man, once more encounters a person he believes to be a reincarnation of his friend, Kiyoaki -- this time restored to life as a teenage orphan, Tōru. Adopting the boy as his heir, Honda quickly finds that Tōru is a force to be reckoned with. The final novel of this celebrated tetralogy weaves together the dominant themes of the previous three novels in the series: the decay of Japan's courtly tradition; the essence and value of Buddhist philosophy and aesthetics; and, underlying all, Mishima's apocalyptic vision of the modern era.
Read less
IS
Review
"Mesmerizing. . . . A saga of 20th-century Japan: a story of national decline that nonetheless proposes redemption through the endurance of a certain soul, forceful enough to be reborn ad infinitum."
--The Guardian (London)
"The end of [Mishima's] Sea of Fertility tetralogy. . . is surely one of the best final scenes in the history of the novel."
--David Mitchell, The New York Times Book Review
From the Back Cover
The dramatic climax of the SEA OF FERTILITY, bringing together the dominant themes of the three previous novels; the decay of Japan's courtly tradition and samurai ideal, and the essence and value of Buddhist philosophy.
About the Author
Yukio Mishima was born in Tokyo in 1925. He graduated from Tokyo Imperial University's School of Jurisprudence in 1947. His first published book, The Forest in Full Bloom, appeared in 1944 and he established himself as a major author with Confessions of a Mask (1949). From then until his death he continued to publish novels, short stories, and plays each year. His crowning achievement, The Sea of Fertility tetralogy--which contains the novels Spring Snow (1969), Runaway Horses (1969), The Temple of Dawn (1970), and The Decay of the Angel (1971)--is considered one of the definitive works of twentieth century Japanese fiction. In 1970, at the age of 45 and the day after completing the last novel in the Fertility series, Mishima committed seppuku (ritual suicide)--a spectacular death that attracted worldwide attention.
Read less
Product details
Publisher : Vintage; Reissue edition (14 April 1990)
Language : English
Paperback : 256 pages
Customer Reviews:
4.7 out of 5 stars 132 ratings
Yukio Mishima
Yukio Mishima (三島 由紀夫 Mishima Yukio?) is the pen name of Kimitake Hiraoka (平岡 公威 Hiraoka Kimitake?, January 14, 1925 – November 25, 1970), a Japanese author, poet, playwright, actor, and film director. Mishima is considered one of the most important Japanese authors of the 20th century. He was considered for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1968 but the award went to his fellow countryman Yasunari Kawabata. His works include the novels Confessions of a Mask and The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, and the autobiographical essay Sun and Steel. His avant-garde work displayed a blending of modern and traditional aesthetics that broke cultural boundaries, with a focus on sexuality, death, and political change. Mishima was active as a nationalist and founded his own right-wing militia. He is remembered for his ritual suicide by seppuku after a failed coup d'état attempt, known as the "Mishima Incident".
The Mishima Prize was established in 1988 to honor his life and works.
Bio from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Photo by Shirou Aoyama (http://www.bungakukan.or.jp/) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.
Read less
4.7 out of 5 stars
Top reviews from other countries
Patrick McParland
4.0 out of 5 stars A frustrating end to a great seriesReviewed in the United Kingdom on 9 April 2019
Verified Purchase
Really enjoyed reading all of these and although was unexpected maybe it was fitting.
Report abuse
Amazon Customer
5.0 out of 5 stars ... the books in the sea of fertility series are amazing.Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 20 February 2018
Verified Purchase
all of the books in the sea of fertility series are amazing.
Report abuse
Jim W.-
5.0 out of 5 stars OkReviewed in the United Kingdom on 21 June 2018
Verified Purchase
I’m very satisfied
Report abuse
Sahil Sood
3.0 out of 5 stars The Decay Of The AngelReviewed in India on 22 September 2020
Verified Purchase
Bleak and dispiriting, the final installment in "The Sea of Fertility", set in the late 1960s of the post-war Japan, which is quick and eager to absorb the rising influx of Western ideals, is about decay of purity and nature of evil. Honda, now rich and dissolute, is besieged by old age and lassitude. Driven by a nihilistic impulse to witness destruction of his physical and spiritual ideal of beauty, he adopts the handsome sixteen-year-old orphan Tōru, identifying him with the two previous reincarnations of his childhood friend Kiyoaki, each of whom died at the age of twenty. He raises the boy as his own child, tending to his every little wish and need, only waiting for him to die. “The Decay of the Angel” reads like an elegy for a bygone era, the cultural spirit of the pre-war Japan that has no physical remnants and which can now only be re-constructed through dreams and memories of its few living descendants.
One person found this helpfulReport abuse
Marko
5.0 out of 5 stars Nice bookReviewed in Germany on 11 December 2021
Verified Purchase
I bought it as a birthday gift for my friend and she said, she loves the book cause it has such a good story :) i just can recommend the book only thing i want the mention is that i had to order the book twice cause the first order didnt arriver but all in all the book is good and thats the only thing that counts
Report abuse
===
The Decay of the Angel
(The Sea of Fertility #4)
by
Yukio Mishima,
Edward G. Seidensticker (Translator)
4.13 · Rating details · 3,781 ratings · 310 reviews
The dramatic climax of The Sea of Fertility tetraology takes place in the late 1960s. Honda, now an aged and wealthy man, discovers and adopts a sixteen-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.
GET A COPYKobo
Online Stores ▾
Book Links ▾
Download eBook
Paperback, Reprint, 236 pages
Published January 2nd 2001 by Vintage (first published November 1970)
Original Title
天人五衰 [Tennin Gosui]
ISBN
009928457X (ISBN13: 9780099284574)
Edition Language
English
Series
The Sea of Fertility #4
Characters
Shigekuni Honda
Other Editions (63)
All Editions | Add a New Edition | Combine...Less DetailEdit Details
Jul 06, 2019Ahmad Sharabiani rated it really liked it · review of another edition
Shelves: fiction, culture, japan, japanese-literature, 20th-century
Tennin Gosui = The Decay of the Angel (The Sea of Fertility #4), Yukio Mishima
The Decay of the Angel is a novel by Yukio Mishima and is the fourth and last in his Sea of Fertility tetra-logy. It is the last installment of Shigekuni Honda’s pursuit of the successive reincarnations of his childhood friend Kiyoaki Matsugae. A retired judge, Shigekuni Honda, adopts a teenage orphan, Tōru Yasunaga, whom he believes to be a dead school friend's third successive reincarnation. ...
تاریخ نخستین خوانش: سال1999میلادی
عنوان: زوال فرشته کتاب چهارم از سری دریای باروری؛ نویسنده: یوکیو میشیما؛ مترجم: غلامحسین سالمی؛ تهران، کتاب مهناز، سال1377؛ در373ص؛ شابک ایکس-964553805؛ چاپ دیگر: تهران، نگاه، چاپ سوم سال1397؛ در392ص؛ شابک9786003760226؛ موضوع: داستانهای نویسندگان ژاپن - سده20م
داستان این کتاب پیرامون زندگی قاضی بازنشسته ای به نام «هوندا» است، که دوران بازنشستگی خود را، با خوانش و سفر میگذراند؛ موضوع مورد علاقه ی او فرشتگان هستند؛ او در یکی از سفرهایش، با پسر یتیمی به نام «تورو» آشنا میگردد، و او را به فرزند خواندگی خویش میپذیرد؛ کتاب «زوال فرشته»، آخرین اثر «یوکیو میشیما» بوده است، که تنها چند ماه پیش از خودکشی او، به روش «سامورایی (هاراگیری)»، منتشر شد
نقل نمونه متن: («تورو» در همان مدرسه ی مقدماتی ای قبول شد، که خود برگزیده بود؛ در سال دوم زندگی اش با «هوندا»، کسی برای پیرمرد پیغامی آورد؛ شخص معتبر و بانفوذی، که دختری دَمِ بخت داشت، فکر کرده بود که شاید پسر جوان، دخترش را برای زناشویی برگزیند؛ اگرچه «تورو» به سن قانونی رسیده بود، ولی هنوز هیجده سال بیشتر نداشت؛ «هوندا» از این پیشنهاد خندید؛ طرف مقابل مشتاق این وصلت بود، و پیشنهادش را توسط واسطه ی دیگری عنوان کرد؛ از آنجاییکه واسطه ی دوم، در دنیای حقوق و قضا، آدمی متشخص، و از دوستان «هوندا» به شمار میآمد، پیرمرد، نمیتوانست بدون گفتگو با پسرخوانده اش، به او جواب رد بدهد؛ «هوندا» آرزویی در دل میپروراند، «عروسی جوان»، که در مرگ شوهر بیست و یک ساله اش، عزادار میشد، و جامه ی سیاه بر تن میکرد؛ جلوه ای از فاجعه ای زیبا! پس آنگاه «هوندا» یکبار دیگر، با تبلور ناب زیبایی، رودررو میشد.؛ این رؤیا با شخصیتِ اجتماعی، و تربیت او همخوانی نداشت؛ تازه اگر این رؤیا به حقیقت نمیپیوست، و بُحرانی پیش نمیآمد، «هوندا» میبایست خود را به زحمت میانداخت، تا یک زندگی طولانی و عاری از زیبایی را، برای «تورو» تدارک ببیند؛ چیزی که پیرمرد از آن میترسید، همانی بود، که آرزویش را داشت، و آن چیزی که آرزو میکرد، همان چیزی بود، که او را به وحشت میانداخت.)؛ پایان نقل؛
تاریخ بهنگام رسانی 07/05/1399هجری خورشیدی؛ 19/01/1401هجری خورشیدی؛ ا. شربیانی (less)
flag156 likes · Like · comment · see review
Sep 11, 2019Jim Fonseca rated it really liked it
Shelves: japanese-authors
This is the fourth and final volume in Mishima’s tetralogy, The Sea of Fertility.
Class divisions and changing values in Japan due to western influence are major themes. Another theme all the way through the series is reincarnation. In Decay of the Angel, the reincarnated spirit is an orphan. He has a job helping ships in port navigate to their docks. Obviously it was pre-ordained that Honda finds him since he encounters him by simply wandering around the port.
Honda, the lawyer, who is another main character through the four volumes. He is now 76 years old but he adopts the young boy. He does this even though, if the pattern holds, he knows the boy will die at age 20. A sub-theme tied in with the reincarnation is how Honda, originally an associate justice in the national courts, is initially all into rationalism and logic. But when he meets the young boy gang leader in volume two, Runaway Horses, he notices three moles on his body identical to his deceased friend from years ago. Despite his rationality, he comes to believe the young boy is his old friend reincarnated.
But unlike in the other volumes, the boy in The Decay of the Angel sets out to do evil – thus the ‘decay’ in the title. “I vow it: that when I am twenty I will cast Father into hell. I must start making plans.” The boy is attached to an ugly, obese, mentally ill young woman whom he eventually marries. His evil starts out small, getting his tutor dismissed, but graduates to where he terrorizes his adoptive father by striking him with a poker. He makes his four maids his mistresses.
Although you can pick up most of the back story in context, it really helps to have to have read the whole series in sequence. For those who want to read this book but have not read the preceding volumes, here are brief summaries for each book:
Spoiler for the first volume, Spring Snow:
(view spoiler)
Spoiler for the second volume, Runaway Horses: (view spoiler)
Spoiler for third volume, The Temple of Dawn. (view spoiler)
Mishima (1925-1970) was a classic Japanese author. He committed ritual suicide the same day he delivered this book to his publisher. His best-known work is this tetralogy, The Sea of Fertility. I thought the whole series excellent, with the first volume, Spring Snow, the best.
Photo of Japanese a port in the 1930's from i.pinimg.com/originals
The author from theguardian.com/books
(less)
flag133 likes · Like · 10 comments · see review
Jun 15, 2020Adam Dalva rated it really liked it · review of another edition
A strange, swift landing to the Sea of Fertility tetralogy, and a book that can't help but be altered by the fact that Mishima's strange, ritualistic suicide occurred the day after he handed it in, on the date on the last page of the mansucript. There is a lot to like in this volume, which cleverly inverts the reincarnations of Kiyoaki by questioning whether this particular rendition (a sociopathic ship watcher named Tōru Yasunaga, a character w/ virtually no inner life) is a complex imposter. The middle of the book, Toru's journal, is an interesting return to the first book, set in 1970s Japan, as the lead, Honda, battles old age. But there are shortcomings here: the book moves too fast, accepting its strangeness as a matter of course, and cutting short the intriguing push and pull between Honda and his adopted son, who have so much in common. It's almost as if Mishima himself is in dread of his aged narrator, whose gradual disintegration is treated rather grotesquely. The ending, however, is excellent: something we've waited for for 4 books...for 60 years of plot.
As an overall project, The Sea of Fertility is fascinating to consider: flawed, weird, autobiographical, ambitious. I enjoyed my journey through its lush, barren pages. (less)
flag75 likes · Like · 1 comment · see review
Feb 13, 2018William2 rated it liked it · review of another edition
Shelves: 20-ce, translation, fiction, japan
What’s this one about, do you suppose? There is in all translations of Mishima’s work I have read—by a host of translators—a fundamental woodeness or clunkiness of description, especially in his philosophical flights. In Japan he is often referred to as a stylist with a penchant for archaic Japanese word forms. So it could be that Mishima’s use of archaisms means he doesn’t translate well into English. I don’t know. But this fourth volume of The Sea of Fertility tetralogy seems to me in the first half worst of the batch. One has no idea why the characters are alternately so goddamned indifferent then so cruel. The novel’s seems to be all surface. Why is there mention of evil out of the blue like that? What’s evil? I'd like to be shown Tōru's evil and not simply be told about it. It would do wonders for the suspense. Yet the motivations are often completely opaque. Except at the end, there is little or no insight into character. Tōru is without parentage. No past for him is ever given. He lives alone without friends, motivated like most Mishima protagonists, entirely by a mix of naïveté and cryptic self inquiry. The day after Mishima finished this MS he committed suicide. He was 45. Maybe that was his only alternative. He certainly makes clear here, as in all his books to some degree, his absolute detestation of old age. The book seems to me a farrago, a pastiche whose fragments are not without interest, but a novel they do not make. (less)
flag57 likes · Like · 6 comments · see review
Apr 03, 2012Matthew rated it it was amazing
To be as honest as possible, I must run the risk of not making any sense: this is simultaneously my favorite and least favorite book in the series. Parts of it were hugely gorgeous -- the prose was pure and had an almost cleansing aura to it, and I felt alive while reading it. However, I wanted to strangle Mishima for writing some other parts that I felt were not only uncalled for but intentionally annoying to read (I'm looking at you, several descriptions of harbor boats). I know that Seidensticker is apparently revered as some sort of translator god in the Japanese world, but I couldn't help but feel he edited it sentence by sentence with his mindset alternating between "How do I make this as beautiful as possible?" with "How can I make this as tedious as possible?"
Where has Honda come to, then? He was first the friend of Kiyoaki Matsugae, then the lawyer of Isao Iinuma, and finally the friend/voyeur of Ying Chan. Now he's the guardian of Toru, a diabolical young teenager who in wanting to see himself as superior to everyone else decides to be evil. Honda's journey has been as remarkable as it has been beautiful, and according to him that may be for the better. It would appear that beauty is perhaps one of the most undefinable things in the universe. It is pain, fragility, distance, youth, and above all death. When you put it together, it seems to be that it becomes the "art of suicide" - to kill yourself before you really grow up. Beauty, then, becomes nothing more than the physicality of your being, your existence, as an independent entity - a transcendental adolescence, and by killing yourself at that stage, your life becomes synonymous with that beauty. Hell, if that was Kiyoaki's objective, I think he did a bang-up good job.
The last twenty pages are worth reading it all again for, though. It makes me want to go back and read the first one again, if only that. There's a throwback to a scene from the end of Spring Snow, where Honda, at wits end, decides to visit someone he hasn't seen in sixty years. The discussion that ensues chills me.
"Memory is like a phantom mirror. It sometimes shows things too distant to be seen, and sometimes it shows them as if they were here."
Has this all, then, been but a dream? No, it wasn't all just a dream. That would be silly. Mishima isn't some nutjob with a pen -- well, okay, maybe he was... but let's be honest with ourselves here. Mishima might actually be testing us with this one. He wasn't a Buddhist, but there's definitely something weird going on in the last installment, and the writing itself betrays a sort of unsettling of his own philosophy. There might be a good reason why Mishima chose to stage his coup right after finishing this final piece. Perhaps it is not Honda but Mishima who arrives with the reader where there is no memory -- to the place where the noontide sun of summer flows over an empty garden. (less)
flag43 likes · Like · 1 comment · see review
Oct 11, 2020P.E. rated it really liked it · review of another edition
Shelves: diary, characters, chemins, decadent, psychology, the-media, vivid-dream, absurd, crime, favorites
WISHFUL THINKING
1970, Honda is now 80. He meets Toru, a young signalman he immediately surmises to be a reincarnation of Ying Chan, Isao and his deceased friend Kiyoaki. A contemplative orphan, Toru also looks like Honda in terms of personality. Honda decides to adopt him, paving the way for a merciless strife for domination between the two men...
