The Decay of the Angel - Yukio Mishima

will die at twenty?”
“I think probably the danger has passed. Let’s talk
about it in the other room.”
A bright fire had been lighted in the fireplace.
Below the mantel, a gold-clouded alcove in the
Japanese style with a Kōtatsu hanging, two small
golden doors opened to reveal the fireplace. Tōru and
Keiko sat before the fire, a small table between them.
Keiko repeated the long story of birth and rebirth she
had had from Honda.
Tōru listened, gazing into the fire. He started at the
faint sound of a collapsing log.
Clinging to a log with its smoke, the flame would
twist and grow, and then show again in the darkness
between log and log, its bed rich with a bright, still
repose. Like a dwelling, the small floor dizzying in its
reds and vermilions was deep in quiet, marked off by
a rough frame of logs.
Sometimes the smoke bursting through the somber
logs was like a grass fire far out on a night plain.
There were great vistas in the fire, and the shadows
moving in the depths of the fireplace were a miniature
of the flames of political upheaval tracing shadows
across the heavens.
As the flames died down on one log, an even
expanse of quiet vermilion would show itself from