The Decay of the Angel

by Yukio Mishima Book 4 in the The Sea of Fertility series.

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Japan, late 1960s. The elderly Honda notices sixteen-year-old harbour signalman Tōru Yasunaga and identifies familiar birthmarks that suggest another reincarnation. He adopts Tōru, educates him and makes him his heir, expecting the boy to die at twenty like Kiyoaki, Isao and Ying Chan. Tōru instead proves calculating, contemptuous and determined to control Honda’s household and fortune.

Against the consumer wealth and altered landscapes of postwar Japan, Honda’s final experiment strips the reincarnation pattern of romance and heroism. Tōru’s cruelty, Keiko Hisamatsu’s intervention and Honda’s last visit to Satoko at Gesshū Temple force an unsettling question: whether the lives that governed Honda’s memory ever formed a coherent sequence at all.