Koishikawa Kōraku-en, Tokyo
MAJOR THEMES:
⬤ Universal decay.
Be it trash, rotten vegetables, old flesh, everything comes down to be mere matter. Even angels rot. Everything is germinating, maggoty, eaten by corruption. Decay and corruption lie at the very heart of life. Life itself is corruption.
⬤ Futility of politics, pointlessness of time and absurdity of being.
In the Sea of Fertility cycle, Nowhere else than in The Decay of the Angel are references to politics and contemporary events in Japan that scarce in the narrative.
The main reference to foreign affairs is one about the US military operations in Cambodia, which rings quite ironically, after reading The Temple of Dawn, taking place as the Japanese imperial army fights in the South-Eastern Asia area, a mere 25 years before.
⬤ Toru, a living embodiment of non-being.
⬤ Unescapable vulgarity, derision and debasement in Westernized Japan.
⬤ Set-ups and cover-ups.
- Toru has his fiancée working to her own demise, dictating her a letter exposing degrading motives behind her union with Toru : in this letter, her father is said to have worked this scheme of marrying his daughter to Toru because he is after Honda's money.
- This story also displays crual plots designed by Honda and Toru against one another. Toru even resorts to gaslighting and blackmail... This sadistic and masochistic backgroung is not a little reminiscent of Spring Snow, the first book in the Sea of Fertility series, of Dangerous Liaisons or of The Seducer's Diary.
⬤ Obsessing over meaning: the ceaseless need to construe reality.
Koishikawa Kōraku-en, Tokyo
SIMILAR WORKS:
Painstaking deconstruction and analysis of life, the fixation with decay:
The Simulacra
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Martian Time-Slip
Nausea
Non-being and unnaturalness:
Against Nature
No Longer Human
Mephisto
The Train
Epistolary novels, diaries and masquerades :
The Seducer's Diary
Dangerous Liaisons
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Mind tricks from other adept writers :
Black Water Lilies
Mind of Winter
Beauty and finiteness :
Urbex : 50 lieux secrets et abandonnés en France
Ruines et vestiges
SOUNDTRACK :
The Unforgiven - Metallica
〜 〜 〜 〜 〜 〜 〜
VŒU PIEUX
1970, Honda a maintenant quatre-vingt ans. Il fait la rencontre de Toru, un jeune observateur de navires et orphelin qui lui paraît immédiatement être la réincarnation de Ying Chan, d'Isao, et de son ami Kiyoaki. Contemplatif, il lui apparaît aussitôt qu'il est comme la copie crachée de sa propre personnalité. Il décide de l'adopter. S'engage alors une relation de domination et de surenchère à la cruauté entre les deux hommes, dont chacun n'existe qu'autant qu'il nie l'autre.
Koishikawa Kōraku-en, Tokyo
----
LES THÈMES :
⬤ Le pourrissement universel.
Tout se réduit ici à de la matière : déchets, pourriture, végétaux en décomposition et vieilles chairs plus particulièrement. Même les anges pourrissent. Tout est germinatif, véreux, mangé de corruption. Le pourrissement et la corruption existent au sein même de la vie. La vie même est corruption.
- Les personnages Honda et Keiko, vieillards, ont un dégoût pour la vieillesse affiché qu'accompagne une jalousie de la jeunesse. Ils s'appuient l'un sur l'autre pour tromper leur ennui et leur déclin.
⬤ Vanité de la politique, du temps et de l'être.
Il me semble que nulle part ailleurs que dans L'ange en décomposition la politique et les évènements contemporains sont si peu présents dans la narration.
La principale référence est celles des opérations armées des États-Unis au Cambodge. Ce qui, à peine 25 ans après Le Temple de l'aube : La mer de la fertilité III et les opérations militaires de l'armée impériale japonaise en Asie sud-orientale... laisse un arrière-goût amer d'éternel retour.
⬤ Toru et le non-être, Toru et l'anti-nature, Toru, contradiction vivante de la vie.
- Lorsque Honda rencontre Toru, il est presque renversé par la ressemblance de sa personnalité avec la sienne.
Toru témoigne un mépris infini pour le monde. Il pratique une forme de solipsisme ultra-analytique très proche de celui de Honda, à la différence que pour Toru, il n'y a pas d'arrière-plan métaphysique ou mystique, seulement une immensité indigo indicible... Tous deux sont des voyeurs pratiquement dépourvus de volonté et qui mènent une vie sans enjeu, sans marées, "sans poésie et sans félicité". Du reste, Honda décèle le mal absolu en Toru et le reconnaît pour sien.
- Toru la conscience exacerbée, Kinué l'enfermement en soi ?
Dans les deux cas, il y a refus du monde. Négation du monde extérieur, confondu avec le monde intérieur.
⬤ Vulgarité, affreuse dérision et contrefaçon des idéaux.
- Le sanctuaire de Mio, visité par Honda et son amie Keiko, est devenu un parc d'attraction bruyant.
- Toru, incarnation dérisoire de la conscience Alaya ?
- Toru détruit le journal de Kiyoaki. Il détruit et salit tout ce que Honda a pu rassembler.
⬤ Montages et mises en scènes.
- Toru fait collaborer sa fiancée Momoko à un stratagème qui va la perdre : il lui dicte une lettre qui avilit les motifs derrière son union avec Toru : il ne serait question que de faire un bon parti pour son père désargenté.
- Mises en scènes cruelles de Honda et de Toru l'un contre l'autre. "Gaslighting", chantage... Chez les deux personnages, masochisme et sadisme. Qui ne sont pas sans faire penser à Neige de Printemps, aux Liaisons dangereuses ou au Journal du séducteur.
⬤ La manie d'interpréter.
- Arrivé à un point de l'histoire, la vieille amie Keiko s'entiche de culture japonaise traditionnelle et entend tout de travers, du moins l'interprète, erronément, à sa façon. Ce qui ne manque pas de faire doucement sourire Honda. C'est un thème qui revient obstinément. Qui est exempt de ces biais, de cette manière d'envisager le monde par le petit bout de la lorgnette, ou bien en s'affranchissant de ce qui vient contre notre façon de voir ?
- Sur la fin de ses jours, Honda connaît une invasion onirique. Dans le monde éveillé comme en sommeil, tout lui sert d'aliment à théorie, tout lui sert de signe, est perçu comme signal. Au point de ne plus bien faire la différence entre le signe, le signifiant et le signifié. Bref, entre le monde et ce qu'il veut bien en voir.
Toru, lui, est visité par des visions inquiétantes qui le visitent sans prévenir. On dirait un peu les apparitions inquiétantes de Raskolnikov dans l'excellent Crime et Châtiment...
- Mishima lui-même, maître du grand montage, induit le lecteur en erreur en l'incitant à faire des rapprochements entre des évènements peut-être fortuits. En fin de compte, jusqu'à la prose de ce livre est désossée par ces rapprochements, ces perceptions gratuites mais toujours interprétées de la manière la plus concluante possible. Honda clôt le cycle en retournant à Gesshuji, où Satoko a passé sa vie comme abbesse.
Il est accueilli par l'image du néant.
Koishikawa Kōraku-en, Tokyo
MON AVIS :
A l'origine, je comptais terminer ce cycle en hiver, pour avoir une belle régularité dans la lecture de ses quatre livres : Neige de printemps en mai, Chevaux échappés en juillet, Le Temple de l'Aube en septembre et puis L'ange en décomposition pour cet hiver. Et puis je me suis dit : bah, à quoi bon patienter. J'en suis à un stade où clairement ce sont les lectures qui battent la mesure de ma vie, et ce cycle de La mer de la fertilité a donné forme à cette étrange année 2020, au moins autant que les évènements de politique intérieure et internationale.
Bref, je l'ai proprement dévalé, et n'était le travail, je l'aurais lu en une traite.
L'évolution de la personnalité de Honda m'a vraiment frappé à partir du Temple de l'Aube. Ici, impossible de ne pas garder en vue la date de remise du manuscrit, qui coïncide avec celle du suicide de Mishima. Il y a fort à parier que l'auteur y a mis beaucoup de sa conception du monde et de sa personne tout simplement. Je suis pris à la fois de sympathie et saisi par la vie étrange de cet homme. Cette étrangeté n'est pas la mienne, mais elle me permet de mieux remarquer combien étranges sont les vies que l'on mène. De combien de préconceptions et de raccourcis, par quels détours et quels rapprochements hasardeux, de quelle incohérence et de quelles contradictions nous nourrissons ce qu'il faut bien appeler sa vision du monde.
----
ŒUVRES VOISINES :
Décomposition des mécanismes de la vie et morbidité :
Simulacres
Blade Runner : Les androïdes rêvent-ils de moutons électriques ?
Glissement de temps sur Mars
La Nausée
Le non-être et l'anti-nature :
À rebours
La Déchéance d'un homme
Mephisto
Le Train
Jeux de regards et de miroir, tenue d'un journal ; pouvoir extraordinaire de simulation des mots. Montage épistolaire :
Le journal du séducteur
Les Liaisons dangereuses
L'Insoutenable légèreté de l'être
Savants montages de la part d'autres écrivains :
Les Nymphéas noirs
Esprit d'hiver
Beauté et finitude :
Urbex : 50 lieux secrets et abandonnés en France
Ruines et vestiges
THÈME MUSICAL :
The Unforgiven - Metallica (less)
flag36 likes · Like · comment · see review
Mar 07, 2018Florencia rated it really liked it · review of another edition
Shelves: mishimaism, japanese
Do you think that your hopes and those of someone else coincide, that your hopes can be smoothly realized for you by someone else? People live for themselves and think only of themselves. You who more than most think only of yourself have gone too far and let yourself be blinded.
You thought that history has its exceptions. There are none. You thought that the race has its exceptions. There are none.
There is no special right to happiness and none to unhappiness. There is no tragedy and there is no genius. Your confidence and your dreams are groundless. If there is on this earth something exceptional, special beauty or special evil, nature finds it out and uproots it. We should all by now have learned the hard lesson, that there are no ‘elect.’
Like a knife. So… the last volume of The Sea of Fertility tetralogy. It tells the story of an elderly Honda and Tōru, a 16-year-old he adopts after noticing that the boy had a certain characteristic that led the old man to believe he was in the presence of Kiyoaki’s third reincarnation, the protagonist of Spring Snow, the first volume, which, despite my previous doubts, is still my favorite of the series. This book is far from mediocrity, however, I can’t say, even while having the same rating, that it matches the first installment’s excellence.
I have to admit that I suffered. I was expecting repulsion, mostly. I didn’t imagine I was going to be this disoriented, fluctuating between annoyance and boredom. So I suffered for almost the entire book. It only takes one allusion to abuse – in any way, shape, or form; in this case, toward the elderly – for me to feel incredibly sad. I can’t describe the feeling when such situations stop being fiction. In any case, Honda’s vulnerability made me forget, from time to time, the disgust I felt in The Temple of Dawn, the previous volume. My ultimate cause of suffering was the adopted son, who symbolized the vastly unoriginal juxtaposition of external beauty and internal ugliness. Clichéd to the point of boredom, if this isn’t your first novel of the kind. As I told someone before, I think I reached the limit and can’t tolerate more stories involving handsome and aloof boys/men who think girls/women are shallow and fairly unnecessary if it weren’t for lust.
Aside from that, Tōru is the embodiment of evil. In that sense, the story felt forced and rushed. It took forever to start and then, quite abruptly, we find a diabolic adolescent whose mission in life is to injure - among others - his adoptive father. By the end, we are given some explanations we all heard before but it was too late to revert the process. I was already looking forward to a conclusion.
Having read a fair amount of his books, Mishima remains a conundrum to me. A delightful enigma endowed with the ability to attract and repel. As ever, his writing is painfully poetic, and when it clashes with obnoxious ideas or disgusting actions, the counterpoint has an enthralling effect. The search for beauty – something that never leaves the sphere of the flesh, a word the author loves, as well as self-respect – still continues and everything that interferes with the narrator’s visions of what’s pure and beauteous is severely ridiculed. The aversion to aging is almost insulting. Moreover, the idea of rising against not a machine but a natural and inexorable process is an absurd way to experience life.
Too many signs of decay.
This book was meandering toward the 3-star realm, but the last few chapters struck a chord. The following quote is part of one brutal rebuke. The little cloud of evil had found an implacable opponent.
[…] All puffed up by illusions born of abstract concepts, you strut about as the master of a destiny even though you have none of the qualifications. You think you have seen to the ends of the earth. But you have not once had an invitation beyond the horizon. You have nothing to do with light or enlightenment, there is no real spirit in flesh or in heart.
Honestly, there was nothing special about the previous 'reincarnations' either, as they were all brimming with selfishness, the most ordinary of qualities. From a practical point of view, humanity is defined by a self-absorbed, completely narcissistic nature; nothing more commonplace. A trite old joke with an air of uniqueness, with delusions of grandeur. The truly remarkable is the opposite; kindness, empathy, altruistic acts amid so much filth.
April 2, 18
* Later on my blog. Note to self: edit.
** The Sea of Fertility:
Spring Snow
Runaway Horses
The Temple of Dawn (less)
flag35 likes · Like · 19 comments · see review
Jun 24, 2020Luís rated it really liked it · review of another edition
Shelves: g-historical-fiction, g-classics, e-4, japan
In the recent review of "The Temple of Dawn", the third instalment in Mishima's tetralogy, we left Honda, the fiftieth lawyer, prey to the pangs of the noon demon and unable to curb obsessive voyeurism.
We find him in 1970 in the last opus entitled "The decaying angel" in the guise of an old man of 76 years, now widowed and walking painfully with the help of a cane. Since the death of his wife, he has lived more or less with Keiko, a neighbour of his age. However, it has kept a pronounced penchant for beautiful young women, an inclination that harmonizes quite well with the voyeurism of Honda.
We have known this central figure in the tetralogy since his 18th birthday, the date from which a growing attraction for the ancient Indian laws of Manu was manifested in him, which gave particular importance to reincarnation.
This Honda has approached, twice already in its life, two people who in its eyes were the reincarnation of Kiyoaki, its friend of youth tragically disappeared:
- in 1932, he took the criminal defence of a young nationalist, Isao, accused of the attempted assassination. Then, in 1940, he met fortuitously during a professional trip to Bangkok a Siamese princess, Moon Light, a young woman whom he saw again a few years later in Tokyo under very particular circumstances.
Like Kiyoaki, Isao and Moon Light had three perfectly aligned moles under their left arms at armpit level.
As "The Decaying Angel" begins, Toru Yasunaga is at his observation post and watches for the arrival of the cargo ships off the port of Shimizu. Its job is to alert the various port institutions one hour before the boat dock.
Orphan of exceptional beauty, this sixteen-year-old boy is wholly convinced that he does not belong to this world. But, by observing the horizon line, the conviction that he comes from another planet had forged in his mind.
Three moles mark his left side, and the reader quickly understands that Toru is the third reincarnation of Kiyoaki. What will be the relationship between Toru, the young man who looks like an angel and Honda, the older man assaulted by his past demons? The ultimate Mishima tragedy is in place. The outcome is approaching, the central character slowly advances towards the end of his life, and a deep sadness gradually gains the reader who turns, as if with regret, the last pages of "The angel in decay".
He knows that just now, his literary work completed, the great Japanese writer will truncate his pen for the sabre and that the man will go, in the pure samurai tradition, towards the destiny he has chosen. Thus ends this famous tetralogy entitled "The Sea of Fertility" concerning a body of water on the moon (also called "The Sea of Fertility"). Few writers have contemplated the heavens as Mishima did. Many of his novels contain descriptions of the sky and the sky more magnificent than the others, and this strange title was probably not chosen in the hazard.
Oddly enough, when a book fascinates me, I love to drag the last chapters, so I happen to regularly start a new book while the suspense intensifies in the current one. So, of course, this cobblestone of Mishima, with constant twists and turns, has not departed from this habit of making the pleasure last. Moreover, a period of settling between each opus of the tetralogy is not excessive, so much is the author's erudition on historical, philosophical and religious themes.
