The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea
— 1963 —
New York: Vintage International, 1994; translated from the Japanese by John Nathan; 181 pages; originally published in Japan in 1963 as Gogo no eiko
FIRST LINES
Noboru’s mother closed his bedroom door and locked it. What would she do if there were a fire? Let him out first thing—she had promised herself that. But what if the wooden door warped in the heat or paint clogged the keyhole? The window? There was a gravel path below; besides, the second floor of this gangling house was hopelessly high.
PLOT SUMMARY
In postwar Yokohama, Japan, a thirteen-year-old boy named Noboru makes a discovery. Behind a chest of drawers in his room, he finds a small hole in the wall that allows him to secretly look into his widowed mother’s bedroom. He begins spying on her at night, particularly when she had nagged or scolded him and is preparing for bed.
Noboru is locked in because he had been caught sneaking out to join his friends, a gang of precocious teenage boys led by a “chief” who has formidable notions about the imperfections and hypocrisy of adults. Noboru decides that his mother, who owns a shop selling fashionable Western luxury goods, is imperfect.
When he meets Ryuji, his mother’s new romantic interest, Noboru is in awe. In this merchant marine officer, with his manly reserve and tales of the sea, Noboru sees the sailor as a heroic figure. One night, as the boy spies through the peephole, he sees his mother and the sailor make love. Noboru is “certain he had watched a tangle of thread unravel to trace a hallowed figure.”
Noboru’s admiration quickly fades when he learns that the sailor will leave his ship and marry his mother. All reverence for Ryuji is shattered. Why is the sailor ready to sacrifice his honor? Disgusted, Noboru and his gang plot to make “the sailor who fell from grace” pure and heroic once more, with dreadful consequences.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: YUKIO MISHIMA
Recognized in the literary world as one of Japan’s most significant writers in the years after World War II, Yukio Mishima was once a candidate for the Nobel Prize. He failed to win the award but rather reached a new level of notoriety on November 25, 1970, when he committed ritual suicide—known as seppuku. Disemboweling himself, he was decapitated by a loyal follower in a public display that made international headlines.
Born Hiraoka Kimitake in Tokyo on January 14, 1925, the author of The Sailor was the son of a high-ranking civil servant. Kimitake’s mother’s family came from Japan’s traditional aristocracy and he was educated at Peers’ School, established as an academy for Japan’s royal family and members of Japan’s feudal nobility. Fascinated from an early age by classical Japanese theater, he began writing poetry for the school’s literary magazine.
In 1941, at the age of sixteen, he published a short story in a prestigious literary magazine. Its editors coined his pen name, Yukio Mishima, combining the Japanese word for snow and the name of a railway station in the city of Mishima.
Mishima graduated at the top of his class in 1944 in a ceremony attended by the Japanese Emperor. Japan was then at war and he received his draft notice. But he failed his physical examination and was spared fighting in the war’s final year when many young men, willing to die for the Emperor, embarked on suicide missions.
While working in Japan’s Ministry of Finance, he began pursuing writing professionally, encouraged by novelist Yasunari Kawabata, later the first Japanese winner of the Nobel Prize. Drawing heavily on Japanese literature and cultural traditions, Mishima wrote short stories that explored violence and sexuality in many forms.
Though Yukio Mishima married and had two children, gay themes reverberated throughout his work. His 1949 novel, Kamen no kokuhaku (Confessions of a Mask in English), was a semiautobiographical story of a closeted gay man. The book established twenty-four-year-old Yukio Mishima as a leading voice among postwar Japanese writers.
He followed with a series of novels whose main characters are tormented by physical or psychological problems. The most acclaimed of these was Kinkaku-ji (1956), published in English as The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, the story of monk, obsessed with beauty, who burns down a famous Buddhist temple.
