The Decay of the Angel - Yukio Mishima

day and through the night, intimidated by harbor and
ship, until gazing became pure madness. The
whiteness, the abandonment of the self, the
uncertainty and loneliness were themselves a ship.
He felt that one could not stay at it long without getting
drunk.
The boy pretended to be lost in his work. But
Honda knew that in point of fact he had no work when
there were no ships in sight.
“When is the next ship due?”
“About nine in the evening. This has been a slack
day.”
He answered with an air of bland efficiency; and his
ennui and curiosity came through like strawberries
through plastic walls.
It may have been a matter of pride for the boy not to
make himself more formal—in any case he put on
nothing over his undershirt. In the hot air, still even with
the window open, there was nothing unnatural in his
way of dress. The fair body, with no fullness of flesh
but with rather a sort of botanical slenderness, sent
the immaculate shirt down from the shoulders in two
circles and thence over the roundness of the stooped
chest. It was a body with a firm coolness about it, and
no suggestion of softness. The profile, aristocratic
eyebrows and nose and lips, was well formed, as on