Mishima's Last Testament

YUKIO MISHIMA committed suicide the day he completed Tennin Gosui, thus blending art and life inextricably into an eloquent statement of emptiness and silence. Now translated into English by Edward Seidensticker, The Decay of the Angel is the last volume of the tetralogy The Sea of Fertility, which Mishima regarded as his greatest work. The four-part narrative follows the experiences and reflections of Honda Shigekuni, from his days as a student in Part One to his near senility in Part Four.

In the first book, Spring Snow, Honda develops a passionate friendship with another young man, Mitsugae Kiyoaki, who is courting a young woman of the aristocracy, Ayakura Satoko. Having become pregnant, Satoko finds refuge in a Buddhist abbey; Kiyoaki makes a desperate attempt to see her there, but succumbs to illness and dies.

Honda has aged twenty years in the second volume, Runaway Horses. He is now a judge in the Court of Appeals. A young man named Isao is brought before him, accused of conspiring in a right-wing plot against the government. Honda resigns his position and successfully pleads the boy's defense, for he has seen a birthmark--three moles under the left armpit--that convinces him that the boy is a reincarnation of the dead Kiyoaki. Released from jail, the boy assassinates an important financial figure, and then commits harikiri alone.

In The Temple of Dawn, the third volume, Honda meets yet another reincarnation of his lost friend--this time a Thai princess named Ying Chan. A millionaire by this time, Honda builds a large summer home and invites the princess to visit him there, hoping to win her affections. His hopes come to naught, however, and he resorts to peering through a hole in the wall to watch her make love to another woman. Years later, he learns of her death by cobra-bite in Thailand.

Decay of the Angel is the story of Honda's involvement with a young man who appears to be a fourth incarnation in this series. Toru Yasunaga is a boy of sixteen, brilliant but poor, who works in a signal station adjoining a large harbor. Honda discovers him one day when out walking with a lady friend; when the boy reaches up to remove something from a shelf, the birthmark is revealed.

AFTER carefully investigating the boy's background, Honda decides to adopt him, convinced that this is his friend born still again. But lingering doubts remain: He is unable to ascertain the date of the princess's death, and fears that the boy may have been born too early.

Toru enters Honda's household, and is reared into the Western manners of the modern Japanese. Honda tells him, "Good breeding means a familiarity with the Western way of doing things. We find the pure Japanese only in the slums and in the underworld." Yet Honda has a deeper motivation for this deliberate polishing of the boy's character: He hopes to avert fate, to save the boy from the tragic death which befell each of the other three incarnations of Kiyoaki, by immersing him in the banalities of polite society.

In Honda's mind, the being that he has encountered in Kiyoaki and the rest is an angel of the Six Worlds of Desire. To save Toru from the angel's recurring fate he must steal its wings, for "the world does not approve of flying."

Toru, however, is no angel, but coldly and thoroughly evil. From the first moment in his new father's house, he begins scheming to destroy him and the others around him. Toru has himself an awareness of his own fate, but that awareness is demented by the fate itself--for he may be an angel, but a decaying one. Told the real reason for his adoption by a friend, Toru attempts suicide but succeeds only in blinding himself.

WHEN HIS son lives past the destined age of twenty, Honda realizes that he must be a counterfeit. Old now, and infirm, he travels to the abbey where his friend's lover Satoko is now the abbess. She receives him warmly, but denies any knowledge of him or his friend Kiyoaki.

Honda is crushed. The abbess suggests to him that perhaps his memory has faded somewhat, that Kiyoaki never indeed existed. "If there was no Kiyoaki, then there was no Isao," he says. "There was no Ying Chan, and who knows, perhaps there has been no I."

The ephemerality of existence recurs throughout the novel. In the opening chapter, Toru gazes out at the harbor and watches a ship appear in the fog:

The whole composition changed. With a rending of the whole pattern of being, a ship was received by the horizon. An abdication was signed. A whole universe was thrown away. A ship came in sight, to throw out the universe that had guarded its absence... We are too accustomed to the absurdity of existence. The loss of a universe is not worth taking seriously.

Throughout the book, reality is twisted and torn by the unique perceptions of individuals. Toru marries the madwoman Kinue, who turns her own horrible ugliness into the delusion of stunning beauty; her own reality "became malleable, selective, a seeing of what was desirable and a rejection of everything else." But through it she attained "perfect happiness."

Kinue's madness, and her assumed beauty, are equated with Toru's self-awareness and Honda's perception of unyielding fate. "Don't you suppose a beautiful, well-shaped girl has the best chance of becoming an angel?" she asks Toru. "Only a beautiful woman can really know..."

With Honda's increasing realization that Toru is not the real reincarnation of Kiyoaki comes acceptance of the arbitrary nature of reality. "It was an accident, an utterly senseless accident, that Kiyoaki and Isao and Ying Chan had all appeared beside Honda... Eternity does not come into being because I think I exist," the old man reflects. Struck by the final challenge of Satoko's denial of Kiyoaki's existence, Honda sits in the abbey garden:

There was no other sound. The garden was empty. He had come, thought Honda, to a place that had no memories, nothing.

Eternity is only present in the emptiness and silence of total abandonment.

MISHIMA'S NOVEL, like much Japanese fiction, is weak on plot and characterization. The story is contrived and unsatisfying; the characters are more agents who elaborate certain intellectual ideas than real people who interact in human fashion.

Yet Mishima writes with a powerful insight of the problems of man's relationship to the world and to reality. The clarity of his perception is stunning, as the various characters of the book unfold their complex metaphysical relationships. Long passages describing intense self-scrutiny hold the reader in an almost morbid fascination, until he must be relieved at the end to see Honda give up his vain attempts at understanding.

Mishima said that he put everything he knew about life and art into The Sea of Fertility. Thus his suicide came not as a denial, but a culmination and fruition of a process of realization. "Suicide," he once said, "is art." For him it was by no means a retreat from the suffering of the human condition, but the logical and appropriate conclusion to life itself.