The Decay of the Angel - Yukio Mishima

His experience in making money had been a
strange one. He could, to be sure, have made tenfold
more if he had been bolder; but he could not think that
he had come the wrong way. His prudence had
guaranteed against loss. Yet there were small regrets
and feelings of dissatisfaction. Pushed to their
conclusion, they amounted to a dissatisfaction with
his own innate nature; and a certain morbid lyricism
was an inevitable result.
Honda had achieved security by clinging to his oldfashioned
principles even though he was quite aware
of the sacrifices they required. He worshipped the
trinity of classical capitalism. There was something
sacred about it, the harmony of liberal economics. It
was symbolic, it had in it the slow, studied intellectual
arrogance and sense of balance the gentlemen of the
home country had toward colonies still in the primitive
insecurity of monoculture.
Such things survived in Japan, then? As long as the
tax laws remained unchanged, and enterprises
continued to depend on sources of money other than
their own capital, and as long as banks continued to
demand land as security for loans, the giant article in
pawn known as the land of Japan would have no part
of the classic principles, and land prices would
continue to rise. Inflation would cease only with the