The Decay of the Angel

About

The final novel in Mishima's Sea of Fertility tetralogy. Honda, now elderly and wealthy, adopts Toru — an orphaned teenager who may be the last reincarnation of the soul Honda has tracked across three previous lives. But Toru is neither the romantic Kiyoaki nor the fanatical Isao. He is cold, beautiful, and empty — a vessel with nothing inside, whose corruption unfolds with the inevitability of a prophecy. Mishima completed the manuscript on the morning of his ritual suicide in 1970. The novel's final scene — devastating, quiet, and deliberately ambiguous — reframes everything that came before it. The conclusion of a life's work and a life, delivered simultaneously — a novel that asks whether anything we remember was ever real.