The Decay of the Angel - Yukio Mishima

Very strange. The whole vast space was
abandoned.
There were not even wings of gulls.
Then a phantom ship arose and disappeared
toward the west.
The Izu Peninsula was shrouded in mist. For a time
it ceased to be the Izu Peninsula. It was the ghost of a
lost peninsula. Then it disappeared entirely. It had
become a fiction on a map. Ships and peninsula alike
belonged to “the absurdity of existence.”
They appeared and disappeared. How did they
differ?
If the visible was the sum of being, then the sea, as
long as it was not lost in mist, existed there. It was
heartily ready to be.
A single ship changed it all.
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.
Multiple changes in the color of the sea, moment by
moment. Changes in the clouds. And the appearance
of a ship. What was happening? What were
happenings?
Each instant brought them, more momentous than