Yukio Mishima's Final Novel was Messed Up! Plot Spoiling Deep Read

Added: 2026-05-23

[00:00:06][bell] >> Hello fellow lovers of the liminal and the weird and welcome to another video by Liminal Spaces. Today we're going to be talking about the final volume in Yukio Mishima's Sea of Fertility Tetralogy and it is called The Decay of the Angel.

[00:00:30]In this book we see a return of form.

[00:00:33]The last book kind of did away with the structure that the the first two books followed. Uh this book I feel like returns to that original structure in that the possible reincarnation of Kiyoaki which this uh entire series has been dealing with uh is we we actually see from his perspective which we didn't in the third book. Also I believe that Yukio Mishima is using Todu, the young boy that may be Kiyoaki's reincarnation, as a statement about the generation that he is a part of.

[00:01:12]Uh and so I was very happy to return to form with that. This book was also the shortest in the tetralogy, about half the length of most of them.

[00:01:21]And [snorts] I feel it is, in my opinion, an incredible, a strong conclusion to this series and I think that it makes trudging through the third book absolutely worth it. The book opens with Honda and his friend Keiko uh traveling around and they've both aged quite a bit and they are almost like a couple but they're not of course because Keiko prefers women.

[00:01:50]So uh they travel the world together, enjoy their money and their time and it actually really displays them as kind of a a cute couple, almost. Keiko's always got his back. They talk about their medical problems together and do the general stuff of old age. Well, uh they visit a beach at one point, and on this beach is a small structure. And in this structure is Todu. Todu is a young man whose job it is uh to watch the harbor, watching these binoculars out into this harbor to see which boats pass to let people know which boats are coming in in and out of port. And he seems good at his job, like he enjoys it. And we also meet a young woman named Kinuwe. And Kinuwe is for me uh a really interesting Murakami character because she is a woman that by all societal standards is not attractive, rather the opposite. However, in her mind, she is the most beautiful woman who has ever been born, and she lives like this. Everybody that looks at her, she thinks is looking at her because they want to be with her. Uh she feels like any woman that looks at her wants to be her, and any man that looks at her wants to be with her because she is so unbelievably beautiful. And [snorts] Todu who keeps this illusion alive with her. But he does think of her as insane, and so does Yukio Mishima. He presents her as an insane girl. And the idea to me was really interesting as I I read through it. Um and unfortunately, I feel like kind of makes her into a little bit of uh a nihilistic wit witticism by the end, but we'll get into that. Anyway, Kinuway often visits Todu while he's waiting for boats to come by, but one night he is watching boats and Honda and Keiko show up and walk up and talk to him for a bit. And at one point, Honda notices that he has the mark that shows him as one of Kiowaki's reincarnation, that is three moles under the armpit on the side of the chest here. And he believes that he has found the final reincarnation of Kiowaki that he will be alive to see.

[00:04:28]So, they leave soon after and right away uh Keiko he takes Keiko out to eat and says, "I'm going to adopt that kid." And he has a weird reaction with Todu because what he sees in Todu is himself.

[00:04:45]But he also sees evil.

[00:04:47]Uh so, he says, "This is like true evil captured in a person and he's also like me."

[00:04:54]>> [snorts] >> And so, we get this interesting way that Honda views himself that when Kiowaki is reincarnated as a person most like him, it is an evil person. And he also uh wants to see more directly than he has been with any of the other reincarnations if he can save Todu from the fate of all the reincarnations, which is to die at 20.

[00:05:23]Um but if he can't save him, then he will see this glorious death of this young man at 20 as a symbol of his generation.

[00:05:33]So, he decides to adopt Todu.

[00:05:36]>> [snorts] >> And he goes through all the paperwork and of course Todu is blown away that this rich old man, this rich old lawyer wants to adopt him, but he says yes because it would mean that he would inherit a large chunk of money.

[00:05:52]So, he he says yes and goes to live with Honda, and Honda begins to teach him how to live a rich upper-crust life.

[00:06:03]And it doesn't go over smoothly.

