Details Books As 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
Specify 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 |
Representaion 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 ReviewsCrit Of Books The Decay of the Angel (The Sea of Fertility #4)
Whats 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 halfHonda (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
I think this book is a tour de force by an exceptionally skilled writer. Wrapping up his The Sea of Fertility series, this book weaves the threads of the three previous books into an amazingly rich tapestry.Following the formula established by books two and three, Honda once again finds a young person he believes to be a reincarnation of his childhood friend Kiyoaki. Unlike prior circumstances, this time Honda goes all in with this belief. Without revealing too much, it does not go as well as
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.
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
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
No comments
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.