Some time ago, amazed by the beauty of the prose of "Spring Snow", I was inspired by a splendid reference of Mishima to the constellation Orion to evaluate this first dazzling book. Naturally, therefore, the eight stars of the Orion harness retained during this rating are subjective. (less)
flag26 likes · Like · see review
Jul 11, 2020Omar Sabri rated it really liked it
A great ending to a great tetralogy , the ending is drilled in my memory like a painting I can see Honda on his cane questioning his life , and Satoko guided by her assistant gazing at the garden ( a place that had no memories as Honda said ) with the sunlight streaming on the trees .
flag18 likes · Like · comment · see review
Feb 07, 2013Michael Battaglia rated it it was amazing
Much like listening to Joy Division's "Closer", there's an inescapable feeling of finality when reading the last novel of the quartet that goes beyond simply it being the last novel. If you're at all interested in Mishima or the quartet, you're probably well aware that as soon as Mishima finished the novel, he went out, attempted to stage a coup that failed miserably and then committed a ritual suicide, all of which made perfect sense to him in his worldview but don't seem entirely like the acts of a rational person. Yet we have this. As his death was clearly planned, when reading the final pages of the novel you are definitely reading the last words of a man about to die and who knew that he was about to die. And that knowledge is somewhat haunting.
Not surprisingly the notion of mortality creeps up more than once in the course of the slimmest of the four novels, although the quartet as a whole has been obsessed with the idea of growing older and losing the fire of youth, it seems more poignant here even as Mishima eschews sentimentality almost entirely. We run into Honda again and find the man in his eighties, old enough to realize that the good times are behind him (even though he's quite rich) and prepared to slide into oblivion the same way he has coasted through life, unable or unwilling to leave or make much of an impact. Always at the back of his mind is the notion of reincarnation, embodied by his childhood friend Kiyoaki, who keeps showing up in different guises throughout his life, dying tragically young each time.
This time it seems that his old friend has become an orphan named Toru. Spying those telltale birthmarks, Honda adopts him as a teenager with the intent of watching him grow up and perhaps seeing if he can finally be spared the fate of all the other incarnations and not perish at a young age. Sounds like as good a retirement plan as any, right?
Yet it quickly becomes different. The other incarnations were marked by what Honda perceived as an inner beauty, a fiery passion that was inspiring in the way a bonfire can be. You can stand back and admire it without daring to get too close. Instead Toru seems wayward and petty, not possessed with any grand romance or ideas for Japan, content in casual cruelty and not struck with any arcing ambition. And before long, the old man and the kid are starting to get at each other's throats, with Toru rather fond of seeing the old man die (and nicely inheriting his wealth) while Honda's initial desire to save the youth from what he believes was his fate becomes an insistence on surviving long enough to see him die, so he can have the satisfaction of having lived longer. Meanwhile the world erodes and decays around them both, as Toru's inability to grasp beauty even in the midst of his petty evil makes Honda wonder if he indeed is a reincarnation, or he has perhaps devoted his energy to the wrong course. But his sureness in the rightness of it is what keeps him going, in a sense, the notion of being eternal and lasting beyond what he is, exemplified in the continual reemergence of his old friend.
Its an interesting reversal from the early volumes, a subtle undermining of all that we saw before. Doubts that never existed before begin to linger, the Japan outside Honda slipping further away as we spend more time in his thoughts, even as his thoughts become ossified. Mishima has no love for old age, a disdain that crackles throughout the book but seems to take on a particular focus here. There are moments when the fear of losing the fire of one's youth and settling into senescence practically leaps off the page, a chilling intensity that comes near to desperation. The sensuality that lingered in the pages of "Temple of Dawn" or the raw passion that infused "Runaway Horses" has been replaced here with a crumbling decay that doesn't realize how fragile it has become, a weakly swaggering Honda lost within himself, detached from a Japan that Mishima perceives as already detached from itself, lost in a spiral where the arc is no longer beautiful. The final scenes resonates with a chill that goes past despair, into a cold realization that can only occur when one feels that finally all the layers are stripped away and what remains in undoubtedly the truth.
In the light of this, the ending becomes remarkable, upending everything that both we and Honda have known all along, stripping away the mysticism and philosophy that marked the first volumes and perhaps leaving us with what was there all along, the spaces between words, the spaces that make up words and the voids that comprise ourselves. The blissful continuation of nothing, arrived and achieved. Taken as a whole the volumes of the quartet have done their best to gradually take away the layers we thought existed, setting up a world where we're convinced certain notions are true, against all hope, and by the end reinforcing that our original ideas were true all along. We have no one else, Mishima seems to suggest as the book races toward its and his end, no one else and not even ourselves. Just the universe, maybe, a single point of hard dark light too far away to be touched and unable to be unseen. So what do we have then, when the point is finally grasped? The ending has a suggestion that Mishima may have ultimately taken in its fragile clarity, or his interpretation may have been the only way he could have seen it, having perhaps striven for so long to see what needed to be there, what had to be present. But we negate in our faltering absences, acting without blinking. Thus it becomes. It acts as a mirror that turns us into glass. It becomes better every time I read it. Not truer, but better. It fits where it has to, and in that becomes its own perfection, and maybe worth the effort in ways he was unable to imagine. (less)
flag15 likes · Like · comment · see review
Apr 03, 2021morgan rated it it was amazing
I'm in disbelief on how much I love this book and the rest of the tetralogy 🌸 I'm rather upset that's it's over :( (less)
flag12 likes · Like · 1 comment · see review
Jul 25, 2019Nancy Oakes rated it it was amazing · review of another edition
Shelves: japanese-fiction, translated-fiction, 2019
An excellent ending to a most excellent and powerful series of four novels.
I'm so sad to see it end, and I'm sure I'll be feeling a bit empty for a while.
more to come (less)
flag10 likes · Like · comment · see review
Apr 28, 2022Michael rated it it was amazing · review of another edition
Shelves: mishima-yukio, translation, aa-asialit, multivolume-lit, read-twice-or-more, fantasy, aa-japanlit, zz1970
220428: just finished this tetralogy and in many ways like it even more than the first time. just discovered first reading of first book, Spring Snow, though also read since now twice- (3) was thirty-eight years ago! I feel so old! it was romance of my youth. the next Runaway Horsesbook, could not help but be less to me, also as it was focused on military fanaticism... the third bookThe Temple of Dawn is beautiful and I remember it for the passages on reincarnation and buddhist beliefs... this book The Decay of the Angel I always liked least because the main characters seem to be cruel and manipulative but I understand it better now years later... I could now see the perversity linked with the hope to break causality and save the angel... (less)
flag10 likes · Like · comment · see review
Dec 08, 2017Junta rated it it was amazing
Shelves: reviewed, 5-star, read-in-japanese, japanese, mishima, book-quoting-book
Following on from Eight Conversations I read in February, I read another one of Shiba's books on Japan, "Japan Inside the World—from the 16th Century" this week in which he discusses Japan over the last 500 years from various angles with Japanese scholar Donald Keene, and found a fascinating section on Mishima and this tetralogy (my translation):
Keene: Mr. Shiba, you said that Mishima Yukio was searching for something absolute, and I agree with you. Mishima proposed that the Emperor is an infallible being, but he wasn't talking about the Shōwa Emperor or the Meiji Emperor, but the abstract concept of Emperor.
Shiba: Yes.
Keene: Mishima believed that the abstract and absolute Emperor could do no wrong. I think he thought that if that wasn't the case, then there was no meaning at all in the world. If everything was relative, that the Emperor of Japan was comparable to the Queen of England, then he thought that the world was meaningless.
His final tetralogy is called The Sea of Fertility, but that was a form of irony. When you talk about Fertility, it's the state of being rich in harvest, but Mishima's "Sea of Fertility" is talking about the sea on the moon (reviewer note: Mare Fecunditatis). There is no water in that sea, or for that matter, anything at all. It's just a name. I think Mishima looked at the world, and reached the same conclusion. There's nothing in the world, it's nihilistic, but if there is something, then it's the abstract concept of the Emperor. God would also do, but Mishima didn't believe in God, so he wanted to believe in the abstract Emperor's existence.
He wrote the novel, 英霊の声 Eirei No Koe , in which the kamikaze pilots strongly criticise the Humanity Declaration. If the Emperor is an ordinary human, then they don't know what they're dying for. Mishima thought that if something verging on the absolute wasn't involved, then the heroes' acts were meaningless. Perhaps, in the end, he was unable to believe. And that was the tragedy of Mishima.
Shiba: Mishima Yukio probably used the word 'god' in a special way, and it didn't point to gods like Inari Ōkami or Susanoo-no-mikoto. Mishima's 'God' was a God with a capital G. As you said, Mr. Keene, Mishima wasn't a Christian, so if he were to search for the absolute elsewhere, it would be the Emperor in front of him. However, this wasn't a specific Emperor, but the absolute Emperor he thought he held in his grasp. If this wasn't the case, then he wouldn't be able to write...perhaps he thought of the Emperor not as an ideology but rather as literature, but I'm not sure. Unless he comes here himself to explain, we won't know for sure, but Mr. Keene, you must understand it well, as a feeling. He must have had an admiration for the 'absolute'.
Keene: He must have.
Shiba: And unfortunately, that's nowhere to be found in Japan.
Keene: It's the same with his The Temple of the Golden Pavilion. The Temple itself is absolute. Because the Temple exists, the protagonist, Mizoguchi can't be free. Because absolute beauty is always there in front of his eyes, he can't love women either. Mishima had this strong admiration for such absoluteness.
25 June, 2021
This was a powerful tetralogy, and I would have liked to write something about it, but for now, regarding Japanese classical works and authors, I am also quite happy to just share the thoughts of people like Shiba and Keene! (less)
flag17 likes · Like · 10 comments · see review
Jul 22, 2016Edward rated it it was amazing · review of another edition
Shelves: japanese-literature
How can an angel decay? An "angel" in this context is not the haloed, winged messenger of the Christian deity. In Buddhist cosmology, angels are "celestial beings" who live in the sixth realm of rebirth. Those with good karma can be reborn there, and the pleasure and comfort it offers far exceed that of the human world. However, this is not the unqualified paradise it may sound like. No matter how many eons and kalpas may pass, beings cannot stay in the sixth realm. Like the other realms, good and bad, it is part of samsara--the endless cycle of death and rebirth. A perfect being must eventually fall from perfection. Nothing in the world of samsara is permanent, all is subject to change.
Honda, now an old man on the verge of death, is undergoing change. His wife has died. Wealthy, he no longer needs to work. He looks in the mirror and sees the physical signs of decay advancing daily. The one constant in his life is seeking out the reincarnations of Kiyoaki, all of whom have died by the age of twenty. This time around it appears to be in the form of Toru Yasunaga, a sixteen-year old boy working a menial job far below his abilities.
As the story progresses two themes emerge. Decay is one of course, but also uncertainty. Unlike with the past reincarnations, we are not sure by the end of the novel that Toru is really authentic. Honda himself comes to believe he probably isn't, especially since he does not die at twenty. Decay is evident in Honda and the depiction of human aging, but also in the land itself. Honda visits the famous pine tree of Miho, supposedly the place where a divine being once danced, only to find it full of pollution and tourists. Elsewhere he notes the increasing clutter and debris of modernity, in a passage emblematic of Mishima's disdain for Western innovation:
"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. Among heaps of rubble below cliffs where wild daisies stabbed at the sky were automobile dumps, blue and yellow and black, piled precariously one on the other, the gaudy colors molten in the sun."
This was Mishima's last work before his suicide, and this story takes on greater significance once you know more about what he was thinking, or rather obsessing over during this point in his life. Mishima was a man who desperately wanted to exist, and exist authentically. Writing was one way of doing this, but paradoxically, so was dying. It is fitting that his final book was about death and dying, and the illusion of life.
As the story draws to a close the narrative takes on almost dream-like qualities. Honda returns to Gesshuji to see Satoko, and tries to relive Kiyoaki's last moments there. He becomes both Honda and Kiyoaki, imagining that his friend is waiting for him at the inn, even has Honda himself makes the excruciating climb toward the temple. Arriving at the gate, he thinks to himself "only an instant had passed." I don't believe Mishima intended this to be poetical. Only a moment really has passed. Time is yet another illusion, a figment we insist upon.
Once admitted inside, he (and we) finally see Satoko again, one of the few characters who is not reintroduced in the earlier books. Although older, she is not decayed. Her presence in the first and last books is like bookends, meant to tell us something important. She tells a baffled Honda that she never knew a Kiyoaki, leading him to doubt that anything in the previous books happened, and that "perhaps then there has been no I."
While this may sound like an existential crisis, ending with what seems like a "it was all a dream" trope conclusion, it becomes more than that when you consider Mishima's intense focus on Buddhist doctrines throughout the Sea of Fertility. Honda's existential doubt is essentially the teaching of "anatman"--the belief that because the "self" cannot be located or identified as anywhere or as anything, it does not really exist. One is simply a collection of "skhandas" or phenomena (flesh, blood, bone, etc.) that comes together for a time, and later, disintegrates. These phenomena are "reborn" again and again, but what is reborn is "not you and not another." Realizing this truth is a step on the path to Enlightenment, because it frees you from attachment. Satoko, having attained this wisdom, is not the wizened, disappointed creature Honda is in his old age. He chased phantoms all his life in a quest for some kind of permanence, only to realize at the end that nothing is permanent.
As the reader, we observed Honda much as Honda observed others, and like him we are shocked by revelation. Was any of this real? Why did we believe it was? Honda was convinced that the reincarnations happened mostly because of factors that appeared airtight as evidence, but on second thought may only have been a coincidence. What, in the end, was his proof? Three moles on the left side of a body? Along for the ride, we accepted this reasoning by the final book only to have our confidence dashed. What does it mean to be reborn? What, for that matter, does it mean to live? (less)
flag8 likes · Like · comment · see review
Sep 05, 2010Sarah Magdalene rated it really liked it
Just finished Decay of Angel. I haven't even met the Angel yet (still waiting for Spring Snow to arrive) and he is already decayed. This final novel of Mishimas is sparse but fascinating. It is easy to imagine him deciding that he had had enough by the end of it. There is so much weariness, so much pain, and so much bitterness too. How well he knew the human condition by this stage. Too well I think. Too much awareness is never an easy burden to bear but without it you can't be a great writer. Oh and you have to love kitties too ;P Which he did of course.
The denouement is as shocking and thought provoking as I've come to expect of him. But it has left me feeling a little gloomy. As I knew it would. I was actually quite fond of Honda, so to see him suffer so much is a bit depressing. Like everything I've read of his though, it's a perfect manifestation. He's wrung every last drop of juice from himself. (less)
flag7 likes · Like · comment · see review
Oct 11, 2016Michael Finocchiaro rated it it was amazing
Shelves: fiction, japanese-20th-c, japanese-lit, novels
I need to reread this one, but I recall that it had that same air of misty teahouses and of a melancholy ghost story. Mishima's writing at its finest. (less)
flag11 likes · Like · comment · see review
Apr 17, 2011David rated it it was amazing
Shelves: big-red-circle
This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. Honda (octogenarian sex offender) now thinks that Kiyoaki (beautiful lover), Isao (beautiful fighter) and Ying Chan (beautiful lesbian) have been distilled into something evil and not particularly beautiful: Toru. It's unclear why, but Toru seeks a gruesome revenge on Honda and whilst his machinations seem successful, he's not very good at disguising them from Honda. Frustrated, he resorts to violence and beats Honda with a poker. Betrayed, destroyed and lonely, Honda makes the journey to Satoko for the conversation they could have had 60 years ago.
"Decay of the Angel" seemed very different from the other books. Mishima starts explaining crucial events in summary and skipping great chunks of time (something I'd loved him to have done with the first part of "The Temple of Dawn"). Toru's attack on Honda, the fate of the dream book, the attempted suicide and Honda and Keiko's argument are all passed off in a couple of sentences. It felt, at times, that Mishima was skipping to the end. But it also worked to signify that this incarnation, Toru, lacked the substance and dignity of the others.
I loved Keiko's speech at Christmas dinner, stripping Toru of his pretentions. Unwittingly demonstrating that, through her relationship with Ying Chan, she knows that Toru is no Kiyoaki or Isao:
"There is nothing in the least special about you. I guarantee you a long life. You have not been chosen by the gods, you will never be at one with your acts, you do not have in you the green light to flash like young lightening with the speed of the gods and destroy yourself. All you have is a certain premature senility. Your life will be suited for coupon-clipping. Nothing more." (less)
flag6 likes · Like · 2 comments · see review
Apr 16, 2020Jack rated it really liked it
Shelves: 20th-century, japan
There has been no author I’ve read so opaque as Mishima, despite pretenders. The coincidence of this final novel and his death speak to his fulfillment of his art more powerfully than any literary award. I don’t know what to make of The Sea of Fertility, though I knew back from reading Spring Snow at seventeen that there was something intoxicating in his work. A little dangerous. Imagine if I’d read all these novels before I turned twenty! Not that I have the madness to tear down so absolutely any barrier between life and art.
