This novel has a deceptively simple storyline but is full of parallelisms, a chilling tale that invokes some disturbing themes. A 13-year old boy, his beautiful widowed mother, and a sailor. The boy is devoted to his loving mother and seems to have normal interests for a boy his age -- swimming, sailing, the sea. Unbeknownst to her, he belongs to a small group of highly intelligent students eager to live out the ideals of their so-called life philosophy, "objectivity", where they denounce emotions and sentimentality. It is no mere innocent childish rebellion against adults, they reject adulthood as illusory and hypocritical. They believe themselves to have the moral right to free the world of "romanticism" -- a kind of exaggerated nihilism, even fanaticism where violence and brutality are mere instruments to be wielded whenever necessary. A spy-hole where he peeps at his mother at night, and a savage dissection of a cat are merely two tests in emotion control.

The mother meets the sailor and they become lovers. The boy, from the beginning, looks up to him as the epitome of the hero their group aspired to -- strong, daring, valiant, glorious, terrifying, rough, in short, macho as macho can be. There is a gradual disillusionment when the sailor and his mother decides to marry and he stays ashore for good. This is the ultimate betrayal -- for once he ties himself to land and the institutions of adulthood, his weak, feminine side now dominates him. He is essentially condemned, his perfection soiled. This the group can never except, so they must do something about it.

There are strong symbolisms apparent between these main characters, the tension between imperial and modern Japan, and Mishima himself. The prose is stark compared to his other novels, yet Mishima effectively lets us explore the pathology of misplaced idealism. He is very good in doing that. ( )

Mishima's acclaimed short novel tells of a disaffected youth who idealizes a sailor for his strong, noble character and then begins to loathe him when the sailor reserves himself to normal life. It is both a portrait of youthful distress as well as the sailor's yearning for glory through the transformative power of death, a recurring them in Mishima's oeuvre. Not quite as staggering as Spring Snow, but still a powerful and quintessential work that would be a fine, accessible introduction to the writings of this phenomenal author. ( )

One of the most touching books I ever read!
My favourite Japanese classic! ( )

Disturbing read. Whenever you have a bunch of kids killing kittens and ripping their insides out, you are definitely looking at trouble ahead.

Written in 1963, this book is about a small band of boys and their belief in the idea of ‘objectivity’, of rejecting the adult world as mere foolishness and sentimentality, and the savage acts this belief led them to.

Mishima’s account of these boys (aged around 13, from moderate to affluent families, and model students with good grades) was interesting in the present context of the violence seen today among similar kids and how their actions are attributed to listening to Rammstein and playing Doom.

It is also about a sailor who falls in love with a ‘land’ woman and thus falls from grace with the sea.
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Yukio Mishima committed ritual suicide when I was 23. This, along with his extreme right-wing politics and his reported preoccupation with body-building somehow disturbed me. How could someone who was acclaimed as a great writer, a runner-up for the Nobel Prize for Literature, get things so bizarrely wrong? (I was 23, OK?) Without all that foreknowledge I might have thought this was a finely executed exercise in genre horror. It's certainly well written, capturing beautifully the way people -- adults and children, men and women -- misunderstand each other's silences. But it's not an exercise. In this narrative the writer is fairly evidently struggling with his membership of a death-cult for one: mad, repulsive, deeply horrible, but in the end (for him, apparently) irresistible. It strikes me as being an adult version of the drawings young Mary Bell did in the days before she murdered that little boy: a cry for help. Like Mary's, it went unheard. ( )