The Decay of the Angel - Yukio Mishima

“But you were very sweet while it was all in
process.”
“I was doing as you wanted me to do, I should
imagine.”
“Yes.”
Tōru shuddered as the old man bared his teeth to
the sea wind. They had reached a point of agreement,
and it brought Tōru to thoughts of murder. He could
easily enough let them have their way by pushing
Honda over; but he feared that Honda was aware of
even that impulse. It left him. To have to live was
blacker than the most cheerless black. To have to see
every day a man who sought to understand, and did
understand, the deepest thing inside him.
They had little more to say. After a round of the
terminal building, they stood for a time looking at the
Philippine ship on the far side.
Directly in front of them was an open door to the
crew’s cabins. They could see the scarred linoleum,
glowing dully, and, around a corner, the iron rail of a
stairway leading downward. The short, empty corridor
of the quotidian, of frozen human life, never for a
moment away from human beings, on whatever
remote seas. In the great white transient ship, that one
spot was representative of a dark, dull afternoon
corridor in every house. In a vast, unpeopled house as