This particular novel is undoubtedly the weakest, divorced from the context of Mishima’s circumstances, but it makes little sense to do that. A rush-job toward oblivion. It cannot be any more or less perfect than the flawed novel it is. I know of little of Buddhism and can’t in any sense decode the theological elements that take over the story from The Temple of Dawn, but it seems appropriate that Mishima would want a reader that, fundamentally, cannot understand. The full tetralogy is, naturally, five stars. (less)
flag6 likes · Like · 1 comment · see review
Nov 04, 2018Tonymess rated it it was amazing · review of another edition
What a masterful conclusion to “The Sea of Fertility” tetralogy- the whole four works can seem daunting at times, but like the moss on a tree side allow it to slowly envelope you. Do not resist, to fight is futile, decay always prevails.
flag6 likes · Like · comment · see review
May 11, 2019Morgan rated it really liked it · review of another edition
Shelves: own, translation, fiction, novel, philosophy
Not sure how I liked this ending. I loved the parts about the sea, but I was expecting a different ending. Keep in mind he finished this book the day before he killed himself. In my opinion, that makes this book even harder to rate.
flag6 likes · Like · comment · see review
Jan 26, 2013Christopher rated it it was amazing
Yukio Mishima's The Decay of the Angel is the last volume of his “Sea of Fertility”. It is also the last book he wrote. On November 25, 1970 he sent the manuscript off to the publisher, then went to incite the soldiers of Japan's military headquarters to a coup d'etat. When he failed, he committed seppuku. As might be expected, The Decay of the Angel contains much that that relates to Mishima's dissatisfaction with life, and the cosmic nihilism that he promised would be the ultimate theme of the tetralogy comes to the forefront. The ending is also possibly the most shocking in all of literature.
The year is now 1970, and Shikeguni Honda adopts a young orphan named Toru, who he believes is the third successive reincarnation of Kiyoaki. The decay present throughout the book is especially present in Honda, who we meet as as a man of seventy-six and who reaches eighty-one by the novel's end. His physical health, memory, and wife are gone. He keeps company with Keiko, the former neighbour whose secret formed the climax of The Temple of Dawn, and they talk inanely about senility and medical ailments. But it's also present in Toru who, although young, possesses none of the beauty of Kiyoaki, the dedication of Isao, or the allure of Ying Chan. In fact, Toru is pure evil, and the bulk of the novel is his plot to destroy his adoptive father. The political commentary here is much more subtle than I expected it to be, considering that Mishima ended his life as a nationalist. Japan is plagued by a loss of its own traditions--Keiko shows interest in Japanese culture, but Honda remarks that she treats it as a hobby instead of authentically living it. The country is overrun with Coca-Cola ads and student radicals. But all in all, it is the mind of Honda that is the important setting, not the country around him.
By far the most impressive part of the novel is its surprise ending, which demolishes the entire “Sea of Fertility” cycle in a most impressive way when Honda meets Satoko again, who tells him either the mundane truth or the secret to enlightenment itself. The lectures on transmigration and the self which formed such a large part of The Temple of Dawn are there for a reason, and what Mishima does with the no-self philosophy of Buddhism is awesome. If you've read one or more of the earlier volumes and are uncertain about pressing on, I exhort you to make it through this one. Looking back on the cycle, I admire its clever design, where the first two novels set a precedent and the second two undo it, and the general arc where we track Honda from youth to senescence, and Kiyoaki from a praise-worthy youth to despicable brat is skillfully done. The series as a whole is brilliant, read it all. (less)
flag5 likes · Like · comment · see review
May 19, 2014J rated it it was amazing
Shelves: japanese-literature
This starts off kind of slow, and Mishima spends a lot of time boggled down with bleak, repetitious descriptions of Toru's ship-watching job juxtaposed with Honda as he enters old age. But eventually, things pick up and suddenly your flung into the middle of a psycho-sexual triangle coupled on top of the cat and mouse game of wounded aesthetic reveries between an old man and his chosen disciple. They don't really confront each other as much as their morbid, damaged, gorgeously rendered reveries kind of bounce off of each other.
And the ending...Jesus. It scorches. This is probably one of only 2-3 books I've ever read in my life that made me tear up multiple times. The final pages show Honda, after sixty years, desperately trying to make sense of the doomed soul that has crossed his life in so many forms already, and which in the final moments of the book, are brilliantly called into question, not with a flagrant, overwrought showpiece (bread and butter for Mishima) but in a staggering act of negation and contemplation.
The sea of Fertility taken as whole is a stunningly written book about the profound shifts in modern Japanese life at a social, political, psychological, economic and, somehow, even a spiritual level. Yukio Mishima's final written words complete something that comes close to being a national epic in an age when the very idea of a national epic is laughable. There are some rough moments between the 4 novels that make up this series but this is an often stunning, always ambitious literary project that deserves to be more widely read. Highly Recommended. (less)
flag5 likes · Like · comment · see review
Apr 07, 2021Dominika rated it liked it
3.5
There were parts I enjoyed that make this book different from the previous ones (yay for shorter elaboration on philosophical questions and relation between the heroes which was somewhat deeper). Toru is something fresh and mischevious, yet interesting to follow. Yet there were parts which felt like Mishima had troubles with proper closure and idea for that.
flag4 likes · Like · comment · see review
Nov 20, 2014Andrew added it
Shelves: yukio-mishima, japanese-fiction
I really don't know where to start with this. As a novel, it is in so many ways, uneven, laden with clunky symbolism, and the truly embarrassing conceit of “and now, I'm going to be EVIL!!!”
And yet, carried by Mishima's graceful prose, it works. And it contains some killer parts, a wonderful monologue by an embittered old lady, and a weird, floaty, elliptical ending that draws in like the closing scene in an Antonioni film. Despite some rather lame premises, Mishima is still able to subvert the expectations of this seasoned consumer of narrative.
I recently finished Boardwalk Empire, and wondered why it is that all these arty TV dramas still hold onto the Shakespearean ending with the death or the wedding of the protagonist. I want to shake them, tell them “there's another way this can be done!”
(less)
flag4 likes · Like · comment · see review
Apr 27, 2009Sagar rated it it was amazing
Shelves: the-list, to-buy, read-in-kazakhstan
The Sea of Fertility by Yukio Mishima
“The most complete vision we have of Japan in the twentieth century.”
-Paul Theroux
On the morning of November 25th 1970, the three-time Nobel nominee and 45 year old Yukio Mishima (the pen name of Hiraoka Kimitake) finished The Decay of the Angel, the final book in his seminal Sea of Fertility tetralogy. It was published into the world much akin to John Kennedy Tool's A Confederacy of Dunces: as renowned for its literary me...more The Sea of Fertility by Yukio Mishima
“The most complete vision we have of Japan in the twentieth century.”
-Paul Theroux
On the morning of November 25th 1970, the three-time Nobel nominee and 45 year old Yukio Mishima (the pen name of Hiraoka Kimitake) finished The Decay of the Angel, the final book in his seminal Sea of Fertility tetralogy. It was published into the world much akin to John Kennedy Tool's A Confederacy of Dunces: as renowned for its literary merit, as it was for the strange circumstances surrounding its publication.
After turning in the final draft to his editor for publication he gathered together the members of Tatenokai (the Shield Society), his private army. They stormed the Japanese Self Defense Force in Ichigaya, and after securing control of the complex Mishima delivered an impassioned speech to the troops, calling for them to throw off the shackles of Western influence and return Japan to its pure roots.
Rather than inspire a coup d’etat, the soldiers refused to listen to Mishima’s speech, jeering and mocking him instead.. After finishing, Mishima calmly retreated from the balcony. After writing 40 novels, 18 plays, 20 short story collections, over 20 collections of essays, a libretto and a film, the incredibly prolific Mishima committed ritual suicide by seppuku in the commandant's office.
Born into a samurai family in 1925, Mishima was raised to serve The Emperor in the wake of WWI while Japanese society was beginning what would become rapid Westernization. Widely considered one of the most important voices of Japanese post-war literature, the Sea of Fertility is his crowning masterpiece.
The title stems from the large, dark and basaltic plain on Earth’s Moon, called the Mare Fecunditatis (The Sea of Fecundity or Fertility). It is located at about the same place on the moon as Japan and the Sea of Japan are located on the Earth, and the lunar sea itself resembles an upside down sea of Japan. This obvious inverted allusion to dualism/pluralism is strongly resonant throughout the saga. Named maria (Latin for “seas”), they were originally mistaken by early astronomers. This obviously Western allusion further fuels the conflicted dualism of East/West that Mishima asserts as the downfall of classical Japanese culture and success.
The books are separated into time periods, covering about 60 years of Japanese 20th century history. Spring Snow looks at Japan wrestling with the integration of the Western world into Japanese culture in a post WWI climate. The story focuses on the ill-fated romance between 19 year old Kiyoaki Matsugae, his “star-crossed lover” Satoko Ayakura, and Kiyoaki’s best friend Shigekuni Honda who bears witness to the tragedy. Despite the book’s focus on Kiyoaki, Honda is the true protagonist of the tetralogy, and as begins to lose more and more of its national character, Honda follows Kiyoaki on an epic transmigration of the soul.
Runaway Horses picks up 19 years after the end of Spring Snow and Mishima at once dives into the rising political climate leading up to the second World War. Honda follows young Isao Iinuma and his rampant nationalistic spirit while slowly realizing Isao bears the soul of his long deceased friend Kiyoaki. Complete with a 100 page novel-within-a-novel, romanticized depictions of seppuku, assassination plots and the beginnings of a lengthy meditation on Buddhist transmigration of the soul, Honda narrates Japan through the increasingly polarized separation of the Japanese classes in the years before the outbreak of the war.
The most heavily outright philosophic of the four novels, The Temple of Dawn spends almost a full quarter of the book following Honda’s inquiries into Zen Buddhism, his various interpretations on transmigration vis-à-vis Theravada, and Mahayana Buddhist philosophy, Hinduism and a pilgrimage through the ancient Indian holy city of Benares.
Confusing the pattern of Kiyoaki/Isao’s rebirth, this time Honda is shocked to find the soul of his friend inhabiting the body of the beautiful Thai princess Ying-Chan (Princess Moonlight), who as a young girl, maintains the memories of her previous lives. As she matures, and eventually makes her way to Japan, however, Honda finds she demonstrates no recollection of her childhood or her previous incarnations. Mishima continues to use the backdrop of historical Japan as a dramatic set for his incredibly well crafted and complex characters. A prime example is the progression of Honda’s relationship with Ying-Chan, which begins at the onset of Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, and continues to its dramatic conclusion in the wake of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as the Americans occupy Japan, rapidly and forcefully Westernizing Japan overnight.
Mishima finished the tetralogy with an apocalyptic mirror exposing the modern Japanese soul with his The Decay of the Angel. Honda finally becomes a father, as he adopts the brilliant, heartless and malicious orphan Tōru Yasunaga. Tōru is the antithesis of Kiyoaki. In fact, Mishima concludes the migration of the dying angelic soul through a synthesis of his previous incarnations ending in nothingness.
The body of work, which amounts to almost 1,400 pages across the four texts, was translated by 3 different translation teams (Spring Snow and Runaway Horses were both done by the same translator) but the sheer strength and precision of Mishima’s prose transcends any variation in the mood throughout the series. His sentences are sharp, clear and bursting with life. He has a talent for creating incredibly detailed and visceral scenes to allow his characters to meander about within. Reading Mishima is an experience like no other, as his writing forces the reader to slow down and enjoy each unique sentence as a drop of poetry. From within his beautifully created universe his talent to penetrate the psyche of his characters and create such vivid and living people seems almost unparalleled in contemporary Japanese literature.
A truly momentous work of the 20th century, and one of the most intriguing depictions of Japan from one of her most passionate advocates; I can not strongly enough recommend it. As it is an investment in time, energy, constant thought and contemplation, The Sea of Fertility is a far cry from standard brain candy, but it is an investment with a high yield of return, and one that will remain with you long after the soul of Kiyoaki is put to rest. (less)
flag3 likes · Like · comment · see review
Mar 25, 2012Kirstie rated it really liked it
Recommended to Kirstie by: Rory
This is really more like a 4 1/2 star novel..but of course Goodreads is a bit limiting at times. In any case, I was really intrigued when I found out that Mishima had committed ritual suicide after this one. There is a great deal more of depth and much less innocence than The Sound of Waves (had you not guessed that by the title, though? I mean, really!) There is also a great deal about the sea and waves in this one nonetheless and parallels with humans and angels. There is madness, delusions, youth, and aging..there is the idea of pure evil and it is quite vivid. But at the end, it's not completely clear how much we as a reader were also deceived and how to sort it all out...which I suppose just makes this novel even more interesting and one to fathom further in future readings.
I like the deeper novels that make you think..the ones rich with a sense of philosophy to ponder and make you wonder about your own beliefs as well. I think this is a great work but I wish that it was at least 100 more pages longer at a minimum to really develop the characters themselves even further. I think the novel at its strengths has some interesting story lines and in terms of the character development, there are some intriguing contrasts but I tend to want more like Dostoevsky would do, for instance. I like to feel like I have epically grown with the characters.
In any case, there are some amazing insights in this novel and it is one I am sure I will come back to as I grow older. The language itself, especially the imagery, is so very vivid that it will not easily be forgotten.
Favorite quotes:
pg 1" 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."
pg. 13-14 "There had to be a realm where at the limit of all the layers of clarity it was definite that nothing at all made an appearance. a realm of solid, definite indigo, where seeing cast of the shackles of consciousness and itself became transparent, where phenomena and consciousness dissolved like plumbic oxide in acetic acid."
pg 15 "The joy of seeing, where everything was self evident and given, lay only at the invisible horizon, far beyond the sea. Why need there by surprise? Despite the fact that deceit was delivered at every door every morning without fail, like the milk."
"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."
pg. 24 "There was a wild restlessness in the long and short lights, as if in among the clusters of solid lights a single light were mad with joy. The voice calling out from afar over the dark sea was like the voice of a madwoman. A metal voice crying out sadly though not sad, pleading an agony of joy."
pg 33 "The voices of children were like splinters of lass. Toru liked to look at people as at animals in a zoo..."
pg 40 "It was like night in a zoo of emotions. Cries and laughter came from all the pens and all the cages."
pg 41 "Rainbows will soon be animals too, at this rate. Rainbow animals."
pg 43 "Sixty years had gone by, as an instant. Something came over him to drive away his consciousness of old age, a sort of pleading, as if he had buried his face in her warm bosom."
pg 55 "Honda said to himself: ' The moment I die they will all go' The thought came to him as a happy one, a sort of revenge. IT would be no trouble at all, tearing this world up by the roots and returning it to the void. All he had to do was die. He took a certain minor pride in the thought that an old man who would be forgotten still had in death this incomparably destructive weapon. For him the five signs of decay held no fear."
pg. 66 "And the watch, solitary in the field of white plastic, carrying on an intercourse almost sexual with the sea, through the day and through the night, intimidated by harbor and ship, until gazing became pure madness. The whiteness, the abandonment of the self, the uncertainty and loneliness were themselves a ship."
pg 87 "Yes. The waves as they broke were a manifest vision of death. It seemed to him that they had to be. They were mouths agape at the moment of death.
Gasping in agony, they trailed numberless threads of saliva. Each purple in the twilight became a livid mouth.
Into the gasping mouth of the sea plunged death. Showing death nakedly time and time again, the sea was like a constabulary. It swiftly disposed of the bodies, hiding them from public gaze."
pg. 101 "Among clouds like antique white clay images of warriors were some that suggested dragons twisting angrily and darkly upward. Some as they lost their shape, were tinged rose. "
pg. 113 'The world does not approve of flying. Wings are dangerous weapons. They invite self destruction before they can be used."
pg. 137 "The shadows were the substance. They had been eaten away by the shadows, by the deep melancholy of a concept. That was not life, thought Honda. It was something less easy to excuse."
pg. 143 "But of course the world feels secure when the monstrous is reality."
pg, 154 "I suppose that thus thus rolling in the dark a woman feels only the wheel that runs over her."
pg. 209-210 "Senility was a proper ailment of both the spirit and the flesh, and the fact that senility was an incurable disease meant that existence was an incurable disease. It was a disease unrelated to existentialist theories, the flesh itself being the disease, latent death.
History knew the truth. History was the most inhuman product of humanity.It scooped up the whole of human will and, like the goddess Kali in Calcutta, dripped blood from its mouth as it bit and crunched."
(less)
flag3 likes · Like · 6 comments · see review
Sep 07, 2012Guillermo Galvan rated it it was amazing
I finally did it. I finished Mishima's Sea of Fertility series, the most philosophically twisted series ever written. This final book is the thorny crown gouged into the king's head.
