The Decay of the Angel - Yukio Mishima

a useless expense.”
“Not yet. I’ll buy you one, I promise, when you get
into the university. It will only be a little longer.”
Sending Tōru off to get tickets for the terminal
building, Honda leaned on his stick and looked
wearily up at the stairs he must climb. He knew that
Tōru would be willing enough to help him, but did not
want to ask.
Tōru was happy from the time they reached the
harbor. He had known that he would be. Not only
Shimizu but every harbor was like a crystalline
medicine that worked an immediate cure on him.
It was two in the afternoon. The register for nine in
the morning had been posted: the Chung Lien II,
Panamanian, 2,167 tons; a Soviet ship; the Hai-i,
Chinese, 2,767 tons; the Mindanao, Philippine, 3,357
tons. The Khabarovsk, a Soviet ship bringing
numbers of Japanese passengers from Nahodka,
was due at two thirty. The view of the ships was good
from the second floor of the terminal building, slightly
higher than their decks.
They looked out over the prow of the Chung Lien,
and the stir in the harbor beyond.
It was not unusual for the two of them, as the
seasons passed, to stand thus side by side in
confrontation with grandeur. Perhaps indeed it was