The Decay of the Angel - Yukio Mishima

would have been her uncle, anyhow it was the
Sawado family this cousin married into. She had twin
boys, and no sooner had they turned twenty than they
were killed in traffic accidents one right after the other.
They were models for Twin Buds of Sorrow. It’s very
famous. You may have read it.”
The audience was never attentive to this unraveling
of genealogies, but that made no difference.
Inattention was better than the look of boredom that
came with attention.
They had in common an ailment which they wished
no one else to know of: old age. Everyone wants to
talk about his ailments, and it was clever of them to
have found the right listeners. What made them a little
different from most couples was that Keiko felt no
need for dissimulation or youthful airs.
Fussiness, bias, hostility toward youth, excessive
attention to detail, fear of death, indiscriminate
irritability, these things Honda and Keiko found in
each other, but not in themselves. And when it came
to obstinacy, each was provided with a stock that
quite balanced the other’s.
They were very tolerant of young women and very
intolerant of young men. They loved to complain about
the young, and the Zengakuren and the hippies did
not escape their lances. Smooth skins, rich black hair,