[00:06:09]Todo takes to it, but he also takes to being very abusive. [snorts] And over time, he starts abusing Honda. And he forces Honda to push Keiko away, so Keiko kind of leaves his life. And [snorts] he is alone with Honda. And then Todo fires all of the help that Honda had hired and replaces it with people that maids, basically, that he's paying and sleeping with. And the whole world becomes Todo's. And Honda is just a kind of a passenger for this, and also a passenger that is abused. At one point, Todo hits him in the head with a fireplace poker.

[00:06:53]He also moves Kinuye into the cottage in the backyard of Honda's house.

[00:07:00]And [snorts] Kinuye eats and eats and eats and becomes very obese as time goes on, and also a bit of a hypochondriac and thinks of herself as very, very, very sickly.

[00:07:14]>> [snorts] >> So, she doesn't get up anymore and move around. And Honda feels like he's become an empty old man, a burden, and he doesn't know what to do with himself or his life, and he's angry, which I feel like can happen to a lot of people as they age and feel like themselves being more of a burden than somebody that deserves the attention and time of others. And he takes one last stand, and he takes one last stand in a very Yukio Mishima way in that he decides to go to this park that he frequented it quite a lot in the last book when he was younger where he can hide behind bushes and peek on young couples making love. So he goes to this park and he is peeping on this couple and the man that he's peeping on stabs the woman that he's with and the police show up. The woman survives, the police show up and Honda is arrested. And of course he's a he had been a very prominent lawyer so he felt that he had lost everything that Todu had taken everything with him but he thinks about at that point his reputation and his reputation meant nothing to him. But once he's arrested and news gets out his reputation being sullied absolutely destroys him.

[00:08:46]Really does. He realizes that for the rest of his life when he gives out his business card which is a big deal in Japan giving your business card out that he will be thought of as Honda the pervert instead of Honda the you know great lawyer. And so he just kind of gives up.

[00:09:06]And Todu kind of takes over and eventually Todu gets a letter from Keiko that says, "Hey, I'm having this Christmas party and I'd like you to come."

[00:09:16]And he doesn't really care for Keiko much. He hasn't cared for Keiko the whole time. But he's like, "Okay, I can I can go to her fancy party." And he shows up to her fancy party and it's just him. No other guests arrive and she says, "Oh no, I just thought you and I would have a talk."

[00:09:34]And Keiko lays into him but she does it in a really unique way because of course he's trying to protect her friend Honda.

[00:09:42]And what she does is she explains to him the entire story of why he was adopted.

[00:09:53]That Honda is expecting him to burn out in a blaze of glory when he's 20 uh by taking his own life. But Keiko posits that he is not the reincarnation of Kiwaki, that he is a pretender. That he just happened to have those three moles, but he is he does not have any of that same power that the others had. Uh and that the only way he can prove it is through taking his own life. This book gets messed up. Um I mean I've already talked about messed up stuff and it it it gets worse. I just realized I'm going to have to call this a spoiler deep dive cuz I'm just going for it. And she says, "If you'd like proof of this, your adopted father Honda has a dream journal that was written by Kiwaki. And all these dreams have come true with his reincarnations. So, you should find that book." So, he goes home and he asks Honda to borrow it. And Honda agrees and he reads it and just becomes kind of unresponsive and unhappy for a couple of weeks and then he tries to take his own life, but he does not succeed. But the attempt uh makes him blind.

[00:11:10]So, he becomes blind.

[00:11:13]And [snorts] after this, all the power is gone from Todu. In his eyes, he's not this reincarnation and he is failed to live up to the standards that the other reo reincarnations of Kiwaki had lived up to.

[00:11:31]And Honda kind of regains control at this point. And Todo asks to marry Kinuwe and they do get married and they are this very strange couple. This this blind boy that has no will of his own and this woman that is a hypochondriac and also believes she's the most beautiful woman that has ever been born.

[00:12:02]And this is all presented as kind of the consequences for Todo being the type of person that Todo is. So Honda decides once everything is wrapped up that there's only one thing in his life that he really wants to do.

[00:12:17]And that is to go see Satoko, the young woman that Kiyowaki was so invested in that he eventually ended his own life trying to to meet her. So he goes Of course, Satoko has given up the regular world and has become a nun in a monastery and is now the abbess of this monastery.

[00:12:40]And uh Honda has been thinking about her on and off for the last 60 years. And now he's decides that he has to see her and he goes to Kyoto and he walks up the huge incline up to the temple that Kiyowaki walked in where Kiyowaki passed away.

