The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea by Yukio Mishima is a novel about a thirteen-year-old boy, Noboru, who is in a gang while his mother is a widow. One day, his mother is invited onto a vessel to help out an actress where they meet Ryuji, a sailor. Ryuji is in port for a few days, and begins to take a liking to Noboru’s mother, Fusako. Over the course of those few days, they sleep together while Noboru watches through a peephole from his room. Due to the gang’s hatred for fathers and the adult world, Noboru is conflicted because he adores Ryuji’s profession and idolizes him, while also disliking the fact that he doesn’t fit the standards of the gang. On one of the days Ryuji is still there, Noboru and the gang capture a stray cat, kill it, skin it, and crush its organs in their hands. Upon returning from their killing, Ryuji sees them, but doesn’t suspect anything. Once Ryuji’s leave is over, he returns to his ship, the Rakuyo, and sails away. Ryuji returns in the winter, where he intends to stay on land due to his love for Fusako by proposing to her. However, Ryuji is still heartbroken about leaving his sailing life and likes to tell stories of his tales whenever he can. Everything comes to a head when one night Fusako and Ryuji are making love in the dark when they spy the light of the peep hole and find Noboru sleeping there. Once he’s found out, Noboru believes Ryuji will give him a beating (one Fusako even directed), but is likely even more shamed when it results in a comforting talk from Ryuji. Betrayed by his idol, Noboru goes to his gang with all the wrongs that Ryuji committed, and the gang concocts a plan to drug and kill Ryuji. The day of the wedding, Noboru lures Ryuji out to meet the gang by the docks, where they get on a train, hike through a tunnel, and arrive on a desolate hill overlooking the sea. Ryuji is somewhat suspicious, but enjoys the fact that they were interested in his sailor tales, so he begins discussing all of his adventures. While he is speaking, Ryuji begins to second guess his decision to stay on land. Then, Noboru offers him tea laced with sleeping pills, which he drinks, and the gang’s plans are set in motion.
 
In this novel, Mishima has concocted a deftly violent, intriguing, and impassioned piece of literature. There are moments that are rendered in absolutely terrifying detail (i.e. the cat scene), and his understanding of violence, love, and betrayal are striking. What interested me was the near irony of belief of some of the boys in the gang and the way they treated fathers. Fathers, in their eyes, were scum and because they were scum, nothing they could do would save them from their own being. While some of the boy’s hatred stemmed justifiably (i.e. parents beating them or absent), it was noted at least one of the boys had a loving father that prayed with them. From an outside perspective, this type of thinking is completely illogical, though when Ryuji began to step into the role of being a father, he was lumped in with the rest of them. I found it to be an interesting take on how the identity of someone can be what people hate even though they did nothing wrong. In this case, Fusako had an agency look into Ryuji’s past and found nothing but an upstanding sailor and man. Mishima thus constructs an ideal man: no debts, faithful, hard-working, doesn’t reprimand, strong, and outgoing. And yet, the ideal is still the death of him in the eyes of the gang. In some ways, the gang’s thought process is contradictory in that the boys couldn’t be alive if not for their fathers and yet the boys utterly despise them. Also, Mishima even goes out to say that the boys come from well-to-do backgrounds commenting on their large lunches, and yet Mishima demonstrates an evil inside of the boys.
 
The structure of the novel leads itself to being masterly crafted, with not only the seasons factoring into the tone of the novel (i.e. summer = passion, winter = violence), but in the way the novel expertly cuts off once the reader knows the inevitable. After having read only a handful of Mishima’s novels, I can certainly tell I will enjoy the rest.
 
Final Rating: 5/5

​Iron Horse Literary Review 26.1 is a collection of poetry, fiction, non-fiction, and interviews. The story I enjoyed the most in this issue was ‘All B’s and One C’ by Patrick Font which details the life of a flunking student trying to get by in summer school. He takes weed from his father’s stash and sells it to his classmates. I liked how the voice of Joey comes through, the way he views María, and the lengths he will go to cover for himself.
 
Final Rating: 3/5

​A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf is an essay focusing on the implications and history of women in fiction. It details the types of struggles women have had to exist within in the literature landscape, imagining the lengths with which Jane Austen had to hide her manuscripts, the views of men on women writing, and the difficulties of the past and present. Though, there are also other calls to actions and reassurances for writers, in which she writes, “For masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.” Or, “Perhaps a mind that us purely masculine cannot create, any more than a mind that is purely feminine, I thought.” And finally, “Therefore, I would ask you to write all kinds of books, hesitating at no subject however trivial or however vast.” It’s an encouraging read seeing as Woolf mentions that women, given a hundred years would come into themselves in fiction. Seeing the landscape now, this seems to have become realized (though, not fully so). The thesis of Woolf’s argument is that if a person has the material means (i.e. a stable income, a private space) as well as drawing from both their feminine and masculine sides, then a writer can effectively become renowned. And while Woolf does mention many writers (including herself), come from wealth, it’s hard to reckon with the fact that other writers do not have those resources. How does one simply afford five hundred dollars a year (about nine thousand dollars today), without spending most of their time working and less of their time writing?
 
