The Decay of the Angel - Yukio Mishima

“The sin is ours, Kiyo’s and mine, and nobody
else’s,” she had said on the way back from
Kamakura.
Sixty years had gone by and the words were still in
his ears. Were he to visit Satoko she would probably
after a quiet laugh talk easily about the chain of
memories. But the journey was too much for him. Old
and ugly and stained with sin as he was, the
complications seemed only to increase.
The Gesshuuji itself, gently enveloped in a spring
snow, was layer by layer more distant, with memories
of Satoko, as the years passed. More distant, but not
with a distance as of withdrawing into the heart. As he
sought to remember it, the Gesshuuji was on a snowy
pinnacle, like a temple in the Himalayas, its beauty
turned to harshness, its softness to a day of wrath.
The ultimate in clarity, a moon temple quite at the
ends of the earth, dotted a single dot with the purple
cassock of an aging and ever more delicately
beautiful abbess, seemed to send off an ice-light, as
if it stood at the very limits of awareness and reason.
Honda knew that he could be there in no time by
airplane or express train. But the Gesshuuji had
become not a temple for a man to visit and look upon,
but a ray of moonlight through a rent in the extremities
of his consciousness.