Honda discovers a young man he believes to be the reincarnation of his friend. Somehow Honda adopts the boy and anguishes over his expected death at age 20. Things don't go as Honda hoped to foresee them.
Mishima committed suicide immediately after this book was completed. I had to wonder what was the state of his mind as he wrote this book. Out of the series, The Decay of the Angel is the most abstract. It begins with long passages of Toru, the reincarnated friend, staring at the ocean's horizon waiting for ships to appear. At times the writing dissolves into a disjointed poetry, lost in a state of mind that denies meaning, then reforms into solid realism. This was annoying because I wanted to know what happened in the story, not dwell in the lofty observations of some teenage transcendentalist. But slowly the realizations arose that Mishima intended this to be more than an ordinary novel, it was his farewell statement to the world.
The tone of the book is excessively bitter and narcissistic. Mishima tortures his main characters with an astonishing hatred worthy of some crazed god. Midway the story threatens to come apart and deprive us of a well deserved resolution. The short page count put me on edge, "Can he save this story, this series! with only X number of pages remaining?" Fortunately, that's exactly what he did and it was fucking exciting to have experienced unfold. And the ending! Oh, man, it outright stunned me. I would have crashed my car if I were listening to the audio book.
Mishima left us with a final message of cosmic nihilism that resounds long after the book is finished, compound that with the fact he cut open his stomach afterwards, and the effect is profoundly bleak. His obsession with beauty, and phobia of losing it, reaches a fevered pitch in this closing chapter. His ultra vanity convinced him that it's better to die at pinnacle of one's youth than to decay into old age. Doesn't that sound like some Hollywood diva? That'll always annoy me. Anyhow, the entire series is amazing, each book able to stand on its own but charging the overall story forward to a spectacular conclusion.
(less)
flag3 likes · Like · comment · see review
Sep 27, 2015DeanJean rated it really liked it · review of another edition
Shelves: japanese-literature
I think about life, and I think about death...and then I think some more, and now I prefer neither over the other. Human existence is absurdly comedic, and painfully miniscule simultaneously. There is no such thing as a heroic death nowadays....
flag3 likes · Like · comment · see review
Mar 15, 2020Azin (kade lover no.1) rated it did not like it · review of another edition
Shelves: dnf
Dnf at page 80
Oh im so pretty:)))pretty girls have it so hard in life:))))specially when they have a rich father:)))))if you ever think im pretty im not gonna be your friend anymore:)))))
Anyways life's too short to read books im not enjoying (less)
flag3 likes · Like · comment · see review
The Decay of the Angel
(The Sea of Fertility #4)
by
Yukio Mishima,
Edward G. Seidensticker (Translator)
4.13 · Rating details · 3,781 ratings · 310 reviews
The dramatic climax of The Sea of Fertility tetraology takes place in the late 1960s. Honda, now an aged and wealthy man, discovers and adopts a sixteen-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.
GET A COPYKobo
Online Stores ▾
Book Links ▾
Download eBook
Paperback, Reprint, 236 pages
Published January 2nd 2001 by Vintage (first published November 1970)
Original Title
天人五衰 [Tennin Gosui]
ISBN
009928457X (ISBN13: 9780099284574)
Edition Language
English
Series
The Sea of Fertility #4
Characters
Shigekuni Honda
Other Editions (63)
All Editions | Add a New Edition | Combine...Less DetailEdit Details
Jul 06, 2019Ahmad Sharabiani rated it really liked it · review of another edition
Shelves: fiction, culture, japan, japanese-literature, 20th-century
Tennin Gosui = The Decay of the Angel (The Sea of Fertility #4), Yukio Mishima
The Decay of the Angel is a novel by Yukio Mishima and is the fourth and last in his Sea of Fertility tetra-logy. It is the last installment of Shigekuni Honda’s pursuit of the successive reincarnations of his childhood friend Kiyoaki Matsugae. A retired judge, Shigekuni Honda, adopts a teenage orphan, Tōru Yasunaga, whom he believes to be a dead school friend's third successive reincarnation. ...
تاریخ نخستین خوانش: سال1999میلادی
عنوان: زوال فرشته کتاب چهارم از سری دریای باروری؛ نویسنده: یوکیو میشیما؛ مترجم: غلامحسین سالمی؛ تهران، کتاب مهناز، سال1377؛ در373ص؛ شابک ایکس-964553805؛ چاپ دیگر: تهران، نگاه، چاپ سوم سال1397؛ در392ص؛ شابک9786003760226؛ موضوع: داستانهای نویسندگان ژاپن - سده20م
داستان این کتاب پیرامون زندگی قاضی بازنشسته ای به نام «هوندا» است، که دوران بازنشستگی خود را، با خوانش و سفر میگذراند؛ موضوع مورد علاقه ی او فرشتگان هستند؛ او در یکی از سفرهایش، با پسر یتیمی به نام «تورو» آشنا میگردد، و او را به فرزند خواندگی خویش میپذیرد؛ کتاب «زوال فرشته»، آخرین اثر «یوکیو میشیما» بوده است، که تنها چند ماه پیش از خودکشی او، به روش «سامورایی (هاراگیری)»، منتشر شد
نقل نمونه متن: («تورو» در همان مدرسه ی مقدماتی ای قبول شد، که خود برگزیده بود؛ در سال دوم زندگی اش با «هوندا»، کسی برای پیرمرد پیغامی آورد؛ شخص معتبر و بانفوذی، که دختری دَمِ بخت داشت، فکر کرده بود که شاید پسر جوان، دخترش را برای زناشویی برگزیند؛ اگرچه «تورو» به سن قانونی رسیده بود، ولی هنوز هیجده سال بیشتر نداشت؛ «هوندا» از این پیشنهاد خندید؛ طرف مقابل مشتاق این وصلت بود، و پیشنهادش را توسط واسطه ی دیگری عنوان کرد؛ از آنجاییکه واسطه ی دوم، در دنیای حقوق و قضا، آدمی متشخص، و از دوستان «هوندا» به شمار میآمد، پیرمرد، نمیتوانست بدون گفتگو با پسرخوانده اش، به او جواب رد بدهد؛ «هوندا» آرزویی در دل میپروراند، «عروسی جوان»، که در مرگ شوهر بیست و یک ساله اش، عزادار میشد، و جامه ی سیاه بر تن میکرد؛ جلوه ای از فاجعه ای زیبا! پس آنگاه «هوندا» یکبار دیگر، با تبلور ناب زیبایی، رودررو میشد.؛ این رؤیا با شخصیتِ اجتماعی، و تربیت او همخوانی نداشت؛ تازه اگر این رؤیا به حقیقت نمیپیوست، و بُحرانی پیش نمیآمد، «هوندا» میبایست خود را به زحمت میانداخت، تا یک زندگی طولانی و عاری از زیبایی را، برای «تورو» تدارک ببیند؛ چیزی که پیرمرد از آن میترسید، همانی بود، که آرزویش را داشت، و آن چیزی که آرزو میکرد، همان چیزی بود، که او را به وحشت میانداخت.)؛ پایان نقل؛
تاریخ بهنگام رسانی 07/05/1399هجری خورشیدی؛ 19/01/1401هجری خورشیدی؛ ا. شربیانی (less)
flag156 likes · Like · comment · see review
Sep 11, 2019Jim Fonseca rated it really liked it
Shelves: japanese-authors
This is the fourth and final volume in Mishima’s tetralogy, The Sea of Fertility.
Class divisions and changing values in Japan due to western influence are major themes. Another theme all the way through the series is reincarnation. In Decay of the Angel, the reincarnated spirit is an orphan. He has a job helping ships in port navigate to their docks. Obviously it was pre-ordained that Honda finds him since he encounters him by simply wandering around the port.
Honda, the lawyer, who is another main character through the four volumes. He is now 76 years old but he adopts the young boy. He does this even though, if the pattern holds, he knows the boy will die at age 20. A sub-theme tied in with the reincarnation is how Honda, originally an associate justice in the national courts, is initially all into rationalism and logic. But when he meets the young boy gang leader in volume two, Runaway Horses, he notices three moles on his body identical to his deceased friend from years ago. Despite his rationality, he comes to believe the young boy is his old friend reincarnated.
But unlike in the other volumes, the boy in The Decay of the Angel sets out to do evil – thus the ‘decay’ in the title. “I vow it: that when I am twenty I will cast Father into hell. I must start making plans.” The boy is attached to an ugly, obese, mentally ill young woman whom he eventually marries. His evil starts out small, getting his tutor dismissed, but graduates to where he terrorizes his adoptive father by striking him with a poker. He makes his four maids his mistresses.
Although you can pick up most of the back story in context, it really helps to have to have read the whole series in sequence. For those who want to read this book but have not read the preceding volumes, here are brief summaries for each book:
Spoiler for the first volume, Spring Snow:
(view spoiler)
Spoiler for the second volume, Runaway Horses: (view spoiler)
Spoiler for third volume, The Temple of Dawn. (view spoiler)
Mishima (1925-1970) was a classic Japanese author. He committed ritual suicide the same day he delivered this book to his publisher. His best-known work is this tetralogy, The Sea of Fertility. I thought the whole series excellent, with the first volume, Spring Snow, the best.
Photo of Japanese a port in the 1930's from i.pinimg.com/originals
The author from theguardian.com/books
(less)
flag133 likes · Like · 10 comments · see review
Jun 15, 2020Adam Dalva rated it really liked it · review of another edition
A strange, swift landing to the Sea of Fertility tetralogy, and a book that can't help but be altered by the fact that Mishima's strange, ritualistic suicide occurred the day after he handed it in, on the date on the last page of the mansucript. There is a lot to like in this volume, which cleverly inverts the reincarnations of Kiyoaki by questioning whether this particular rendition (a sociopathic ship watcher named Tōru Yasunaga, a character w/ virtually no inner life) is a complex imposter. The middle of the book, Toru's journal, is an interesting return to the first book, set in 1970s Japan, as the lead, Honda, battles old age. But there are shortcomings here: the book moves too fast, accepting its strangeness as a matter of course, and cutting short the intriguing push and pull between Honda and his adopted son, who have so much in common. It's almost as if Mishima himself is in dread of his aged narrator, whose gradual disintegration is treated rather grotesquely. The ending, however, is excellent: something we've waited for for 4 books...for 60 years of plot.
As an overall project, The Sea of Fertility is fascinating to consider: flawed, weird, autobiographical, ambitious. I enjoyed my journey through its lush, barren pages. (less)
flag75 likes · Like · 1 comment · see review
Feb 13, 2018William2 rated it liked it · review of another edition
Shelves: 20-ce, translation, fiction, japan
What’s this one about, do you suppose? There is in all translations of Mishima’s work I have read—by a host of translators—a fundamental woodeness or clunkiness of description, especially in his philosophical flights. In Japan he is often referred to as a stylist with a penchant for archaic Japanese word forms. So it could be that Mishima’s use of archaisms means he doesn’t translate well into English. I don’t know. But this fourth volume of The Sea of Fertility tetralogy seems to me in the first half worst of the batch. One has no idea why the characters are alternately so goddamned indifferent then so cruel. The novel’s seems to be all surface. Why is there mention of evil out of the blue like that? What’s evil? I'd like to be shown Tōru's evil and not simply be told about it. It would do wonders for the suspense. Yet the motivations are often completely opaque. Except at the end, there is little or no insight into character. Tōru is without parentage. No past for him is ever given. He lives alone without friends, motivated like most Mishima protagonists, entirely by a mix of naïveté and cryptic self inquiry. The day after Mishima finished this MS he committed suicide. He was 45. Maybe that was his only alternative. He certainly makes clear here, as in all his books to some degree, his absolute detestation of old age. The book seems to me a farrago, a pastiche whose fragments are not without interest, but a novel they do not make. (less)
flag57 likes · Like · 6 comments · see review
Apr 03, 2012Matthew rated it it was amazing
To be as honest as possible, I must run the risk of not making any sense: this is simultaneously my favorite and least favorite book in the series. Parts of it were hugely gorgeous -- the prose was pure and had an almost cleansing aura to it, and I felt alive while reading it. However, I wanted to strangle Mishima for writing some other parts that I felt were not only uncalled for but intentionally annoying to read (I'm looking at you, several descriptions of harbor boats). I know that Seidensticker is apparently revered as some sort of translator god in the Japanese world, but I couldn't help but feel he edited it sentence by sentence with his mindset alternating between "How do I make this as beautiful as possible?" with "How can I make this as tedious as possible?"
Where has Honda come to, then? He was first the friend of Kiyoaki Matsugae, then the lawyer of Isao Iinuma, and finally the friend/voyeur of Ying Chan. Now he's the guardian of Toru, a diabolical young teenager who in wanting to see himself as superior to everyone else decides to be evil. Honda's journey has been as remarkable as it has been beautiful, and according to him that may be for the better. It would appear that beauty is perhaps one of the most undefinable things in the universe. It is pain, fragility, distance, youth, and above all death. When you put it together, it seems to be that it becomes the "art of suicide" - to kill yourself before you really grow up. Beauty, then, becomes nothing more than the physicality of your being, your existence, as an independent entity - a transcendental adolescence, and by killing yourself at that stage, your life becomes synonymous with that beauty. Hell, if that was Kiyoaki's objective, I think he did a bang-up good job.
The last twenty pages are worth reading it all again for, though. It makes me want to go back and read the first one again, if only that. There's a throwback to a scene from the end of Spring Snow, where Honda, at wits end, decides to visit someone he hasn't seen in sixty years. The discussion that ensues chills me.
"Memory is like a phantom mirror. It sometimes shows things too distant to be seen, and sometimes it shows them as if they were here."
Has this all, then, been but a dream? No, it wasn't all just a dream. That would be silly. Mishima isn't some nutjob with a pen -- well, okay, maybe he was... but let's be honest with ourselves here. Mishima might actually be testing us with this one. He wasn't a Buddhist, but there's definitely something weird going on in the last installment, and the writing itself betrays a sort of unsettling of his own philosophy. There might be a good reason why Mishima chose to stage his coup right after finishing this final piece. Perhaps it is not Honda but Mishima who arrives with the reader where there is no memory -- to the place where the noontide sun of summer flows over an empty garden. (less)
flag43 likes · Like · 1 comment · see review
Oct 11, 2020P.E. rated it really liked it · review of another edition
Shelves: diary, characters, chemins, decadent, psychology, the-media, vivid-dream, absurd, crime, favorites
WISHFUL THINKING
1970, Honda is now 80. He meets Toru, a young signalman he immediately surmises to be a reincarnation of Ying Chan, Isao and his deceased friend Kiyoaki. A contemplative orphan, Toru also looks like Honda in terms of personality. Honda decides to adopt him, paving the way for a merciless strife for domination between the two men...
Koishikawa Kōraku-en, Tokyo
MAJOR THEMES:
⬤ Universal decay.
Be it trash, rotten vegetables, old flesh, everything comes down to be mere matter. Even angels rot. Everything is germinating, maggoty, eaten by corruption. Decay and corruption lie at the very heart of life. Life itself is corruption.
⬤ Futility of politics, pointlessness of time and absurdity of being.
In the Sea of Fertility cycle, Nowhere else than in The Decay of the Angel are references to politics and contemporary events in Japan that scarce in the narrative.
The main reference to foreign affairs is one about the US military operations in Cambodia, which rings quite ironically, after reading The Temple of Dawn, taking place as the Japanese imperial army fights in the South-Eastern Asia area, a mere 25 years before.
⬤ Toru, a living embodiment of non-being.
⬤ Unescapable vulgarity, derision and debasement in Westernized Japan.
⬤ Set-ups and cover-ups.
- Toru has his fiancée working to her own demise, dictating her a letter exposing degrading motives behind her union with Toru : in this letter, her father is said to have worked this scheme of marrying his daughter to Toru because he is after Honda's money.
- This story also displays crual plots designed by Honda and Toru against one another. Toru even resorts to gaslighting and blackmail... This sadistic and masochistic backgroung is not a little reminiscent of Spring Snow, the first book in the Sea of Fertility series, of Dangerous Liaisons or of The Seducer's Diary.
⬤ Obsessing over meaning: the ceaseless need to construe reality.
Koishikawa Kōraku-en, Tokyo
SIMILAR WORKS:
Painstaking deconstruction and analysis of life, the fixation with decay:
The Simulacra
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Martian Time-Slip
Nausea
Non-being and unnaturalness:
Against Nature
No Longer Human
Mephisto
The Train
Epistolary novels, diaries and masquerades :
The Seducer's Diary
Dangerous Liaisons
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Mind tricks from other adept writers :
Black Water Lilies
Mind of Winter
Beauty and finiteness :
Urbex : 50 lieux secrets et abandonnés en France
Ruines et vestiges
SOUNDTRACK :
The Unforgiven - Metallica
〜 〜 〜 〜 〜 〜 〜
VŒU PIEUX
1970, Honda a maintenant quatre-vingt ans. Il fait la rencontre de Toru, un jeune observateur de navires et orphelin qui lui paraît immédiatement être la réincarnation de Ying Chan, d'Isao, et de son ami Kiyoaki. Contemplatif, il lui apparaît aussitôt qu'il est comme la copie crachée de sa propre personnalité. Il décide de l'adopter. S'engage alors une relation de domination et de surenchère à la cruauté entre les deux hommes, dont chacun n'existe qu'autant qu'il nie l'autre.