In 1955, Mishima began an intense period of body building and martial arts training. As his celebrity grew, Mishima took to modeling in body-building magazines and acting. He played a soldier in the film of his story “Patriotism” in which an army officer and his wife commit ritual suicide to demonstrate loyalty to the Emperor.
“A sickly, scholarly schoolboy, he transformed himself into a muscular man, expert at Japanese fencing and swordsmanship and a proficient student of karate,” wrote Philip Shabecoff of the New York Times, who interviewed Mishima shortly before his death. “Mr. Mishima said that he worked so hard on body building because he intended to die before he was 50 and wanted to have a good looking corpse. He laughed, but then added, ‘I am half-serious, you know.’ ”
With his reputation set, he emerged as a candidate for the Nobel Prize, but the award went instead to his mentor Yasunari Kawabata in 1968. Mishima then published a cycle of novels collectively called The Sea of Fertility that are considered his masterwork: Spring Snow (1969), Runaway Horses (1969), and The Temple of Dawn (1970) were all published before his death.
By the time they were released, Mishima had become a fanatical nationalist, devoted to restoring Japanese traditional values, which he saw being overrun by American influences, even though he privately maintained an essentially Western lifestyle. He formed a right-wing militia group called the Tate No Kai, or Shield Society, whose uniformed members regularly drilled together.
But it was no drill on November 25, 1970, when Mishima and four members of the Shield Society seized a Japanese general at an army compound. From a rooftop, Mishima urged the troops assembled below to rebel and throw off Japan’s postwar constitution, which restricted the country’s rearmament. When his call for a coup was ignored, the forty-five-year-old novelist took his own life in the manner of the traditional samurai warrior.
The Decay of the Angel, the final book in the Sea of Fertility cycle, was published posthumously in 1971.
WHY YOU SHOULD READ IT
The Sailor’s prose is at times violent—describing, for instance, the gang killing a kitten. But Mishima can also be delicately sensual, with a Matisse-like eye for the interplay of color:
Fusako was wearing a black-lace kimono over a crimson under-robe, and her obi was white brocade. Her milky face floated coolly in the dusk. Crimson peeped seductively through the black lace. She was a presence suffusing the air around them with the softness of being a woman; an extravagant, elegant woman—Ryuji had never seen anything like her.
Tightly constructed, skillfully written, The Sailor builds toward its dark conclusion. Does Mishima admire Noboru and his friends as representatives of traditional Japanese values? Or is he mocking their adolescent philosophy as pretentious posturing?
In my reading, it is difficult not to see this gang of boys as representatives of the heart of darkness that lies within.
Before getting very far into this novel, I recalled Agostino (see entry), a tale of another thirteen-year-old enthralled by his mother and caught up with a gang of boys. But Noboru’s fascination goes far beyond Agostino’s. And Noboru’s gang is ready to do far worse. By the end of the novel, we are in Lord of the Flies territory, as Noboru’s gang descends to dark depths.
Read it. You decide.
WHAT TO READ NEXT
The Temple of the Golden Pavilion is based on an actual event in which a Buddhist temple was burned by a monk in 1950. In Mishima’s fictional version, a traumatized boy with a hopeless stutter becomes an acolyte in a famous temple and becomes obsessed with its beauty. It was widely viewed as his masterpiece, before the publication of the four novels in the Sea of Fertility cycle.
The four books in this series follow the reincarnation of a character in four different time periods. Nobel laureate Kawabata, who died in 1972, said of the cycle:
It used to be said that “Kinka-kuji”—“The Temple of the Golden Pavilion”—was his masterpiece. But this new one is greater. Mishima is really going at it with his whole heart now. He has a tremendous gift of words, and it has never been richer than in this new book…. Before I received the Nobel Prize I said that Mishima would get it…. I regard the prize as having been awarded not so much to me as to Japan. As far as talent goes, Mishima is far superior to me.
Finally, also consider Kawabata’s Snow Country (1956), chronicling the romance of a wealthy man and a geisha; it was a candidate for inclusion in this collection.