Point Books Toward The Decay of the Angel (The Sea of Fertility #4)
| Original Title: | 天人五衰 [Tennin Gosui] |
| ISBN: | 009928457X (ISBN13: 9780099284574) |
| Edition Language: | English |
| Series: | The Sea of Fertility #4 |
| Characters: | Shigekuni Honda |
Yukio Mishima
Paperback | Pages: 236 pages Rating: 4.13 | 2943 Users | 211 Reviews
Mention Of Books The Decay of the Angel (The Sea of Fertility #4)
| Title | : | The Decay of the Angel (The Sea of Fertility #4) |
| Author | : | Yukio Mishima |
| Book Format | : | Paperback |
| Book Edition | : | Reprint |
| Pages | : | Pages: 236 pages |
| Published | : | January 2nd 2001 by Vintage (first published November 1970) |
| Categories | : | Fiction. Cultural. Japan. Asian Literature. Japanese Literature. Literature |
Interpretation Concering Books The Decay of the Angel (The Sea of Fertility #4)
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)[The plot revolves around a love story between a boy and the daughter of the neighboring household. They have known each other all their lives and she has loved him since they were children. But his feelings toward her are on-again, off-again; he mistreats her and pretends he doesn’t care for her. Finally she gives up on him and becomes engaged to a son of a noble family, actually a member of the Emperor’s household. At this point (she’s 21; he’s 19), and after the engagement has been approved by the Emperor himself, finally he decides he loves her and begins to pursue her. They begin a sexual relationship and she becomes pregnant. If word of any of this gets out, it would be the equivalent of a national scandal! When the boy’s father learns what is going on, after spending his whole life ass-kissing the emperor and the nobles, to say he is apoplectic is putting it mildly. Never having lifted a hand to his son before, he beats him with a pool cue. She enters a convent and the son later dies of a disease. (hide spoiler)]
Spoiler for the second volume, Runaway Horses: (view spoiler)[A young boy of high school age leads a band of youths (average age 18) who want to restore honor to the Emperor. They are fiercely anti-western and anti-capitalist. With rice famines and great rural poverty (it’s around 1932, still before World War II but during the worldwide Great Depression), they blame the newly-wealthy Western-oriented capitalists who have taken over the parliament, deprived the Emperor of power, and weakened the honor of the samurai class. (They can’t carry swords, for example.) The boys are not just anti-western, they even refer to “Buddhist lackeys” and want to restore more of the original Japanese religion, Shinto. The boys hatch a plan to assassinate the upper echelons of the capitalist leadership and then kill themselves by seppuku, ritual suicide. But their plotting is betrayed to the police. Honda, their lawyer gets them off, but the boy still kills one of richest men in Japan and then commits ritual suicide. (hide spoiler)]
Spoiler for third volume, The Temple of Dawn. (view spoiler)[The boy is reincarnated as a young woman, a princess in Thailand. The young woman is kept isolated because she is considered mentally disturbed because she talks of having lived other lives in Japan. Honda meets with her and even quizzes her on dates and is satisfied that she is the ‘real thing.’ Other than these ‘memories,’ which disappear as she gets older, the young woman is quite normal and eventually visits Honda’s family in Japan. There he spies on her to confirm that she has the ‘three moles’ on her chest that mark the reincarnated individuals. (And for those who follow these things, it is actually common for individuals who claim to be reincarnated to lose those memories of past lives as they leave childhood.) (hide 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
Rating Of Books The Decay of the Angel (The Sea of Fertility #4)
Ratings: 4.13 From 2943 Users | 211 ReviewsAppraise Of Books The Decay of the Angel (The Sea of Fertility #4)
Of all the books that I've read so far, this has got to be the hardest book to review. I feel like my love for this book stems mainly from certain aspects that have little to do with the book itself.As an admirer of Yukio Mishima, this book meant much more to me than any other novel of his, since it documented his last thoughts before his poetic demise. The finished manuscript waited on the desk as he turned his life into the "Line of Poetry written with a splash of Blood" that he had longedWhats this one about, do you suppose? There is in all translations of Mishimas work I have readby a host of translatorsa 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 Mishimas use of archaisms means he doesnt translate well into English. I dont know. But this fourth volume of The Sea of Fertility tetralogy seems to me in the first half
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
There has been no author Ive 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 dont 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 Id read all these novels before I turned twenty! Not that I have the madness to tear down so absolutely any
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.
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
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