The Decay of the Angel - Yukio Mishima

7
HONDA and Keiko Hisamatsu were perfect
companions in old age. When he went walking with
Keiko, everyone took them for an affluent, wellmatched
husband and wife. They could see each
other every other day or so and not be bored. They
worried about each other’s cholesterol count and
hemorrhoids and possible malignancies, and caused
doctors much amusement. They changed hospitals
with great frequency, suspicious of all doctors. They
even had an understanding on trivial economies. They
were assiduous students of the psychology of the old,
their own aside.
They had even struck a balance in irritability. The
one would take on a discreet objectivity when the
other was a victim of meaningless irritation, and each
fed the other’s pride. They nursed each other’s lapses
in memory. When either would forget what he had just
said or say quite the opposite, the other (why it could
as easily have happened to him) would politely refrain
from laughing.
They were both a little vague on things that had
happened these last ten or twenty years; but in