Koishikawa Kōraku-en, Tokyo
----
LES THÈMES :
⬤ Le pourrissement universel.
Tout se réduit ici à de la matière : déchets, pourriture, végétaux en décomposition et vieilles chairs plus particulièrement. Même les anges pourrissent. Tout est germinatif, véreux, mangé de corruption. Le pourrissement et la corruption existent au sein même de la vie. La vie même est corruption.
- Les personnages Honda et Keiko, vieillards, ont un dégoût pour la vieillesse affiché qu'accompagne une jalousie de la jeunesse. Ils s'appuient l'un sur l'autre pour tromper leur ennui et leur déclin.
⬤ Vanité de la politique, du temps et de l'être.
Il me semble que nulle part ailleurs que dans L'ange en décomposition la politique et les évènements contemporains sont si peu présents dans la narration.
La principale référence est celles des opérations armées des États-Unis au Cambodge. Ce qui, à peine 25 ans après Le Temple de l'aube : La mer de la fertilité III et les opérations militaires de l'armée impériale japonaise en Asie sud-orientale... laisse un arrière-goût amer d'éternel retour.
⬤ Toru et le non-être, Toru et l'anti-nature, Toru, contradiction vivante de la vie.
- Lorsque Honda rencontre Toru, il est presque renversé par la ressemblance de sa personnalité avec la sienne.
Toru témoigne un mépris infini pour le monde. Il pratique une forme de solipsisme ultra-analytique très proche de celui de Honda, à la différence que pour Toru, il n'y a pas d'arrière-plan métaphysique ou mystique, seulement une immensité indigo indicible... Tous deux sont des voyeurs pratiquement dépourvus de volonté et qui mènent une vie sans enjeu, sans marées, "sans poésie et sans félicité". Du reste, Honda décèle le mal absolu en Toru et le reconnaît pour sien.
- Toru la conscience exacerbée, Kinué l'enfermement en soi ?
Dans les deux cas, il y a refus du monde. Négation du monde extérieur, confondu avec le monde intérieur.
⬤ Vulgarité, affreuse dérision et contrefaçon des idéaux.
- Le sanctuaire de Mio, visité par Honda et son amie Keiko, est devenu un parc d'attraction bruyant.
- Toru, incarnation dérisoire de la conscience Alaya ?
- Toru détruit le journal de Kiyoaki. Il détruit et salit tout ce que Honda a pu rassembler.
⬤ Montages et mises en scènes.
- Toru fait collaborer sa fiancée Momoko à un stratagème qui va la perdre : il lui dicte une lettre qui avilit les motifs derrière son union avec Toru : il ne serait question que de faire un bon parti pour son père désargenté.
- Mises en scènes cruelles de Honda et de Toru l'un contre l'autre. "Gaslighting", chantage... Chez les deux personnages, masochisme et sadisme. Qui ne sont pas sans faire penser à Neige de Printemps, aux Liaisons dangereuses ou au Journal du séducteur.
⬤ La manie d'interpréter.
- Arrivé à un point de l'histoire, la vieille amie Keiko s'entiche de culture japonaise traditionnelle et entend tout de travers, du moins l'interprète, erronément, à sa façon. Ce qui ne manque pas de faire doucement sourire Honda. C'est un thème qui revient obstinément. Qui est exempt de ces biais, de cette manière d'envisager le monde par le petit bout de la lorgnette, ou bien en s'affranchissant de ce qui vient contre notre façon de voir ?
- Sur la fin de ses jours, Honda connaît une invasion onirique. Dans le monde éveillé comme en sommeil, tout lui sert d'aliment à théorie, tout lui sert de signe, est perçu comme signal. Au point de ne plus bien faire la différence entre le signe, le signifiant et le signifié. Bref, entre le monde et ce qu'il veut bien en voir.
Toru, lui, est visité par des visions inquiétantes qui le visitent sans prévenir. On dirait un peu les apparitions inquiétantes de Raskolnikov dans l'excellent Crime et Châtiment...
- Mishima lui-même, maître du grand montage, induit le lecteur en erreur en l'incitant à faire des rapprochements entre des évènements peut-être fortuits. En fin de compte, jusqu'à la prose de ce livre est désossée par ces rapprochements, ces perceptions gratuites mais toujours interprétées de la manière la plus concluante possible. Honda clôt le cycle en retournant à Gesshuji, où Satoko a passé sa vie comme abbesse.
Il est accueilli par l'image du néant.
Koishikawa Kōraku-en, Tokyo
MON AVIS :
A l'origine, je comptais terminer ce cycle en hiver, pour avoir une belle régularité dans la lecture de ses quatre livres : Neige de printemps en mai, Chevaux échappés en juillet, Le Temple de l'Aube en septembre et puis L'ange en décomposition pour cet hiver. Et puis je me suis dit : bah, à quoi bon patienter. J'en suis à un stade où clairement ce sont les lectures qui battent la mesure de ma vie, et ce cycle de La mer de la fertilité a donné forme à cette étrange année 2020, au moins autant que les évènements de politique intérieure et internationale.
Bref, je l'ai proprement dévalé, et n'était le travail, je l'aurais lu en une traite.
L'évolution de la personnalité de Honda m'a vraiment frappé à partir du Temple de l'Aube. Ici, impossible de ne pas garder en vue la date de remise du manuscrit, qui coïncide avec celle du suicide de Mishima. Il y a fort à parier que l'auteur y a mis beaucoup de sa conception du monde et de sa personne tout simplement. Je suis pris à la fois de sympathie et saisi par la vie étrange de cet homme. Cette étrangeté n'est pas la mienne, mais elle me permet de mieux remarquer combien étranges sont les vies que l'on mène. De combien de préconceptions et de raccourcis, par quels détours et quels rapprochements hasardeux, de quelle incohérence et de quelles contradictions nous nourrissons ce qu'il faut bien appeler sa vision du monde.
----
ŒUVRES VOISINES :
Décomposition des mécanismes de la vie et morbidité :
Simulacres
Blade Runner : Les androïdes rêvent-ils de moutons électriques ?
Glissement de temps sur Mars
La Nausée
Le non-être et l'anti-nature :
À rebours
La Déchéance d'un homme
Mephisto
Le Train
Jeux de regards et de miroir, tenue d'un journal ; pouvoir extraordinaire de simulation des mots. Montage épistolaire :
Le journal du séducteur
Les Liaisons dangereuses
L'Insoutenable légèreté de l'être
Savants montages de la part d'autres écrivains :
Les Nymphéas noirs
Esprit d'hiver
Beauté et finitude :
Urbex : 50 lieux secrets et abandonnés en France
Ruines et vestiges
THÈME MUSICAL :
The Unforgiven - Metallica (less)
flag36 likes · Like · comment · see review
Mar 07, 2018Florencia rated it really liked it · review of another edition
Shelves: mishimaism, japanese
Do you think that your hopes and those of someone else coincide, that your hopes can be smoothly realized for you by someone else? People live for themselves and think only of themselves. You who more than most think only of yourself have gone too far and let yourself be blinded.
You thought that history has its exceptions. There are none. You thought that the race has its exceptions. There are none.
There is no special right to happiness and none to unhappiness. There is no tragedy and there is no genius. Your confidence and your dreams are groundless. If there is on this earth something exceptional, special beauty or special evil, nature finds it out and uproots it. We should all by now have learned the hard lesson, that there are no ‘elect.’
Like a knife. So… the last volume of The Sea of Fertility tetralogy. It tells the story of an elderly Honda and Tōru, a 16-year-old he adopts after noticing that the boy had a certain characteristic that led the old man to believe he was in the presence of Kiyoaki’s third reincarnation, the protagonist of Spring Snow, the first volume, which, despite my previous doubts, is still my favorite of the series. This book is far from mediocrity, however, I can’t say, even while having the same rating, that it matches the first installment’s excellence.
I have to admit that I suffered. I was expecting repulsion, mostly. I didn’t imagine I was going to be this disoriented, fluctuating between annoyance and boredom. So I suffered for almost the entire book. It only takes one allusion to abuse – in any way, shape, or form; in this case, toward the elderly – for me to feel incredibly sad. I can’t describe the feeling when such situations stop being fiction. In any case, Honda’s vulnerability made me forget, from time to time, the disgust I felt in The Temple of Dawn, the previous volume. My ultimate cause of suffering was the adopted son, who symbolized the vastly unoriginal juxtaposition of external beauty and internal ugliness. Clichéd to the point of boredom, if this isn’t your first novel of the kind. As I told someone before, I think I reached the limit and can’t tolerate more stories involving handsome and aloof boys/men who think girls/women are shallow and fairly unnecessary if it weren’t for lust.
Aside from that, Tōru is the embodiment of evil. In that sense, the story felt forced and rushed. It took forever to start and then, quite abruptly, we find a diabolic adolescent whose mission in life is to injure - among others - his adoptive father. By the end, we are given some explanations we all heard before but it was too late to revert the process. I was already looking forward to a conclusion.
Having read a fair amount of his books, Mishima remains a conundrum to me. A delightful enigma endowed with the ability to attract and repel. As ever, his writing is painfully poetic, and when it clashes with obnoxious ideas or disgusting actions, the counterpoint has an enthralling effect. The search for beauty – something that never leaves the sphere of the flesh, a word the author loves, as well as self-respect – still continues and everything that interferes with the narrator’s visions of what’s pure and beauteous is severely ridiculed. The aversion to aging is almost insulting. Moreover, the idea of rising against not a machine but a natural and inexorable process is an absurd way to experience life.
Too many signs of decay.
This book was meandering toward the 3-star realm, but the last few chapters struck a chord. The following quote is part of one brutal rebuke. The little cloud of evil had found an implacable opponent.
[…] All puffed up by illusions born of abstract concepts, you strut about as the master of a destiny even though you have none of the qualifications. You think you have seen to the ends of the earth. But you have not once had an invitation beyond the horizon. You have nothing to do with light or enlightenment, there is no real spirit in flesh or in heart.
Honestly, there was nothing special about the previous 'reincarnations' either, as they were all brimming with selfishness, the most ordinary of qualities. From a practical point of view, humanity is defined by a self-absorbed, completely narcissistic nature; nothing more commonplace. A trite old joke with an air of uniqueness, with delusions of grandeur. The truly remarkable is the opposite; kindness, empathy, altruistic acts amid so much filth.
April 2, 18
* Later on my blog. Note to self: edit.
** The Sea of Fertility:
Spring Snow
Runaway Horses
The Temple of Dawn (less)
flag35 likes · Like · 19 comments · see review
Jun 24, 2020Luís rated it really liked it · review of another edition
Shelves: g-historical-fiction, g-classics, e-4, japan
In the recent review of "The Temple of Dawn", the third instalment in Mishima's tetralogy, we left Honda, the fiftieth lawyer, prey to the pangs of the noon demon and unable to curb obsessive voyeurism.
We find him in 1970 in the last opus entitled "The decaying angel" in the guise of an old man of 76 years, now widowed and walking painfully with the help of a cane. Since the death of his wife, he has lived more or less with Keiko, a neighbour of his age. However, it has kept a pronounced penchant for beautiful young women, an inclination that harmonizes quite well with the voyeurism of Honda.
We have known this central figure in the tetralogy since his 18th birthday, the date from which a growing attraction for the ancient Indian laws of Manu was manifested in him, which gave particular importance to reincarnation.
This Honda has approached, twice already in its life, two people who in its eyes were the reincarnation of Kiyoaki, its friend of youth tragically disappeared:
- in 1932, he took the criminal defence of a young nationalist, Isao, accused of the attempted assassination. Then, in 1940, he met fortuitously during a professional trip to Bangkok a Siamese princess, Moon Light, a young woman whom he saw again a few years later in Tokyo under very particular circumstances.
Like Kiyoaki, Isao and Moon Light had three perfectly aligned moles under their left arms at armpit level.
As "The Decaying Angel" begins, Toru Yasunaga is at his observation post and watches for the arrival of the cargo ships off the port of Shimizu. Its job is to alert the various port institutions one hour before the boat dock.
Orphan of exceptional beauty, this sixteen-year-old boy is wholly convinced that he does not belong to this world. But, by observing the horizon line, the conviction that he comes from another planet had forged in his mind.
Three moles mark his left side, and the reader quickly understands that Toru is the third reincarnation of Kiyoaki. What will be the relationship between Toru, the young man who looks like an angel and Honda, the older man assaulted by his past demons? The ultimate Mishima tragedy is in place. The outcome is approaching, the central character slowly advances towards the end of his life, and a deep sadness gradually gains the reader who turns, as if with regret, the last pages of "The angel in decay".
He knows that just now, his literary work completed, the great Japanese writer will truncate his pen for the sabre and that the man will go, in the pure samurai tradition, towards the destiny he has chosen. Thus ends this famous tetralogy entitled "The Sea of Fertility" concerning a body of water on the moon (also called "The Sea of Fertility"). Few writers have contemplated the heavens as Mishima did. Many of his novels contain descriptions of the sky and the sky more magnificent than the others, and this strange title was probably not chosen in the hazard.
Oddly enough, when a book fascinates me, I love to drag the last chapters, so I happen to regularly start a new book while the suspense intensifies in the current one. So, of course, this cobblestone of Mishima, with constant twists and turns, has not departed from this habit of making the pleasure last. Moreover, a period of settling between each opus of the tetralogy is not excessive, so much is the author's erudition on historical, philosophical and religious themes.
Some time ago, amazed by the beauty of the prose of "Spring Snow", I was inspired by a splendid reference of Mishima to the constellation Orion to evaluate this first dazzling book. Naturally, therefore, the eight stars of the Orion harness retained during this rating are subjective. (less)
flag26 likes · Like · see review
Jul 11, 2020Omar Sabri rated it really liked it
A great ending to a great tetralogy , the ending is drilled in my memory like a painting I can see Honda on his cane questioning his life , and Satoko guided by her assistant gazing at the garden ( a place that had no memories as Honda said ) with the sunlight streaming on the trees .
flag18 likes · Like · comment · see review
Feb 07, 2013Michael Battaglia rated it it was amazing
Much like listening to Joy Division's "Closer", there's an inescapable feeling of finality when reading the last novel of the quartet that goes beyond simply it being the last novel. If you're at all interested in Mishima or the quartet, you're probably well aware that as soon as Mishima finished the novel, he went out, attempted to stage a coup that failed miserably and then committed a ritual suicide, all of which made perfect sense to him in his worldview but don't seem entirely like the acts of a rational person. Yet we have this. As his death was clearly planned, when reading the final pages of the novel you are definitely reading the last words of a man about to die and who knew that he was about to die. And that knowledge is somewhat haunting.
Not surprisingly the notion of mortality creeps up more than once in the course of the slimmest of the four novels, although the quartet as a whole has been obsessed with the idea of growing older and losing the fire of youth, it seems more poignant here even as Mishima eschews sentimentality almost entirely. We run into Honda again and find the man in his eighties, old enough to realize that the good times are behind him (even though he's quite rich) and prepared to slide into oblivion the same way he has coasted through life, unable or unwilling to leave or make much of an impact. Always at the back of his mind is the notion of reincarnation, embodied by his childhood friend Kiyoaki, who keeps showing up in different guises throughout his life, dying tragically young each time.
This time it seems that his old friend has become an orphan named Toru. Spying those telltale birthmarks, Honda adopts him as a teenager with the intent of watching him grow up and perhaps seeing if he can finally be spared the fate of all the other incarnations and not perish at a young age. Sounds like as good a retirement plan as any, right?
Yet it quickly becomes different. The other incarnations were marked by what Honda perceived as an inner beauty, a fiery passion that was inspiring in the way a bonfire can be. You can stand back and admire it without daring to get too close. Instead Toru seems wayward and petty, not possessed with any grand romance or ideas for Japan, content in casual cruelty and not struck with any arcing ambition. And before long, the old man and the kid are starting to get at each other's throats, with Toru rather fond of seeing the old man die (and nicely inheriting his wealth) while Honda's initial desire to save the youth from what he believes was his fate becomes an insistence on surviving long enough to see him die, so he can have the satisfaction of having lived longer. Meanwhile the world erodes and decays around them both, as Toru's inability to grasp beauty even in the midst of his petty evil makes Honda wonder if he indeed is a reincarnation, or he has perhaps devoted his energy to the wrong course. But his sureness in the rightness of it is what keeps him going, in a sense, the notion of being eternal and lasting beyond what he is, exemplified in the continual reemergence of his old friend.
