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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.
From the Trade Paperback edition.
- Sales Rank: #465540 in eBooks
- Published on: 2013-04-09
- Released on: 2013-04-09
- Format: Kindle eBook
Review
"A major literary creation" New York Times "This tetralogy is considered one of Yukio Mishima's greatest works. It could also be considered a catalogue of Mishima's obsessions with death, sexuality and the samurai ethic. Spanning much of the 20th century, the tetralogy begins in 1912 when Shigekuni Honda is a young man and ends in the 1960s with Honda old and unable to distinguish reality from illusion. En route, the books chronicle the changes in Japan that meant the devaluation of the samurai tradition and the waning of the aristocracy" Washington Post "One of the great writers of the twentieth century" Los Angeles Times "Japan's foremost man of letters" Spectator "Mishima's novels exude a monstrous and compulsive weirdness, and seem to take place in a kind of purgatory for the depraved" -- Angela Carter
Language Notes
Text: English, Japanese (translation)
From the Inside Flap
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.
Most helpful customer reviews
12 of 13 people found the following review helpful.
A fine last volume leading up to a nihilistic but utterly fascinating ending.
By Christopher Culver
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.
31 of 33 people found the following review helpful.
The end of literature.
By Angry Mofo
On November 25, 1970, Yukio Mishima went to a Japanese army base. He was accompanied by a number of his young admirers, who called themselves the "Shield Society" and sought to embody an idealized Japanese martial tradition. Together with these followers, Mishima held the commander hostage and demanded that the soldiers at the base be gathered together. He stepped out onto the balcony and gave a fiery speech in which he encouraged the soldiers to overthrow the government and restore power to the Emperor. The speech was soundly mocked and ridiculed. Mishima returned inside and killed himself in the way prescribed by the samurai code, by slashing open his stomach with a Japanese sword. He was forty-five years old.
That very same morning, Mishima had finished his last novel, The Decay of the Angel. He handed it in to the publisher and only then went to his death. It was the last in a cycle of four novels which Mishima called "The Sea of Fertility."
In doing so, Mishima put the finishing touch on the riddle of his life. After his suicide, many people tried to figure out his motive for conceiving and carrying out his failed coup. Naturally, the first thing that occurred to them was to search for the answer in his books. Mishima was a man who had many thoughts and ideas and was never shy about expressing them. Surely his final works should reveal his mind at the end of his life, as a kind of philosophical will. Surely.
What kind of final thoughts might we expect from a man who was called a right-wing extremist, a militant nationalist? Perhaps such a man might use the closing paragraphs of his final novel to make a statement about the glory of Japan, or the honour of the samurai. Or he might rage against the corruption of the government, or a lack of morals among young people. But politics are completely absent from The Decay of the Angel. Not a single page of the book contains so much as a hint of the ideas that Mishima talked about in his last speech. It is as if those issues don't even exist.
And now we turn to think about the entire Sea of Fertility. What was the final point of this last work, over 1500 pages long? Mishima repeatedly said that he knew it was his best work. Anyone who reads it can see the meticulous planning that went into the storyline. If Mishima didn't want to talk about the ideals that he supposedly held, what did he want to express?
In the first two books of the tetralogy, Mishima described beautiful young people who were driven by destructive passions to their deaths. One fell in love with a woman, the other was roused by revolutionary ideas. Mishima's biographer John Nathan thinks that this was Mishima's point. He believed in passion for its own sake, and in his view such passion always led to death. For him, politics were just one way to achieve this exalted state.
But doesn't the conclusion undermine this view? The Decay of the Angel contains no such depictions. More than that, Mishima undermines the value of the passion in the previous novels by making the fourth "incarnation" false. To the eighty-year-old Honda, the previous three characters are gone forever. The final few pages hint that their explosive emotions were without substance.
In the third book, many pages are devoted to an exposition of Buddhist thought. This theme pops up in the first book as well. Of course, Mishima took the whole idea of reincarnation from Buddhism as well. Was Mishima a Buddhist? Did he want to affirm Buddhist doctrines?
But again, the "false incarnation" seriously undermines that theme. And the end calls into doubt whether the other incarnations ever took place. Thus, where Buddhist mysticism dominated the first half of the third book, here it is completely gone.
The first two books, especially the first one, seem to paint a broad picture of Japanese society in the first half of the twentieth century. Did Mishima want to use the Sea of Fertility to chart what he perceived as Japan's moral decline?
But in the last book, society may as well not exist either. Almost all of it takes place in Honda's head. The only other characters are even more marginal and isolated from society than he is. And in retrospect, society gradually disappears throughout the whole tetralogy, and may not even have had much importance to begin with.
Marguerite Yourcenar suggested that Mishima was driven by a "vision" of a "Buddhist void." According to this interpretation, he had to die in order to become one with it. But again, Mishima's final book makes Buddhism look questionable. And the very notion of a "void" that one can merge with is much more tangible than the ending. Nor does Mishima imply that it is possible to achieve any such union through death. On the contrary, the ending deprives death of value.
Mishima is said to have idealized youth and physical fitness. Clearly Honda's old age was distasteful to him. But the youth of the "false incarnation" is just as distasteful. And the youth of the characters in the first three books may as well have never been. Even Satoko's brilliant eyes disappear.
What else is left?
6 of 8 people found the following review helpful.
Frustratingly Good
By A Customer
While Spring Snow remains my favourite book in this amazing series, The Decay of the Angel is the most... elusive. Mishima's message decays right along side his characters, and that in itself is a work of great artistry. To introduce us to interesting, well realized characters and to slowly over the course of four books degrade them and pull them out of the realm of literature into a kind of near-tabloid reality is as cunning as it is disturbing. This book has a lot going for it and it has a strong message, but what exactly that message is remains to be seen.
Trivia fact: After mailing the manuscript for this book Mishima led a failed nationalist uprising and comitted ritual seppuku following his failure. (Or maybe just to save himself having to asnwer: "what does this mean?!"
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