The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea

My first read for #januaryinjapan. I'd been meaning to read some more Mishima for a while now — ever since reading and loving [book:Spring Snow|62793] — and this challenge gave me the perfect reason to do so.

I so enjoy Mishima's style of writing — somehow spare and yet poetic all at once. That said, no one warned me that perhaps as the mother of a fourteen-year-old son, this book might be extra troubling. It really was. This is not a fun or light or easy book to read. There were two parts that were troubling enough that I almost stopped reading. By the way, if you are thinking of reading this book, content warnings for voyeurism, animal abuse, and violence.

BUT. Like I said, the atmosphere of Mishima's writing is so magnetic. As show more are his themes of masculinity, identity, and purpose. His books exist in that transitory space of Japan after WWII, as it was being opened to the West, and the tension between those two cultures. And specifically in this book, add a group of highly intelligent teenage boys under the sway of a budding psychopath.

This dark little book, while upsetting, is quite compelling. An enthralling read. show less

Disturbing and dreary, Yukio Mishima’s The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea throbs with anger. As turbulent as the waves that hit the rock by a cliff in a stormy night, every slap of seawater intensifies, the debris fall then drown, until it calms with a brief gentleness only to pick up again.

Thirteen-year old Noburo is a member of a teen gang driven by radical nihilistic convictions. Cold-blooded acts of violence, unending brain conditioning by peers in competitive and complicit huddles, and almost an irrationally intense hatred are intensified by an arrival of an intruder in his seemingly ordinary home life. This intruder is a sailor who ultimately falls in love with Noburo’s widowed mother. As the months come and go and show more the seasons change, what seems to be an Oedipal element that rusts Noburo’s relationship with both his mother and her lover, a deeper internal revolt against this relationship stems from the problematic structure and system of society; school as one of its smallest unit is an example of confining children, stifling their freedom, disciplining them akin to robots. When they turn into adults they lose the essence of innocence, imagination, and continue to let themselves be eaten by this system; blindly; willingly; and this, unfortunately emanates from his mother’s lover. The gang’s convictions then becomes more rigid and there may only be one solution.

I don’t really buy the almost excessive, subjectively unreasonable brutality of this novel most particularly with animals. The teenagers can be irritating and whiny which of course is how most of them are in real life but I at least expected a strong introspection to accompany their convictions. Beyond this flaw, there is an interesting bit about Japanese juvenile laws that turn some tables around. If not for a certain paragraph I would have rated this lower and it was, I think, the saving grace of Mishima’s too bitter and acidic The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea: “There is no such thing as a good father because the role itself is bad. Strict fathers, soft fathers, nice moderate fathers—one's as bad as another. They stand in the way of our progress while they try to burden us with their inferiority complexes, and their unrealized aspirations, and their resentments, and their ideals, and the weaknesses they've never told anyone about, and their sins, and their sweeter-than-honey dreams, and the maxims they've never had the courage to live by—they'd like to unload all that silly crap on us, all of it!“

I look forward to reading more of his works particularly Forbidden Colours. And after a lot of reading, he also had an intriguing life and controversial death that made this novel all the more horrifying. show less

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 show more 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. show less

Yukio Mishima occupies a strange place in the Western imagination and my imagination in particular. Ever since I saw the trailer for Paul Schrader's biopic about him, Mishima has held a mythic sway over me. He was transgressive and problematic and represented a certain kind of masculine ideal. At its best, this ideal led him to create works of beauty, and at worst turned him into a deranged fascist who committed public suicide. If he were a Westerner, I'm not sure if he would have the same cult following he does. Then again there are plenty of far-right literary figures in the West who remain canonical staples.

In undergrad, I read this novel and The Temple of the Golden Pavilion. I loved this one but was lukewarm on the latter. The best show more of the classic Japanese novelists write in what I call "hallucinatory realism". They don't just use the conventions of literary and psychological realism to explore abnormal personalities, they also have an electric undercurrent running through their work. Think about how Lynch made The Straight Story. It's not a surrealist film, but underneath it all, something isn't quite right. Among these authors, I would include Tanizaki, Rampo, and Akutagawa along with Mishima. This novel is almost like a fantasy without any supernatural elements. At its high points it echoes the best of Greek tragedy. It's not perfect, though. Mishima was at his best writing about men and masculinity. The main female character here isn't well drawn and the sections that focus on her drag. So it deserves 4.5 stars. My recommendation is to go into it and read it blind. The synopsis gives the whole thing away. And be warned that there is a gruesome five-page section that describes the killing and dissection of a kitten in graphic detail. show less

This author and novella came to my via the Bowie 100 Books List and was a definite hit for me.

