The Decay of the Angel (The Sea of Fertility, #4) in mishima

Sep 05, 2010 Sarah 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. O ...more

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Jan 08, 2025 Jack rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. "I wonder when I first fell into the habit of washing my hands after each brush with humanity, lest I be contaminated." as a germaphobe, same

Both everything I could have possibly wanted and never would have guessed I needed from a conclusion. Enriching my appreciation for the previous installments even further, the aesthetic master's masterstroke is both enlightening and entrancingly bittersweet, by the end feeling like some sort of necessary heartbreak. Mishima held out the earth and journey of "I wonder when I first fell into the habit of washing my hands after each brush with humanity, lest I be contaminated." as a germaphobe, same

Both everything I could have possibly wanted and never would have guessed I needed from a conclusion. Enriching my appreciation for the previous installments even further, the aesthetic master's masterstroke is both enlightening and entrancingly bittersweet, by the end feeling like some sort of necessary heartbreak. Mishima held out the earth and journey of man to me, with all its desires, dreams, repulsion, regrets, only to tell me that this is it. Accept it or don't. The idea of reincarnation all this time being a personal comfort rather than a higher form of spiritual guidance is, again, bittersweet, but this acceptance of our existence and the end of the road comes off unexpectedly beautiful - even for the author's standards. It's a finale to both this story (and partly his life) that leaves me with even more emotionally than each of the three major events that took place in the tales of Spring Snow, Runaway Horses and The Temple of Dawn. I've met people that found his work absurd or morbid, but The Decay of the Angel proves otherwise. Honda's character arc throughout this tetralogy truly felt like a life lived and in some ways an examination of the route of man itself, what he can and cannot accept. Some of the newly introduced characters of this part in Tōru and Kinue are a delight, Tōru in particular is surely one of the most real-feeling characters Mishima ever wrote.

The idea of an artist's final work being their "greatest" feels rather cliché to me, I think the context of how one approaches their body of work has a lot of influence on a reaction. I purposefully spaced out each of the four novels in this series between other reads, and I write this while attempting to push aside all recency bias... there's so much to be said about this book, both as a sequel, finale, and its own individual narrative with Mishima's signature lavish and seductive writing that it *might* just propel it to being his definitive masterpiece, or at least we can consider The Sea of Fertility to be such if we choose to look at it as a whole. I leave only wishing that I could thank the man himself for his soul-peering writing! At least I can thank the translators... it would be everything if we could get Kyoko's House in English, though 😅

"Wrapped in paper, the flower would be like a dead butterfly. There was pollen for wing dust, letting one imagine that when it lived it had flown. Dead wings and dead petals are the same. The remembrance of color that has flown through the sky, and the remembrance of color in stillness and resignation." ...more

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