Decay of the Angel
The last volume of Yukio Mishima's Sea of Fertility tetralogy finds Shigekuni Honda old, successful, and spiritually exhausted. He believes he has found the final reincarnation of his boyhood friend Kiyoaki in a young Thai princess, and the novel follows his last attempt to verify the pattern he has spent his life pursuing. As always with Mishima, beauty is inseparable from corruption, and the closer Honda comes to certainty, the less certain everything becomes.The Pocket edition keeps the book portable, which is appropriate: this is late Mishima, written with the full knowledge of how his own story would end. For readers who believe that a novel's final volume should answer less than it asks, and that beauty can be its own form of collapse.
