Word: angelically
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YUKIO MISHIMA committed suicide the day he completed Tennin Gosui, thus blending art and life inextricably into an eloquent statement of emptiness and silence. Now translated into English by Edward Seidensticker, The Decay of the Angel is the last volume of the tetralogy The Sea of Fertility, which Mishima regarded as his greatest work. The four-part narrative follows the experiences and reflections of Honda Shigekuni, from his days as a student in Part One to his near senility in Part Four...
Decay of the Angel is the story of Honda's involvement with a young man who appears to be a fourth incarnation in this series. Toru Yasunaga is a boy of sixteen, brilliant but poor, who works in a signal station adjoining a large harbor. Honda discovers him one day when out walking with a lady friend; when the boy reaches up to remove something from a shelf, the birthmark is revealed...
...Honda's mind, the being that he has encountered in Kiyoaki and the rest is an angel of the Six Worlds of Desire. To save Toru from the angel's recurring fate he must steal its wings, for "the world does not approve of flying...
Toru, however, is no angel, but coldly and thoroughly evil. From the first moment in his new father's house, he begins scheming to destroy him and the others around him. Toru has himself an awareness of his own fate, but that awareness is demented by the fate itself--for he may be an angel, but a decaying one. Told the real reason for his adoption by a friend, Toru attempts suicide but succeeds only in blinding himself...
...lights went down after inj termission, the mercurial opening bars of Impresario's overture transformed the evening. By the standard of the composer's later works, Impresario is a trifle. Its characters are types-Mr. Angel, the elderly financier, Mme. Goldentrill, the aging diva. Yet how boldly the types are cast, and how fresh the music. It was a good show, even though Director Frank Corsaro placed the action in the Edwardian era in a wasted effort to provide contrast with the Salieri. Sopranos Karan Armstrong (Goldentrill) and Ruth Welting (Miss Silverpeal) filled the theater with fine singing...