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…
