The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea

Great novel, very descriptive, and all-around interesting.

The genius of Sailor is how it examines complex issues - Japan's postwar identity, western materialism versus traditional Japanese values, the ways in which nihilism overwhelms meaning - in such a concise, straightforward story. Ryuji is a simple sailor who went to sea to achieve some vaguely defined higher glory. Although Ryuji believes he's destined for great things, so far the fates haven't aligned to reveal what that great thing is. While on shore leave in Yokohama he meets Fusako, a widow who owns a high end clothing store that offers imported English articles. They become lovers, and, before long, fall in love.Fusako's thirteen year old son Noburu runs with a gang of strange and frightening youths who reject all attempts to impose meaning on them from the outside, whether it's from school, parents, society or literature. Noburu is torn between loyalty to the beliefs of his gang and his admiration for the heroic life he believes Ryuji exemplifies. But Ryuji's growing love for Fusako leads him to abandon the sea to become a clerk in Fusako's shop. Noburu's gang pounces on this as evidence that Ryuji has betrayed Noburu and them, and that he must be punished for abandoning the heroic course. This they proceed to do, in a way that feels both horrifying and inevitable.Written five years before his death at 45, this novel encapsulates Mishima's major intellectual and emotional preoccupations, but doesn't resolve them. Ryuji is punished for abandoning his dreams of glory, but it's not clear he would have achieved them. Fusako symbolizes collaboration with the western devil taking over Japan, but she is accomplished and financially successful. The most disturbing character is young Noburu. At an age when most humans are acquiring the mental sextants they need to navigate through the world, he is ensnared by a group who see life as having meaning only in the extremes of glory or death. The growing distance between his everyday life and his dark fantasies opens up during the course of the novel in profound and unsettling ways. What happens to Noburu, who has his whole life in front of him, is in many ways sadder than what happens to Ryuji.Noburu's dark dialectic is also a glimpse into the mental torments that affected Mishima. The most un-Japanese of its major writers in terms of his interests and lifestyle, he was nevertheless the most jingoistic Japanese patriot. A man of massive discipline and ambition, he was bedeviled by the fear that beneath the surface of his successful, glittering life lay a vast emptiness devoid of meaning. He spent his enormous intellectual and physical resources on turning himself into a symbol, but doubts about the meaning of that symbol led him to constantly revise it. Out of these internal contradictions he generated a furious literary output, a high profile life and a very public, if puzzling death meant to protest Japan's turn away from its traditional values. His internal struggles were both sad and heroic; his legacy is the great novels he left us, including this one.

In my Mishima binge it's easy to adapt to the feeling that each chronologically subsequent novel will become my latest favorite. It's another thing altogether to feel, upon reading The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea, that I've encountered my latest favorite, perfectly chiasmic novel of all.As much as I have come to appreciate with spontaneous astonishment the beauty and clarity of Mishima's descriptions, their integrity and definitive distillation of scene and psyche, it is the mastery and inevitability of the multi-various strands of narrative, intuitive and meditative counterpoint resultant in a skein of delusion, greatness in escalating factors of consummate cruelty,, solidity and innate hatred of it, trust in and betrayal by the best expectations of youth and innocence.This ricercare is woven of the interior and exterior voices of 13-year old Noboru, Ryuji, the eponymous Sailor, and finally, although we have seen her since the earliest pages, have indeed seen her first night with Ryuji through Noboru's Hitchcockean peephole into her room, Noboru's single mother, Fusako is finally named and eventually given voice to her dreams, doubts and equivocations.The overarching superego is horrifically, tragically cast as a prepubescent Animal Farm-like cult of nihilist pre-Incels. As frightening is their leader's, their disfigured Chief's anarchist manifestoes can be in their occasionally compelling moments of manipulation, there is a rite of passage involving cruelty to a stray kitten that will not only preclude my recommending this book to any of my fellow cat-lovers, but even more horrifyingly, serves as a mere appetizer of things to come, inexorably, inevitably.

Enjoyable novel and if you like any of Yukio Mishima's other books or even just enjoy the premise, I promise you'll enjoy it. Only thing is some of the content is heavy so be aware.

There is so much in this book to not like. There are early disturbing parts that make you wonder what the heck you are reading and seemingly directionless storytelling.But, I stuck with it and in the last two chapters the book revealed it's purpose to me and the ideas/insights it was leading me toward.I think that for someone who understood Japanese Culture, Honor, and Bushido it could easily be a lifetime favorite.For me as a westerner who only slightly knows about those things, some of it was lost on me. The idea of an Honorable death for example isn't something western kids fantasize about.The most impactful part of this book was the circle of life between the Sailor and Boy, who are in some ways the same person at different ages.I would recommend this book to others, but with a warning: This won't be like the books you're used to reading.

This is a book of longing: longing for uniqueness, for love, for escape, for solitude, for identity in a faceless world. As is the case with much of Mishima's work, the longing takes place in a deep introspective psychological novel. This time, the protagonist is a malleable teenager, and his mirror is a once-malleable sailor he thinks is a hero. The child is precocious in ways that adults cannot understand, and his "genius" involves violence and subservience to a cult of young outcasts. Mishima himself was an outcast, his sensibility full of rage. This is a deeply disturbing novel, not for the faint of heart. Beautiful translation, except for the jacket copy, which doesn't allow for the extremism of Mishima's thoughts and actions.

I received the book in pristine condition, it had no errors or paragraphs misaligned and there was no sign of wear on the book.The font used is a little on the smaller side though, but I could do just fine with it

A entrega foi supre ágil, o livro é bom mas não achei excepcional.

Love this edition! My order came within 2 days (even over the Christmas public holiday break). Packed with care and left in a sheltered area on my property so it’d be safe. Great experience.

なに様、活字が汚すぎる。100年前の印刷機で刷った？　惜しい！英訳そのものは、読みやすく、分かりやすく、ある意味では、名文だと思う。何度も読みたくなる。でも再度言うが、アルファベットの活字が余りにも見にくい？醜い？

Great book.