Review of The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea by Yukio Mishima

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