Timothy Han Edition Perfumes The Decay of the Angel¹ was inspired by the novel of the same name by Yukio Mishima. It is the fourth novel in Mishima’s The Sea of Fertility cycle. In The Decay of the Angel, a wealthy, retired judge, Shigekuni Honda, adopts a handsome (but bad-to-the-bone) teenager, Tōru Yasunaga, who Honda believes is the reincarnation of a friend who died young. Honda wants to save Tōru from an early death — evil, sadness and humiliation ensue.

In college, I fell in love with Japanese Buddhist art. Studying Buddhist sculpture led me to Japanese literature and films. I dutifully paid attention to (read and watched) Mishima and Akira Kurosawa; they were spoken of and written about more than other Japanese writers and filmmakers of their time periods…

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