The Decay of the Angel - Yukio Mishima

him. Why had the two of them come into his life? The
superfluity of their presence ran against his sense of
order. But there was no help for it now. There they
were, smiling on his sofa, as if prepared to wait a
decade or so.
Shigehisa Hamanaka, aged fifty-five, was the
former chief of a feudal clan in the northeast. He
sought to cover the now-empty pride of family in
Bohemianism, and had even written a book of
essays, The Chief, which had been a modest
success. He was the president of a bank, the head
office of which was in his old fief, and he had made a
name in the pleasure quarters as an old-style man of
taste. There was still a full, rich head of black hair over
the gold-rimmed glasses and the almond-shaped
face, but the stronger impression was of vapidity. A
confident raconteur, he always allowed an
appropriate pause before a witty conclusion. A clever
talker who made a great point of skipping the
preliminaries, a person of gentle irony who never
forgot his respect for the aged, he would not have
dreamed he was a bore.
His wife Taeko too came from the military
aristocracy. She was a fat, rough-featured person,
and fortunately the daughter looked like the father. All
Taeko could talk about was family. She had seen