The Decay of the Angel - Yukio Mishima

from the light through the curtains that a quiet summer
rain was falling, he would go over the ordering of the
world he controlled. Were the evil and the arrogance
going like clockwork? Was no one yet aware of the
fact that the world was wholly under the control of evil?
Was order being preserved, everything proceeding
after the laws, with not the smallest spot of love to be
detected anywhere? Were people happy under his
hegemony? Had transparent evil, in form a poem,
been spread over their heads? Had “the human” been
carefully wiped away? Had careful arrangements
been made for every sign of warmth to be ridiculed?
Was spirit quite dead?
Tōru was confident that if he but laid a beautiful
white hand upon it, the world would succumb to a
beautiful illness. And it was natural too that he should
expect windfall to follow unanticipated windfall. For
reasons that he did not know, an impoverished
signalman had been chosen as the foster son of a
rich old man, and an old man with one foot in the
grave. One of these days a king would come from
some country or other and ask to adopt him.
Even in the winter he would run to the shower room
he had had installed next to his bedroom and have a
cold shower. It was the best thing for waking a person
up.