The Decay Of The Angel by Yukio Mishima Read Free Book Online

longer. I want just one more canasta before I die. That’s all I want, my very last wish. My last canasta, Mrs. Hisamatsu.”
    “Don’t say it again, Galina.”
    This curious exchange made Honda, whose hand came to nothing at all, think of waking up in the morning.
    What he had seen first each morning since turning seventy was the face of death. Sensing the arrival of dawn in the faint light at the paper doors, he would be awakened by a strangling accumulation of mucus. During the night mucus accumulated into a red-black mass and nurtured its own nightmarish stiffness. Someday someone would perform for him the service of taking it between chopsticks and cleanly lifting it away.
    The lump of mucus, like bêche-de-mer, would inform Honda afresh each morning that he was still alive. And with the awareness of life it would bring a fear of death.
    Honda was in the habit of giving himself over to a flow of dreams each morning. Like a cow, he would ruminate.
    The dreams were bright and sparkling, much fuller of the happiness of life than life itself. Gradually dreams of boyhood and youth came to predominate. In a dream he would taste the hotcakes his mother had made one snowy morning.
    Why should a meaningless little episode be so insistent? No doubt precisely because it was a meaningless little episode remembered hundreds of times over a half century. Honda could not himself understand the hold on his memory.
    The last traces of the old breakfast room had probably disappeared, so often had the Hongō house been rebuilt. A fifth-year student in the secondary course at Peers, Honda had on his return from school—it would have been a Saturday—gone with a friend to call at a faculty house, and so proceeded homeward, hungry and without an umbrella.
    He usually came in through the kitchen door, but today he went around to look at the snow in the garden. The matting to protect the pines from the winter cold was flecked with white. The stone lanterns were capped with white brocade. His shoes squeaking across the snow, he caught a distant glimpse of his mother’s skirt at the knee-high window of the breakfast room. He was at home.
    “You must be hungry. Come on in, but brush the snow off first.”
    His mother pulled her kimono tight together. Taking off his coat, Honda slipped into the kotatsu . As if she were trying to remember something, his mother blew on the embers. She brushed a wisp of hair up away from the ashes.
    “Wait just a minute,” she said between breaths. “I have something good for you.”
    Placing a small pan on the embers, she rubbed it with greased paper. She poured neat circles of batter on the hot grease.
    It was the taste of those hotcakes that Honda so often remembered in dreams: the taste of honey and melted butter that snowy afternoon. He could remember nothing more delicious.
    But why should that one detail have become the germ of a memory he was to carry through life? There could be no doubt that this unwonted fit of gentleness on the part of his severe mother had added to the enjoyment. There was a strange sadness entangled with the memory: the profile of his mother as she blew on the embers; the glow on her cheeks as they lighted up, with each breath, embers that were not permitted to warm the parlor of this frugal house, dusky even in the light from the snow; the play of light and darkness, shadows coming over his mother’s cheeks each time she took a breath. And perhaps concealed in the intensity of her motions and the rare display of gentleness was a pain that she had refused all her life to give voice to. Perhaps it had come transparently and immediately across to him, in the full round flavor of the hotcakes, through the untrained young palate, in the sense of affection. Only thus could the sadness find explanation.
    Sixty years had gone by, as an instant. Something came over him to drive away his consciousness of old age, a sort of pleading, as if he had buried his face in her warm