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

bosom.
    Something, running through sixty years in a taste of hot-cakes on a snowy day, something that brought knowledge to him, dependent not on an awareness of life but rather on a distant, momentary happiness, destroying the darkness of life at least for that moment, as a light far out on a dark moor destroys an infinity of darkness.
    A moment. Honda could feel that nothing at all had happened in the interval separating the Honda of sixteen from the Honda of seventy-six. An instant, time for a child in a game of hopscotch to hop over a ditch.
    He had seen often enough how the Dream Diary kept so faithfully by Kiyoaki had come true. He had had evidence enough of the superiority of dreams to waking. But he had not thought that his own life would ever be so filled with dreams. There was happiness in the dreams that poured over him like floods over Thai paddy lands; but they had only nostalgia for a past that would not return to set against the delicious fragrance of Kiyoaki’s dreams. A young man who had not dreamed had become an old man who dreamed occasionally, and that was all. His dreams had little to do with symbol or with imagination.
    This chewing-over of dreams as he lay in bed each morning came in part from a fear of the arthritic pains that were certain to follow. With the memory of yesterday’s scarcely endurable pain in the hips, the pain this morning would move to his shoulders and sides. He did not really know until he got out of bed where it would be. He did not know while he still lay in bed, flesh withered and bones creaking in the gelatinous remains of dreams, in thoughts of a day that was certain to bring nothing of interest.
    It was a chore even to reach for the house phone he had had installed some five or six years before. He would have to endure the housekeeper’s shrill morning greetings.
    He had kept a law student in the house after Rié’s death, but he had soon come to find the youth irksome and sent him away; and since then there had been only Honda and two maids and a housekeeper in the big house. The women were constantly changing. At odds with the slovenliness of the maids and the dishonesty of the housekeeper, Honda became aware that his sensibilities were not up to the modish habits and words of today’s women. However diligently they might work, all their mannerisms, up-to-date locutions like “fun game” and “well, sorta,” a door opened without proper ceremony, a loud guffaw without a respectful hand over the mouth, a mistake in honorifics, gossip about television actors, all of them brought physical revulsion. When in his inability to control it he would let slip a word of complaint, he could be sure that the woman would be gone the next day. He would vouchsafe a complaint to the masseuse he called almost every night, and a domestic tempest would ensue. The masseuse had acquired the fashionable predilection for being called “Ma’am” and would refuse to answer if not so addressed; but Honda could not do without her.
    However frequently he might complain, there was dust on the parlor shelves. The master of flower-arranging who came for a weekly lesson also spoke of it.
    The maids would invite errand boys in for cups of tea, and the whiskey he valued so highly was being drunk up by he did not know whom. Occasionally he would catch a burst of insane laughter from far down a hallway.
    His ear branded by the housekeeper’s morning courtesies, he would have trouble bringing himself to order breakfast, and the sticky clinging of feet to the mats in the corridor as the two maids opened the shutters irritated him indescribably. The hot-water faucets were forever getting stopped up, and an empty toothpaste tube was never replaced until he ordered it to be. The housekeeper kept a good enough watch on his laundry and cleaning, but it took a laundry tag scratching at his neck to tell him that that was the case. His shoes were polished but the sand was carefully preserved within, the catch