A young Japanese boy is confused when his widowed mother takes up with a sailor on a couple of days leave in port, but enchanted with boats and the sea this confusion turns to wonderment and idealisation by the time the man returns to sea. When the sailor returns to the boy's mother after six months away at sea, circumstances change and he quickly falls from the pedestal the boy had precariously placed him on. With this fall from grace comes terrible consequences as the boy summons the savage group of boys he is part of for retribution.

As with many Japanese novels, there is a wonderful sense of dark foreboding and yet space and spareness in show more Mishima's writing. Time feels slowed down and the atmosphere is electric, with what is unsaid feeling almost more compelling than what is said, and the extremes of nature - especially the oppressive heat of the summer section - adding to the intoxicating atmosphere.

I would have loved for this short novella to have taken us a little further into the story, yet also respect the point at which Mishima leaves the tale with the reader.

Recommended if you enjoy Japanese literature, but warning - it contains vivid description of animal cruelty in one part, so this Lord of the Flies flavour of story may not be for everyone.

4 stars - a wonderfully dark and evocative tale show less

Glory is bitter stuff... but then so are dreams. The Sailor Who Felll from Grace with the Sea offers an enlightening glimpse into Mishima's thought. A thundering greenish-blue wave rolling in from the West hit Japan's shores post-war. The way of the warrior losing ground, the katana and the tantō starting to show signs of rust where salty water brushed their blade.

Our sailor Ryuji wishes to attain the glory of his ancestors but can only conjure it in his dreams on ship and shore. Torn between the ocean and Fusako's bosom.
Fusako's son, Noboru, and his gang, however, see through the charade and have neatly reordered the world to their apathetic liking.

An interesting ensemble makes for an intense read. A novella that feels like a novel, show more characters that remain somewhat unknown, words and phrases that spring from the page and come alive in the mind. show less

The beauty of "The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea" is, to my mind, beyond dispute. While most of the Japanese literature I've read has struck me as somewhat spare, "The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea" is sensual, full of poetic, often counterintuitive descriptive phrases and startling, memorable imagery. In addition to the obvious political themes that I'll discuss below, I also sense that this novel is attempting to work through some of the psychological fallout from the atomic attacks that ended the Second World War. Mishima's description of his young characters playing in military graveyards an abandoned packing crates perfectly conveys the feelings of paental abandonment, deracination, and hopelessness that they show more express throughout the novel. "The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea" will probably find a receptive audience among those readers whose taste runs toward the gloomy and eschatological, and its precisely sketched characters and straight-line plot convey a full-bore intensity that few writers would even attempt. It's dark, bloody, sexual, merciless, and it makes it home in a particularly twisted corner of the human heart where few authors have dared venture before or since.

My problems with "Sailor" begin and end with its author and some of the political thinking that seems to have gone in to its writing. How, exactly, do we consider a beautiful work of art crafted by a draft-dodging, sexually repressed ultranationalist who committed ritual suicide after attempting to overthrow the Japanese government? There's a part of me that wants to claim that Mishima's political opinions and activities are irrelevant to our enjoyment of his work. After all, many readers have forgiven Pound, Yeats, and Lawrence their dalliances with fascism; their work seems to have survived their politics. However, it's difficult to deny that Mishima's opinions – his distrust of women, his dislike of foreign customs and bourgeois capitalism, his obsession with death and masculinity – permeate every sentence of "Sailor." His apparent sympathy with the aggressors who perpetrate the murder that closes the book is, in the context of his biography, particularly troubling. Seen in the best possible light, this book is an arresting portrait of a singular and brutal worldview and its characters' attitudes are necessary elements in a unified, and ultimately satisfying, whole. Understandably, some readers will find themselves unable to separate Mishima's aesthetics from his politics and will consider this novel the product of a troubled, and perhaps vicious, mind. Dear reader, the only way to find out which of these two camps you will fall into, or at least near, is to read this remarkable, if disturbing, little book for yourself. show less