The Decay of the Angel - Yukio Mishima

outburst since, and it had settled into a conviction that
she was the most beautiful girl in the world.
Because of the delusion, she had been able to
break the mirror that so tormented her and fly off into
a mirrorless world. Reality became malleable,
selective, a seeing of what was desirable and a
rejection of everything else. The guiding principle
would for most people have been a tightrope inviting
almost certain disaster, but it brought her no
complications and no sense of danger. Having thrown
the old plaything of self-awareness into the garbage
can, she had started to make a new plaything of
wonderful ingenuity and intricacy, and now she had
adapted it perfectly to her needs and set it to work
like an artificial heart. When she had finished shaping
it, Kinué had attained perfect happiness; or, as she
would have put it, perfect unhappiness.
Probably the romantic misfortune had come about
when a man made mention of her ugliness. In that
instant Kinué saw the light down her only road, the
defile open to her. If she could not change her own
looks, then she must change the world. She set to
work on her own secret plastic surgery and achieved
a reversal, and a gleaming pearl emerged from the
ugly, ashen shell.
Like a beleaguered soldier finding an escape,