Its an interesting reversal from the early volumes, a subtle undermining of all that we saw before. Doubts that never existed before begin to linger, the Japan outside Honda slipping further away as we spend more time in his thoughts, even as his thoughts become ossified. Mishima has no love for old age, a disdain that crackles throughout the book but seems to take on a particular focus here. There are moments when the fear of losing the fire of one's youth and settling into senescence practically leaps off the page, a chilling intensity that comes near to desperation. The sensuality that lingered in the pages of "Temple of Dawn" or the raw passion that infused "Runaway Horses" has been replaced here with a crumbling decay that doesn't realize how fragile it has become, a weakly swaggering Honda lost within himself, detached from a Japan that Mishima perceives as already detached from itself, lost in a spiral where the arc is no longer beautiful. The final scenes resonates with a chill that goes past despair, into a cold realization that can only occur when one feels that finally all the layers are stripped away and what remains in undoubtedly the truth.
In the light of this, the ending becomes remarkable, upending everything that both we and Honda have known all along, stripping away the mysticism and philosophy that marked the first volumes and perhaps leaving us with what was there all along, the spaces between words, the spaces that make up words and the voids that comprise ourselves. The blissful continuation of nothing, arrived and achieved. Taken as a whole the volumes of the quartet have done their best to gradually take away the layers we thought existed, setting up a world where we're convinced certain notions are true, against all hope, and by the end reinforcing that our original ideas were true all along. We have no one else, Mishima seems to suggest as the book races toward its and his end, no one else and not even ourselves. Just the universe, maybe, a single point of hard dark light too far away to be touched and unable to be unseen. So what do we have then, when the point is finally grasped? The ending has a suggestion that Mishima may have ultimately taken in its fragile clarity, or his interpretation may have been the only way he could have seen it, having perhaps striven for so long to see what needed to be there, what had to be present. But we negate in our faltering absences, acting without blinking. Thus it becomes. It acts as a mirror that turns us into glass. It becomes better every time I read it. Not truer, but better. It fits where it has to, and in that becomes its own perfection, and maybe worth the effort in ways he was unable to imagine. (less)
flag15 likes · Like · comment · see review
Apr 03, 2021morgan rated it it was amazing
I'm in disbelief on how much I love this book and the rest of the tetralogy 🌸 I'm rather upset that's it's over :( (less)
flag12 likes · Like · 1 comment · see review
Jul 25, 2019Nancy Oakes rated it it was amazing · review of another edition
Shelves: japanese-fiction, translated-fiction, 2019
An excellent ending to a most excellent and powerful series of four novels.
I'm so sad to see it end, and I'm sure I'll be feeling a bit empty for a while.
more to come (less)
flag10 likes · Like · comment · see review
Apr 28, 2022Michael rated it it was amazing · review of another edition
Shelves: mishima-yukio, translation, aa-asialit, multivolume-lit, read-twice-or-more, fantasy, aa-japanlit, zz1970
220428: just finished this tetralogy and in many ways like it even more than the first time. just discovered first reading of first book, Spring Snow, though also read since now twice- (3) was thirty-eight years ago! I feel so old! it was romance of my youth. the next Runaway Horsesbook, could not help but be less to me, also as it was focused on military fanaticism... the third bookThe Temple of Dawn is beautiful and I remember it for the passages on reincarnation and buddhist beliefs... this book The Decay of the Angel I always liked least because the main characters seem to be cruel and manipulative but I understand it better now years later... I could now see the perversity linked with the hope to break causality and save the angel... (less)
flag10 likes · Like · comment · see review
Dec 08, 2017Junta rated it it was amazing
Shelves: reviewed, 5-star, read-in-japanese, japanese, mishima, book-quoting-book
Following on from Eight Conversations I read in February, I read another one of Shiba's books on Japan, "Japan Inside the World—from the 16th Century" this week in which he discusses Japan over the last 500 years from various angles with Japanese scholar Donald Keene, and found a fascinating section on Mishima and this tetralogy (my translation):
Keene: Mr. Shiba, you said that Mishima Yukio was searching for something absolute, and I agree with you. Mishima proposed that the Emperor is an infallible being, but he wasn't talking about the Shōwa Emperor or the Meiji Emperor, but the abstract concept of Emperor.
Shiba: Yes.
Keene: Mishima believed that the abstract and absolute Emperor could do no wrong. I think he thought that if that wasn't the case, then there was no meaning at all in the world. If everything was relative, that the Emperor of Japan was comparable to the Queen of England, then he thought that the world was meaningless.
His final tetralogy is called The Sea of Fertility, but that was a form of irony. When you talk about Fertility, it's the state of being rich in harvest, but Mishima's "Sea of Fertility" is talking about the sea on the moon (reviewer note: Mare Fecunditatis). There is no water in that sea, or for that matter, anything at all. It's just a name. I think Mishima looked at the world, and reached the same conclusion. There's nothing in the world, it's nihilistic, but if there is something, then it's the abstract concept of the Emperor. God would also do, but Mishima didn't believe in God, so he wanted to believe in the abstract Emperor's existence.
He wrote the novel, 英霊の声 Eirei No Koe , in which the kamikaze pilots strongly criticise the Humanity Declaration. If the Emperor is an ordinary human, then they don't know what they're dying for. Mishima thought that if something verging on the absolute wasn't involved, then the heroes' acts were meaningless. Perhaps, in the end, he was unable to believe. And that was the tragedy of Mishima.
Shiba: Mishima Yukio probably used the word 'god' in a special way, and it didn't point to gods like Inari Ōkami or Susanoo-no-mikoto. Mishima's 'God' was a God with a capital G. As you said, Mr. Keene, Mishima wasn't a Christian, so if he were to search for the absolute elsewhere, it would be the Emperor in front of him. However, this wasn't a specific Emperor, but the absolute Emperor he thought he held in his grasp. If this wasn't the case, then he wouldn't be able to write...perhaps he thought of the Emperor not as an ideology but rather as literature, but I'm not sure. Unless he comes here himself to explain, we won't know for sure, but Mr. Keene, you must understand it well, as a feeling. He must have had an admiration for the 'absolute'.
Keene: He must have.
Shiba: And unfortunately, that's nowhere to be found in Japan.
Keene: It's the same with his The Temple of the Golden Pavilion. The Temple itself is absolute. Because the Temple exists, the protagonist, Mizoguchi can't be free. Because absolute beauty is always there in front of his eyes, he can't love women either. Mishima had this strong admiration for such absoluteness.
25 June, 2021
This was a powerful tetralogy, and I would have liked to write something about it, but for now, regarding Japanese classical works and authors, I am also quite happy to just share the thoughts of people like Shiba and Keene! (less)
flag17 likes · Like · 10 comments · see review
Jul 22, 2016Edward rated it it was amazing · review of another edition
Shelves: japanese-literature
How can an angel decay? An "angel" in this context is not the haloed, winged messenger of the Christian deity. In Buddhist cosmology, angels are "celestial beings" who live in the sixth realm of rebirth. Those with good karma can be reborn there, and the pleasure and comfort it offers far exceed that of the human world. However, this is not the unqualified paradise it may sound like. No matter how many eons and kalpas may pass, beings cannot stay in the sixth realm. Like the other realms, good and bad, it is part of samsara--the endless cycle of death and rebirth. A perfect being must eventually fall from perfection. Nothing in the world of samsara is permanent, all is subject to change.
Honda, now an old man on the verge of death, is undergoing change. His wife has died. Wealthy, he no longer needs to work. He looks in the mirror and sees the physical signs of decay advancing daily. The one constant in his life is seeking out the reincarnations of Kiyoaki, all of whom have died by the age of twenty. This time around it appears to be in the form of Toru Yasunaga, a sixteen-year old boy working a menial job far below his abilities.
As the story progresses two themes emerge. Decay is one of course, but also uncertainty. Unlike with the past reincarnations, we are not sure by the end of the novel that Toru is really authentic. Honda himself comes to believe he probably isn't, especially since he does not die at twenty. Decay is evident in Honda and the depiction of human aging, but also in the land itself. Honda visits the famous pine tree of Miho, supposedly the place where a divine being once danced, only to find it full of pollution and tourists. Elsewhere he notes the increasing clutter and debris of modernity, in a passage emblematic of Mishima's disdain for Western innovation:
"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. Among heaps of rubble below cliffs where wild daisies stabbed at the sky were automobile dumps, blue and yellow and black, piled precariously one on the other, the gaudy colors molten in the sun."
This was Mishima's last work before his suicide, and this story takes on greater significance once you know more about what he was thinking, or rather obsessing over during this point in his life. Mishima was a man who desperately wanted to exist, and exist authentically. Writing was one way of doing this, but paradoxically, so was dying. It is fitting that his final book was about death and dying, and the illusion of life.
As the story draws to a close the narrative takes on almost dream-like qualities. Honda returns to Gesshuji to see Satoko, and tries to relive Kiyoaki's last moments there. He becomes both Honda and Kiyoaki, imagining that his friend is waiting for him at the inn, even has Honda himself makes the excruciating climb toward the temple. Arriving at the gate, he thinks to himself "only an instant had passed." I don't believe Mishima intended this to be poetical. Only a moment really has passed. Time is yet another illusion, a figment we insist upon.
Once admitted inside, he (and we) finally see Satoko again, one of the few characters who is not reintroduced in the earlier books. Although older, she is not decayed. Her presence in the first and last books is like bookends, meant to tell us something important. She tells a baffled Honda that she never knew a Kiyoaki, leading him to doubt that anything in the previous books happened, and that "perhaps then there has been no I."
While this may sound like an existential crisis, ending with what seems like a "it was all a dream" trope conclusion, it becomes more than that when you consider Mishima's intense focus on Buddhist doctrines throughout the Sea of Fertility. Honda's existential doubt is essentially the teaching of "anatman"--the belief that because the "self" cannot be located or identified as anywhere or as anything, it does not really exist. One is simply a collection of "skhandas" or phenomena (flesh, blood, bone, etc.) that comes together for a time, and later, disintegrates. These phenomena are "reborn" again and again, but what is reborn is "not you and not another." Realizing this truth is a step on the path to Enlightenment, because it frees you from attachment. Satoko, having attained this wisdom, is not the wizened, disappointed creature Honda is in his old age. He chased phantoms all his life in a quest for some kind of permanence, only to realize at the end that nothing is permanent.
As the reader, we observed Honda much as Honda observed others, and like him we are shocked by revelation. Was any of this real? Why did we believe it was? Honda was convinced that the reincarnations happened mostly because of factors that appeared airtight as evidence, but on second thought may only have been a coincidence. What, in the end, was his proof? Three moles on the left side of a body? Along for the ride, we accepted this reasoning by the final book only to have our confidence dashed. What does it mean to be reborn? What, for that matter, does it mean to live? (less)
flag8 likes · Like · comment · see review
Sep 05, 2010Sarah Magdalene rated it really liked it
Just finished Decay of Angel. I haven't even met the Angel yet (still waiting for Spring Snow to arrive) and he is already decayed. This final novel of Mishimas is sparse but fascinating. It is easy to imagine him deciding that he had had enough by the end of it. There is so much weariness, so much pain, and so much bitterness too. How well he knew the human condition by this stage. Too well I think. Too much awareness is never an easy burden to bear but without it you can't be a great writer. Oh and you have to love kitties too ;P Which he did of course.
The denouement is as shocking and thought provoking as I've come to expect of him. But it has left me feeling a little gloomy. As I knew it would. I was actually quite fond of Honda, so to see him suffer so much is a bit depressing. Like everything I've read of his though, it's a perfect manifestation. He's wrung every last drop of juice from himself. (less)
flag7 likes · Like · comment · see review
Oct 11, 2016Michael Finocchiaro rated it it was amazing
Shelves: fiction, japanese-20th-c, japanese-lit, novels
I need to reread this one, but I recall that it had that same air of misty teahouses and of a melancholy ghost story. Mishima's writing at its finest. (less)
flag11 likes · Like · comment · see review
Apr 17, 2011David rated it it was amazing
Shelves: big-red-circle
This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. Honda (octogenarian sex offender) now thinks that Kiyoaki (beautiful lover), Isao (beautiful fighter) and Ying Chan (beautiful lesbian) have been distilled into something evil and not particularly beautiful: Toru. It's unclear why, but Toru seeks a gruesome revenge on Honda and whilst his machinations seem successful, he's not very good at disguising them from Honda. Frustrated, he resorts to violence and beats Honda with a poker. Betrayed, destroyed and lonely, Honda makes the journey to Satoko for the conversation they could have had 60 years ago.
"Decay of the Angel" seemed very different from the other books. Mishima starts explaining crucial events in summary and skipping great chunks of time (something I'd loved him to have done with the first part of "The Temple of Dawn"). Toru's attack on Honda, the fate of the dream book, the attempted suicide and Honda and Keiko's argument are all passed off in a couple of sentences. It felt, at times, that Mishima was skipping to the end. But it also worked to signify that this incarnation, Toru, lacked the substance and dignity of the others.
I loved Keiko's speech at Christmas dinner, stripping Toru of his pretentions. Unwittingly demonstrating that, through her relationship with Ying Chan, she knows that Toru is no Kiyoaki or Isao:
"There is nothing in the least special about you. I guarantee you a long life. You have not been chosen by the gods, you will never be at one with your acts, you do not have in you the green light to flash like young lightening with the speed of the gods and destroy yourself. All you have is a certain premature senility. Your life will be suited for coupon-clipping. Nothing more." (less)
flag6 likes · Like · 2 comments · see review
Apr 16, 2020Jack rated it really liked it
Shelves: 20th-century, japan
There has been no author I’ve read so opaque as Mishima, despite pretenders. The coincidence of this final novel and his death speak to his fulfillment of his art more powerfully than any literary award. I don’t know what to make of The Sea of Fertility, though I knew back from reading Spring Snow at seventeen that there was something intoxicating in his work. A little dangerous. Imagine if I’d read all these novels before I turned twenty! Not that I have the madness to tear down so absolutely any barrier between life and art.
This particular novel is undoubtedly the weakest, divorced from the context of Mishima’s circumstances, but it makes little sense to do that. A rush-job toward oblivion. It cannot be any more or less perfect than the flawed novel it is. I know of little of Buddhism and can’t in any sense decode the theological elements that take over the story from The Temple of Dawn, but it seems appropriate that Mishima would want a reader that, fundamentally, cannot understand. The full tetralogy is, naturally, five stars. (less)
flag6 likes · Like · 1 comment · see review
Nov 04, 2018Tonymess rated it it was amazing · review of another edition
What a masterful conclusion to “The Sea of Fertility” tetralogy- the whole four works can seem daunting at times, but like the moss on a tree side allow it to slowly envelope you. Do not resist, to fight is futile, decay always prevails.
flag6 likes · Like · comment · see review
May 11, 2019Morgan rated it really liked it · review of another edition
Shelves: own, translation, fiction, novel, philosophy
Not sure how I liked this ending. I loved the parts about the sea, but I was expecting a different ending. Keep in mind he finished this book the day before he killed himself. In my opinion, that makes this book even harder to rate.
flag6 likes · Like · comment · see review
Jan 26, 2013Christopher rated it it was amazing
Yukio Mishima's The Decay of the Angel is the last volume of his “Sea of Fertility”. It is also the last book he wrote. On November 25, 1970 he sent the manuscript off to the publisher, then went to incite the soldiers of Japan's military headquarters to a coup d'etat. When he failed, he committed seppuku. As might be expected, The Decay of the Angel contains much that that relates to Mishima's dissatisfaction with life, and the cosmic nihilism that he promised would be the ultimate theme of the tetralogy comes to the forefront. The ending is also possibly the most shocking in all of literature.
The year is now 1970, and Shikeguni Honda adopts a young orphan named Toru, who he believes is the third successive reincarnation of Kiyoaki. The decay present throughout the book is especially present in Honda, who we meet as as a man of seventy-six and who reaches eighty-one by the novel's end. His physical health, memory, and wife are gone. He keeps company with Keiko, the former neighbour whose secret formed the climax of The Temple of Dawn, and they talk inanely about senility and medical ailments. But it's also present in Toru who, although young, possesses none of the beauty of Kiyoaki, the dedication of Isao, or the allure of Ying Chan. In fact, Toru is pure evil, and the bulk of the novel is his plot to destroy his adoptive father. The political commentary here is much more subtle than I expected it to be, considering that Mishima ended his life as a nationalist. Japan is plagued by a loss of its own traditions--Keiko shows interest in Japanese culture, but Honda remarks that she treats it as a hobby instead of authentically living it. The country is overrun with Coca-Cola ads and student radicals. But all in all, it is the mind of Honda that is the important setting, not the country around him.
