The Decay of the Angel - Yukio Mishima

microscope.
The two were a pair of children soon tired of their
toy. They had no particular interest in the sea. All they
had really wanted was to intrude for a moment upon a
stranger’s life and work. They looked around them, at
the several instruments echoing the stir of the harbor,
distantly and sadly but faithfully, at “Shimizu Docks”
and the name of each dock in large black letters, at
the wide blackboard listing the ships in port, at the
books ranged on the shelf, Shipping Ledger,
Registry of Japanese Shipping, International Codes,
Lloyd’s Register of Shipowners 1968–69, at the
telephone numbers on the wall, those of the agent and
the pilot and the customs and quarantine stations and
the provisioners and the rest.
All these details had about them, undeniably, the
smell of the sea, the light of the harbor some two or
three miles distant. From whatever distance, a harbor
announces its languorous turbulence in its own sad
metallic tones. It was a gigantic, lunatic zither,
sprawled out by the sea and sending an undulant
image over the sea, sounding and for a time echoing
destruction on all the seven giant strings of its docks.
Entering the boy’s heart, Honda dreamed of the sea.
Sluggishly pulling in, sluggishly tying up, sluggishly
unloading—what an endless compromise it was, this