The Decay of the Angel - Yukio Mishima

ut now his eye caught, the rustic pink of a
convolvulus below the breakwater. In the sand along
the breakwater a great litter of garbage lay scoured
by the sea winds. Empty Coca-Cola bottles, food
cans, paint cans, nonperishable plastic bags,
detergent boxes, bricks, bones.
The dregs of life on land cascaded down and came
against infinity. The sea, infinity not met before. The
dregs, like man, unable to meet their end save in the
ugliest and filthiest of fashions.
Straggling pines along the embankment sent out
blossoms like red starfish. To the left a radish patch
put out forlorn little four-petaled white blossoms. Small
pines lined the road. For the rest there was a solid
expanse of plastic strawberry shelters. In vast
numbers, under quonset huts of plastic, strawberries
trailed their fruit over stone terraces among a
profusion of leaves. Flies crawled along the sawblade
edges of the leaves. Quonset huts, as far as he
could see, unpleasantly white, jammed in, one against
another. Honda noticed—he had not before—a small
tower-like structure among them.
Just in from the prefectural highway on which the
cab had stopped, it was a two-story hut on a
disproportionately high concrete platform. It was too
tall for a watch shelter, too poor for an office building.