By far the most impressive part of the novel is its surprise ending, which demolishes the entire “Sea of Fertility” cycle in a most impressive way when Honda meets Satoko again, who tells him either the mundane truth or the secret to enlightenment itself. The lectures on transmigration and the self which formed such a large part of The Temple of Dawn are there for a reason, and what Mishima does with the no-self philosophy of Buddhism is awesome. If you've read one or more of the earlier volumes and are uncertain about pressing on, I exhort you to make it through this one. Looking back on the cycle, I admire its clever design, where the first two novels set a precedent and the second two undo it, and the general arc where we track Honda from youth to senescence, and Kiyoaki from a praise-worthy youth to despicable brat is skillfully done. The series as a whole is brilliant, read it all. (less)
flag5 likes · Like · comment · see review
May 19, 2014J rated it it was amazing
Shelves: japanese-literature
This starts off kind of slow, and Mishima spends a lot of time boggled down with bleak, repetitious descriptions of Toru's ship-watching job juxtaposed with Honda as he enters old age. But eventually, things pick up and suddenly your flung into the middle of a psycho-sexual triangle coupled on top of the cat and mouse game of wounded aesthetic reveries between an old man and his chosen disciple. They don't really confront each other as much as their morbid, damaged, gorgeously rendered reveries kind of bounce off of each other.
And the ending...Jesus. It scorches. This is probably one of only 2-3 books I've ever read in my life that made me tear up multiple times. The final pages show Honda, after sixty years, desperately trying to make sense of the doomed soul that has crossed his life in so many forms already, and which in the final moments of the book, are brilliantly called into question, not with a flagrant, overwrought showpiece (bread and butter for Mishima) but in a staggering act of negation and contemplation.
The sea of Fertility taken as whole is a stunningly written book about the profound shifts in modern Japanese life at a social, political, psychological, economic and, somehow, even a spiritual level. Yukio Mishima's final written words complete something that comes close to being a national epic in an age when the very idea of a national epic is laughable. There are some rough moments between the 4 novels that make up this series but this is an often stunning, always ambitious literary project that deserves to be more widely read. Highly Recommended. (less)
flag5 likes · Like · comment · see review
Apr 07, 2021Dominika rated it liked it
3.5
There were parts I enjoyed that make this book different from the previous ones (yay for shorter elaboration on philosophical questions and relation between the heroes which was somewhat deeper). Toru is something fresh and mischevious, yet interesting to follow. Yet there were parts which felt like Mishima had troubles with proper closure and idea for that.
flag4 likes · Like · comment · see review
Nov 20, 2014Andrew added it
Shelves: yukio-mishima, japanese-fiction
I really don't know where to start with this. As a novel, it is in so many ways, uneven, laden with clunky symbolism, and the truly embarrassing conceit of “and now, I'm going to be EVIL!!!”
And yet, carried by Mishima's graceful prose, it works. And it contains some killer parts, a wonderful monologue by an embittered old lady, and a weird, floaty, elliptical ending that draws in like the closing scene in an Antonioni film. Despite some rather lame premises, Mishima is still able to subvert the expectations of this seasoned consumer of narrative.
I recently finished Boardwalk Empire, and wondered why it is that all these arty TV dramas still hold onto the Shakespearean ending with the death or the wedding of the protagonist. I want to shake them, tell them “there's another way this can be done!”
(less)
flag4 likes · Like · comment · see review
Apr 27, 2009Sagar rated it it was amazing
Shelves: the-list, to-buy, read-in-kazakhstan
The Sea of Fertility by Yukio Mishima
“The most complete vision we have of Japan in the twentieth century.”
-Paul Theroux
On the morning of November 25th 1970, the three-time Nobel nominee and 45 year old Yukio Mishima (the pen name of Hiraoka Kimitake) finished The Decay of the Angel, the final book in his seminal Sea of Fertility tetralogy. It was published into the world much akin to John Kennedy Tool's A Confederacy of Dunces: as renowned for its literary me...more The Sea of Fertility by Yukio Mishima
“The most complete vision we have of Japan in the twentieth century.”
-Paul Theroux
On the morning of November 25th 1970, the three-time Nobel nominee and 45 year old Yukio Mishima (the pen name of Hiraoka Kimitake) finished The Decay of the Angel, the final book in his seminal Sea of Fertility tetralogy. It was published into the world much akin to John Kennedy Tool's A Confederacy of Dunces: as renowned for its literary merit, as it was for the strange circumstances surrounding its publication.
After turning in the final draft to his editor for publication he gathered together the members of Tatenokai (the Shield Society), his private army. They stormed the Japanese Self Defense Force in Ichigaya, and after securing control of the complex Mishima delivered an impassioned speech to the troops, calling for them to throw off the shackles of Western influence and return Japan to its pure roots.
Rather than inspire a coup d’etat, the soldiers refused to listen to Mishima’s speech, jeering and mocking him instead.. After finishing, Mishima calmly retreated from the balcony. After writing 40 novels, 18 plays, 20 short story collections, over 20 collections of essays, a libretto and a film, the incredibly prolific Mishima committed ritual suicide by seppuku in the commandant's office.
Born into a samurai family in 1925, Mishima was raised to serve The Emperor in the wake of WWI while Japanese society was beginning what would become rapid Westernization. Widely considered one of the most important voices of Japanese post-war literature, the Sea of Fertility is his crowning masterpiece.
The title stems from the large, dark and basaltic plain on Earth’s Moon, called the Mare Fecunditatis (The Sea of Fecundity or Fertility). It is located at about the same place on the moon as Japan and the Sea of Japan are located on the Earth, and the lunar sea itself resembles an upside down sea of Japan. This obvious inverted allusion to dualism/pluralism is strongly resonant throughout the saga. Named maria (Latin for “seas”), they were originally mistaken by early astronomers. This obviously Western allusion further fuels the conflicted dualism of East/West that Mishima asserts as the downfall of classical Japanese culture and success.
The books are separated into time periods, covering about 60 years of Japanese 20th century history. Spring Snow looks at Japan wrestling with the integration of the Western world into Japanese culture in a post WWI climate. The story focuses on the ill-fated romance between 19 year old Kiyoaki Matsugae, his “star-crossed lover” Satoko Ayakura, and Kiyoaki’s best friend Shigekuni Honda who bears witness to the tragedy. Despite the book’s focus on Kiyoaki, Honda is the true protagonist of the tetralogy, and as begins to lose more and more of its national character, Honda follows Kiyoaki on an epic transmigration of the soul.
Runaway Horses picks up 19 years after the end of Spring Snow and Mishima at once dives into the rising political climate leading up to the second World War. Honda follows young Isao Iinuma and his rampant nationalistic spirit while slowly realizing Isao bears the soul of his long deceased friend Kiyoaki. Complete with a 100 page novel-within-a-novel, romanticized depictions of seppuku, assassination plots and the beginnings of a lengthy meditation on Buddhist transmigration of the soul, Honda narrates Japan through the increasingly polarized separation of the Japanese classes in the years before the outbreak of the war.
The most heavily outright philosophic of the four novels, The Temple of Dawn spends almost a full quarter of the book following Honda’s inquiries into Zen Buddhism, his various interpretations on transmigration vis-à-vis Theravada, and Mahayana Buddhist philosophy, Hinduism and a pilgrimage through the ancient Indian holy city of Benares.
Confusing the pattern of Kiyoaki/Isao’s rebirth, this time Honda is shocked to find the soul of his friend inhabiting the body of the beautiful Thai princess Ying-Chan (Princess Moonlight), who as a young girl, maintains the memories of her previous lives. As she matures, and eventually makes her way to Japan, however, Honda finds she demonstrates no recollection of her childhood or her previous incarnations. Mishima continues to use the backdrop of historical Japan as a dramatic set for his incredibly well crafted and complex characters. A prime example is the progression of Honda’s relationship with Ying-Chan, which begins at the onset of Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, and continues to its dramatic conclusion in the wake of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as the Americans occupy Japan, rapidly and forcefully Westernizing Japan overnight.
Mishima finished the tetralogy with an apocalyptic mirror exposing the modern Japanese soul with his The Decay of the Angel. Honda finally becomes a father, as he adopts the brilliant, heartless and malicious orphan Tōru Yasunaga. Tōru is the antithesis of Kiyoaki. In fact, Mishima concludes the migration of the dying angelic soul through a synthesis of his previous incarnations ending in nothingness.
The body of work, which amounts to almost 1,400 pages across the four texts, was translated by 3 different translation teams (Spring Snow and Runaway Horses were both done by the same translator) but the sheer strength and precision of Mishima’s prose transcends any variation in the mood throughout the series. His sentences are sharp, clear and bursting with life. He has a talent for creating incredibly detailed and visceral scenes to allow his characters to meander about within. Reading Mishima is an experience like no other, as his writing forces the reader to slow down and enjoy each unique sentence as a drop of poetry. From within his beautifully created universe his talent to penetrate the psyche of his characters and create such vivid and living people seems almost unparalleled in contemporary Japanese literature.
A truly momentous work of the 20th century, and one of the most intriguing depictions of Japan from one of her most passionate advocates; I can not strongly enough recommend it. As it is an investment in time, energy, constant thought and contemplation, The Sea of Fertility is a far cry from standard brain candy, but it is an investment with a high yield of return, and one that will remain with you long after the soul of Kiyoaki is put to rest. (less)
flag3 likes · Like · comment · see review
Mar 25, 2012Kirstie rated it really liked it
Recommended to Kirstie by: Rory
This is really more like a 4 1/2 star novel..but of course Goodreads is a bit limiting at times. In any case, I was really intrigued when I found out that Mishima had committed ritual suicide after this one. There is a great deal more of depth and much less innocence than The Sound of Waves (had you not guessed that by the title, though? I mean, really!) There is also a great deal about the sea and waves in this one nonetheless and parallels with humans and angels. There is madness, delusions, youth, and aging..there is the idea of pure evil and it is quite vivid. But at the end, it's not completely clear how much we as a reader were also deceived and how to sort it all out...which I suppose just makes this novel even more interesting and one to fathom further in future readings.
I like the deeper novels that make you think..the ones rich with a sense of philosophy to ponder and make you wonder about your own beliefs as well. I think this is a great work but I wish that it was at least 100 more pages longer at a minimum to really develop the characters themselves even further. I think the novel at its strengths has some interesting story lines and in terms of the character development, there are some intriguing contrasts but I tend to want more like Dostoevsky would do, for instance. I like to feel like I have epically grown with the characters.
In any case, there are some amazing insights in this novel and it is one I am sure I will come back to as I grow older. The language itself, especially the imagery, is so very vivid that it will not easily be forgotten.
Favorite quotes:
pg 1" 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."
pg. 13-14 "There had to be a realm where at the limit of all the layers of clarity it was definite that nothing at all made an appearance. a realm of solid, definite indigo, where seeing cast of the shackles of consciousness and itself became transparent, where phenomena and consciousness dissolved like plumbic oxide in acetic acid."
pg 15 "The joy of seeing, where everything was self evident and given, lay only at the invisible horizon, far beyond the sea. Why need there by surprise? Despite the fact that deceit was delivered at every door every morning without fail, like the milk."
"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."
pg. 24 "There was a wild restlessness in the long and short lights, as if in among the clusters of solid lights a single light were mad with joy. The voice calling out from afar over the dark sea was like the voice of a madwoman. A metal voice crying out sadly though not sad, pleading an agony of joy."
pg 33 "The voices of children were like splinters of lass. Toru liked to look at people as at animals in a zoo..."
pg 40 "It was like night in a zoo of emotions. Cries and laughter came from all the pens and all the cages."
pg 41 "Rainbows will soon be animals too, at this rate. Rainbow animals."
pg 43 "Sixty years had gone by, as an instant. Something came over him to drive away his consciousness of old age, a sort of pleading, as if he had buried his face in her warm bosom."
pg 55 "Honda said to himself: ' The moment I die they will all go' The thought came to him as a happy one, a sort of revenge. IT would be no trouble at all, tearing this world up by the roots and returning it to the void. All he had to do was die. He took a certain minor pride in the thought that an old man who would be forgotten still had in death this incomparably destructive weapon. For him the five signs of decay held no fear."
pg. 66 "And the watch, solitary in the field of white plastic, carrying on an intercourse almost sexual with the sea, through the day and through the night, intimidated by harbor and ship, until gazing became pure madness. The whiteness, the abandonment of the self, the uncertainty and loneliness were themselves a ship."
pg 87 "Yes. The waves as they broke were a manifest vision of death. It seemed to him that they had to be. They were mouths agape at the moment of death.
Gasping in agony, they trailed numberless threads of saliva. Each purple in the twilight became a livid mouth.
Into the gasping mouth of the sea plunged death. Showing death nakedly time and time again, the sea was like a constabulary. It swiftly disposed of the bodies, hiding them from public gaze."
pg. 101 "Among clouds like antique white clay images of warriors were some that suggested dragons twisting angrily and darkly upward. Some as they lost their shape, were tinged rose. "
pg. 113 'The world does not approve of flying. Wings are dangerous weapons. They invite self destruction before they can be used."
pg. 137 "The shadows were the substance. They had been eaten away by the shadows, by the deep melancholy of a concept. That was not life, thought Honda. It was something less easy to excuse."
pg. 143 "But of course the world feels secure when the monstrous is reality."
pg, 154 "I suppose that thus thus rolling in the dark a woman feels only the wheel that runs over her."
pg. 209-210 "Senility was a proper ailment of both the spirit and the flesh, and the fact that senility was an incurable disease meant that existence was an incurable disease. It was a disease unrelated to existentialist theories, the flesh itself being the disease, latent death.
History knew the truth. History was the most inhuman product of humanity.It scooped up the whole of human will and, like the goddess Kali in Calcutta, dripped blood from its mouth as it bit and crunched."
(less)
flag3 likes · Like · 6 comments · see review
Sep 07, 2012Guillermo Galvan rated it it was amazing
I finally did it. I finished Mishima's Sea of Fertility series, the most philosophically twisted series ever written. This final book is the thorny crown gouged into the king's head.
Honda discovers a young man he believes to be the reincarnation of his friend. Somehow Honda adopts the boy and anguishes over his expected death at age 20. Things don't go as Honda hoped to foresee them.
Mishima committed suicide immediately after this book was completed. I had to wonder what was the state of his mind as he wrote this book. Out of the series, The Decay of the Angel is the most abstract. It begins with long passages of Toru, the reincarnated friend, staring at the ocean's horizon waiting for ships to appear. At times the writing dissolves into a disjointed poetry, lost in a state of mind that denies meaning, then reforms into solid realism. This was annoying because I wanted to know what happened in the story, not dwell in the lofty observations of some teenage transcendentalist. But slowly the realizations arose that Mishima intended this to be more than an ordinary novel, it was his farewell statement to the world.
The tone of the book is excessively bitter and narcissistic. Mishima tortures his main characters with an astonishing hatred worthy of some crazed god. Midway the story threatens to come apart and deprive us of a well deserved resolution. The short page count put me on edge, "Can he save this story, this series! with only X number of pages remaining?" Fortunately, that's exactly what he did and it was fucking exciting to have experienced unfold. And the ending! Oh, man, it outright stunned me. I would have crashed my car if I were listening to the audio book.
Mishima left us with a final message of cosmic nihilism that resounds long after the book is finished, compound that with the fact he cut open his stomach afterwards, and the effect is profoundly bleak. His obsession with beauty, and phobia of losing it, reaches a fevered pitch in this closing chapter. His ultra vanity convinced him that it's better to die at pinnacle of one's youth than to decay into old age. Doesn't that sound like some Hollywood diva? That'll always annoy me. Anyhow, the entire series is amazing, each book able to stand on its own but charging the overall story forward to a spectacular conclusion.
(less)
flag3 likes · Like · comment · see review
Sep 27, 2015DeanJean rated it really liked it · review of another edition
Shelves: japanese-literature
I think about life, and I think about death...and then I think some more, and now I prefer neither over the other. Human existence is absurdly comedic, and painfully miniscule simultaneously. There is no such thing as a heroic death nowadays....
flag3 likes · Like · comment · see review
Mar 15, 2020Azin (kade lover no.1) rated it did not like it · review of another edition
Shelves: dnf
Dnf at page 80
Oh im so pretty:)))pretty girls have it so hard in life:))))specially when they have a rich father:)))))if you ever think im pretty im not gonna be your friend anymore:)))))
Anyways life's too short to read books im not enjoying (less)
flag3 likes · Like · comment · see review
No comments:
Post a Comment