Final Rating: 4/5

​South Dakota Review 58.1 is a collection of poetry, fiction, and non-fiction. Out of the pieces, I enjoyed ‘Nepenthes Northiana’ by Virgil Suárez, ‘When it Rains’ by Elizabeth Wilson, ‘Never Break Two Laws at Once’ by Adam Straus, and ‘Mascot Worship’ by William Musgrove. Particularly the story by Adam Straus was interesting in the way it handled desertion, anxiety, and dislike toward the military.
 
Final Rating: 3.5/5

​Story Spring 1991 is a collection of short stories which I found to be intriguing and heartbreaking. I particularly liked ‘Floor Show’ by Julia Alverez, ‘Cash Machine’ by Madison Smartt Bell, ‘It’s Come to This’ by Annick Smith, ‘Porpoises and Romance’ by Lewis Nordan, and ‘’The Control Group’ by Antonya Nelson. ‘Floor Show’ is about an immigrant family trying to impress a wealthy family at a Mexican restaurant while one of the daughters sees the wealthy wife kiss her dad. ‘Cash Machine’ is about a pair of men trying to rob a young couple of money in New York. ‘It’s Come to This’ is about a widow who lost her husband while living in Montana, and trying to deal with the grief by befriending a neighbor. And ‘Porpoises and Romance’ is about a boy who questions his sexuality while his parents celebrate a second honeymoon at a beach. This collection was a powerful read.
 
Final Rating: 4/5

​(I am) A Real American by Bob Kan is a memoir about a Japanese American Air Force fighter pilot, his experiences overseas, and a few near-death crashes. Kan was witness to Pearl Harbor, joined the military, and was stationed in Vietnam, Korea, and Japan. There are some interesting moments, for example one in which Kan’s aircraft loses one of its engines in Vietnam and he has to eject. However, there were some moments that didn’t quite hit the mark. While reading, I was particularly aware of the formatting/grammatical mistakes and felt that another round of edits was needed. I’m also not too fond of pro-military stories, even if told from a Japanese American.
 
Final Rating: 2.5/5

​Rashomon and Other Stories by Ryunosuke Akutagawa is a collection of six short stories focusing on the lives of samurai, priests, and pre-war Japan. The first, ‘In a Grove’, is about a murder of a man, told through interviews with a police officer, some of them witnesses, the suspect, the wife, and finally the dead man through a medium. On three of the accounts, all of the speakers describe themselves as the killer, all with differing motives. The truth is never revealed, though provides a look at how the world can be viewed differently even if everyone witnesses the same thing. The second story, ‘Rashomon’, tells the story of a hungry samurai who would never resort to becoming a thief, but when he sees a woman pulling hair out of corpses at the top of a gate, he steals everything she owns. Another interesting story is, ‘The Martyr’, in which an orphan is raised by a church, but his duty to the church is questioned when a girl says she is having his child. The orphan is then excommunicated, becomes a beggar, and only when the town burns down does he save the daughter people think different about him. However, the fire burned him so badly he dies by the feet of the girl, where it is revealed the orphan was actually a girl. And finally, the last story, ‘The Dragon’, follows a priest who decides to play a trick on the other priests because they make fun of his nose. He decides to make up the fact that a dragon will ascend to heaven from the pond. From this rumor, everyone from the town as well as the surrounding areas gather to see the dragon, although he knows it to be a lie. However, it turns out a dragon does ascend to heaven and the priest is left wondering if it actually happened.
 
This collection of stories was fascinating, not only in the stories themselves, but how they are framed. One takes the form of interview monologues, another adds an imagined post script, and another frames the story inside of another story. It was a fun read, especially, ‘The Dragon’, in which Akutagawa displays how lies can manifest themselves into being.
 
Final Rating: 4.5/5

​Instructions between Takeoff and Landing by Charles Jensen is a collection of poems that delve into the loss of a mother and contemplations on queerness. The poems are broken up into sections, with the ones under the ‘Story Problems’ sections adapting essay questions/discussions. I was fond of the poems discussing space and the Voyager satellite, ‘The Space Race’, ‘Instructions between Takeoff and Landing’, and ‘The Space Race, Cont.’. I also liked the poems ‘Hospice’ for its form and how it handled its subject matter and ‘Mortality’ for how strongly it worked the speaker’s life into the piece. The collection talks to itself, sometimes questions itself, and in that reflection, it creates intensity in its layers.
 
Final Rating: 4/5

​Maw Appears in the Following Forms by Kiley McLaughlin is a collection of sections all discussing the ways in which three mothers interact and treat both each other and their daughters. There are elements of surrealism, weird dreams, moments at the beach, which all are written poetically and with care. I particularly liked the section, ‘Another Way to Tell It [Ear Tagging]’, with its use of ear tagging of calves and applying it to these characters in an instructional way.
 
Final Rating: 4/5

​When Your Sky Runs Into Mine by Rooja Mohassessy is a collection of poems describing the impacts and reverberations of the war in Iran, both as a child and in reflection. There are many moments of depth from ‘They Were Blind and Mad, Some of Them Were Laughing. There Was Nobody to Lead the Blind People.’ to ‘Interview for Asylum’. The collection exposes and ruminates on the loss of childhood, of friends and family, of hearing, and of joy. It’s a gut-wrenching but needed collection.
 
Final Rating: 4/5