[00:13:00]And asks to meet with the abbess with Satoko.

[00:13:05]And he eventually does meet her.

[00:13:09]And he they exchange formal greetings and then he says, "I'm here because I wanted to talk to you about Kiyowaki Matsugae."

[00:13:19]And she says, "I don't know a Kiyowaki Matsugae."

[00:13:24]And [snorts] he he's completely stunned because if she's lying, if she's pretending that she doesn't know Kiyowaki, then [snorts] that is a very unholy thing to do and will kind of destroy her position in his eyes. So, they talk a little bit. He's like, "You must have known Kiyowaki."

[00:13:44]And she says, "No." And he's She talks about her old life and she's like, "No, I remember every every part of my life having grown up. I have never known a Kiyowaki Matsugae."

[00:13:55]And Honda is just shocked. He can't believe it. And he says, "Wait a minute.

[00:14:02]If there is no Kiyowaki, then there is no I Sao [clears throat] and there's no Yen Ching.

[00:14:11]There's there's no me."

[00:14:14]She He says, "Then everything is empty."

[00:14:16]And she said, "As it is with every heart in the world." And then she says, "Why don't we go explore the garden?" And they walk and they stare at this beautiful garden and Honda feels like he's in a place where there is no memory.

[00:14:31]And that's where this book ends and that's where the tetralogy ends and it is in my opinion an outstanding ending. One could claim, "Well, it doesn't make any sense cuz it could be it was all a dream." But I don't think that's what Mishima was getting at. Maybe she's just lying because she doesn't want to talk about something so painful or maybe she is teaching Honda an incredibly valuable Buddhist lesson. But it pairs up with all the things in this book beautifully because this is about the 1970s, the generation of the 1970s in Japan. And this is Yukio Mishima's view of what became of the Japanese people in the 1970s in Japan. And that is that they all became fake in the sense that they were living under an American forced constitution from World War II and they were at that point very interested in the American or Western culture again and we see in Todu a fake. He's not a real reincarnation of Kiyowaki.

[00:15:44]And then in Kinuye we see a woman who is the opposite of everything she believes she is. She just has this belief in her brain that she is the most beautiful perfect woman in the world when in reality she's not attractive um and a hypochondriac. And in the end we see that Honda might be fake. That this whole journey Honda's life took of following these reincarnations might not even be real. And I [snorts] think that this is the strong statement that Yukio Mishima wanted to make at the end of this. That is that Japan had lost its tradition, had lost its values and that it was a fake, a copy of other Western nations that nobody was who they were supposed to be. Everybody uh was somebody different. Uh they either believed they were something they're not or they weren't something they were supposed to be.

[00:16:51]Uh and yeah, I find that I found that very very interesting. This was finished and soon after Yukio Mishima tried his failed coup and committed public seppuku and this was published a few months after that posthumously. That ended Yuki Yukio Mishima's writing career and it is a scathing scathing critique of the generation of Japan in the 1970s, which fits in with a lot of his philosophies and a lot of his politics.

[00:17:25]He did definitely did not like the way that his country was going and he felt in his obsession with the concept of manly death that that was the only way that he could make a statement strong enough to hopefully sway and change the way that he felt his country was going at that point. I love this tetralogy. I think it's absolutely wonderful. I enjoyed this reread. I do however think that I have read it enough.

[00:17:54]I've read Spring Snow I think three or four times now. I read Runaway Horses twice and I've read these two the the third one and this one twice and [snorts] I think for me the point has sunken in enough that I don't know if I will need to do a reread. Who knows? Maybe when I'm you know, 80 I'll be here on YouTube talking about this again, but I don't think so. I think I've I've had my fun with this series. I want to thank everybody that joined us in the read-through. It was really fun.

[00:18:27]I don't know how far everybody else got.

[00:18:30]I think Will of Genre finished it. So maybe we'll do a live with Will of Genre and chat about all four of these books.

[00:18:37]I think that would be super fun. So I think I'll invite him on the channel, see if they'll go live with me and talk about these books. But I hope that that has kind of given you an explanation of what was happening in this book. What are parts I missed? Do you perhaps have a different interpretation? Tell me all about it in the comments. I absolutely love to read the comments and thank you very much for watching this and I'll see you on the next one.