The Decay of the Angel - Yukio Mishima

ut there were no family complications, and the whole
of his estate would go to Tōru. Could any proposal be
more attractive?
But why? The question tickled at Tōru’s selfrespect.
The other person had jumped over something. It
corresponded, by wonderful coincidence, to
something Tōru himself had jumped over. It seemed
to the other and to Tōru himself that the irrationality of
it all was natural; and the ones who had been taken in
were the common-sense ones in between, the
president and the others.
The news came to Tōru as nothing to be surprised
by at all. He had been prepared for a curious
denouement the moment he had met the quiet old
man. He was confident that no one would find him out,
but the faculty of not being caught by surprise had
given him the confidence to pass generous judgment
on wholly outrageous mistakes about himself and to
swallow the results. If in the end they came to
nonsense, they were the results of beautiful error. If a
confusion in the world’s awareness was taken to be a
self-evident premise, then anything could follow. The
view that all the benevolence and malevolence
directed at him were based upon error brought a
blinding of self-respect, and self-denial as the final