The Decay of the Angel - Yukio Mishima

with the void. They seemed to stroke the invisible, but
without humility or petition. If there are hands to be
used only for addressing the infinite and the universe,
they are a masturbator’s hands. I have seen through
him, thought Honda.
Beautiful hands for touching the moon and the stars
and the sea, meant for no practical work. He wanted
to see the faces of the persons who sought to hire
them. When they hired a man, they learned nothing
from such tiresome details as family and friends and
ideology and transcripts of grades and state of health.
It was this boy himself they had hired, knowing none of
these things; and he was unmixed evil.
Look at it if you will. Unmixed evil. The reason was
simple. The insides of the boy were wholly and utterly
those of Honda himself.
An elbow against the table at the windowsill,
pretending to gaze unblinkingly out to sea, under a
natural covering of senile gloom, Honda from time to
time stole a glance at the boy’s profile, and felt that he
was seeing in that glance his own life.
The evil suffusing that life had been self-awareness.
A self-awareness that knew nothing of love, that
slaughtered without raising a hand, that relished death
as it composed noble condolences, that invited the