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

First published:Gogo no eikō, 1963 (English translation, 1965)

Type of work: Novel

Type of plot: Psychological realism

Time of plot: After World War II

Locale: Yokohama, Japan

Principal characters

• Noboru Kuroda, an adolescent male
• Fusako Kuroda, his widowed mother
• Ryuji Tsukazaki, second mate of a tramp vessel
• Chief, anonymous leader of a band of boys to which Noboru belongs

The Story:

Part 1. Noboru, a precocious boy of thirteen, convinced of his own genius, spends much of his time in his bedroom, looking out over Yokohama Bay and listening to the sound of ships’ horns. His personal philosophy, like that of the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, comprises distrust of authority and women, concentration on death and nihilism, and faith in universal order. One night he discovers a peephole in his bedroom wall through which he is able to observe his mother’s boudoir. Several days later, his mother, Fusako, who is only thirty-three years old and retains much of her beauty, invites a sailor named Ryuji to dinner, and they pass the night in lovemaking. Noboru, through his peephole, observes their most intimate moments. At first, he finds nothing objectionable, merely a verification of his philosophy of universal order. In his mind, he is encroaching on the mother, the mother on the man, the man on the sea, and the sea on the boy in a purposeful design.

Superficially, Fusako, as the wealthy proprietress of an exclusive male boutique, has nothing in common with Ryuji, the rough sailor. About her own age, he always lived as a loner, hating both the land and the sea as types of a prison. From his youth, he cherished the illusion of a special destiny leading him to glory. Becoming a sailor to escape a boring life such as his father led, Ryuji did not, like the conventional seafarer, engage in easy and frequent sex. His image of perfect love consists of idyllic courtship ending in death.

On the morning after Noboru’s spying on his mother, he tells her that he is going swimming, but instead he spends the day denouncing the insignificance of ordinary life with a band of six schoolfellows, all top students. They are ranked according to leadership; their chief is number one, and Noboru is number three. In boasting of his spying exploits, Noboru portrays the sailor as a hero, a man dominating a woman, but the chief disagrees on the grounds that such a relationship is unimportant. He inculcates as a principle that the band should remain absolutely apathetic concerning all things sexual. By means of a therapy of showing pictures that portray every physical aspect of intercourse, he makes the band completely dispassionate. Part of their ritual at this meeting consists of killing a kitten as a symbol of the emptiness of existence. Selected as executioner, Noboru bashes the kitten against a log. The boys strip off the animal’s skin and dissect its organs in order to experience the sensation of absolute nakedness. Noboru compares the nakedness of the kitten with the nakedness of his mother.

A chance meeting with Ryuji on his way home turns Noboru’s rapture into embarrassment. Since he told his mother that his destination was elsewhere in the city, he is forced to admit his deception to the sailor, who good-naturedly promises not to expose his lie. Instead of feeling gratitude, Noboru looks down upon Ryuji as a fawning adult, seeking to ingratiate himself. As they talk about sailing and the sea on their way to Noboru’s home, however, he has another change of heart, impressed by the sailor’s masculinity and experience. Fusako is similarly attracted by Ryuji’s manliness, but she struggles against being trapped in the conventional role of a grieving woman deserted by a sailor lover.

During their final encounter before his next voyage, Ryuji has the fantasy that one of their kisses is the kiss of death and that Fusako should, therefore, feel that their parting is like dying happily. Previously, in his dreams, he associated the notion of final glory with abandoning a woman. Their actual farewell on the docks, however, is formal, without emotion on either side.

Part 2. When Ryuji returns to Yokohama in time for the New Year festivities, Fusako takes him straight to her home. During his absence, she was chaste, dissipating her energies through work and exercise. By this time, Ryuji, having reached the age of thirty-three, realizes that his dream of a grand future will never come to pass and considers giving up the sea. Although the sea represents freedom, it also involves a monotonous existence with no tangible glory. In the midst of indecision, he asks Fusako to marry him, at the same time offering to give her all of his money, whether or not she accepts his proposal. Fusako, touched by this artless generosity, agrees immediately.

After the holidays, when Noboru rejoins his band in an enormous abandoned crate on the harbor front, he expresses his disgust at Ryuji’s decision to settle down as a landsman. The chief first asks whether he would like to participate in turning the sailor back into a hero, but then without saying more on the subject, he launches into a generalized diatribe against fathers and father figures, boasting that he is capable of making his own world die, an achievement equivalent to glory.

Ryuji takes up permanent residence with Fusako, and, soon after, she informs Noboru of their imminent marriage. Conditions in the household grow tense. Fusako discovers the existence of the peephole and angrily confronts Noboru. Expecting Ryuji to administer bodily punishment, she is shocked when he merely delivers a verbal rebuke. Noboru is even more upset by this placid reaction, which completely shatters his image of the sailor as hero and glory-figure. Angrily, he asks the chief to call an emergency meeting of the band to discuss the situation. They decide that Ryuji’s example represents an affront to order and that he has to be eliminated. They decide that he should be drugged and then disemboweled in line with their previous ritual with the kitten. They have no fear of consequences, since none is yet the age of fourteen, and the penal code clearly states that acts of juveniles under that age are not punishable by law.

On the day of execution, Noboru succeeds in delivering Ryuji to the appointed meeting place under the pretext that his companions want to hear tales of the sea. Ryuji willingly begins a narrative combining nautical and personal reminiscences. Although sensing that something is not quite right, he unhesitatingly drinks a cup of poisoned tea that is offered to him. It has an odd taste, a sensation he associates with the bitterness of glory. His romantic association of love, death, and glory vanishes with him into nothingness.

Bibliography

Keene, Donald. Five Modern Japanese Novelists. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003. Keene devotes a chapter to Mishima in his examination of five Japanese novelists with whom he was acquainted. He provides his personal recollections of the writers as well as literary and cultural analyses of their works.

Napier, Susan J. Escape from the Wasteland: Romanticism and Realism in the Fiction of Mishima Yukio and Ōe Kenzaburō. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991. Does not treat The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea separately but offers many insights and suggestions.

Nathan, John. Mishima: A Biography. Boston: Little, Brown, 1974. Reprint. Cambridge, Mass.: Da Capo Press, 2000. Nathan provides a new preface for the 2000 reprint of his classic biography. Nathan knew Mishima personally and professionally, and he provides a detailed and balanced portrait of the writer.

Petersen, Gwenn Boardman. The Moon in the Water: Understanding Tanizaki, Kawabata, and Mishima. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1979. Provides a lucid interpretation of the sexual and aesthetic elements in The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea.

Piven, Jerry S. The Madness and Perversion of Yukio Mishima. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2004. A psychological study of Mishima. Piven traces the events of Mishima’s life—most notably his early childhood, spent largely in his grandmother’s sick room—in order to provide a better understanding of the author and his works. Chapter 7 is devoted to a discussion of The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea.

Starrs, Roy. Deadly Dialectics: Sex, Violence, and Nihilism in the World of Yukio Mishima. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1994. Starrs provides a critical and interpretive look at Mishima’s work, focusing on its elements of sex, violence, and nihilism. He examines Mishima’s intellectual background, including the influences of Thomas Mann and Friedrich Nietzsche, and describes the quality of Mishima’s thought. Includes bibliography and index

Ueda, Makoto. Modern Japanese Writers and the Nature of Literature. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1976. Discerning analysis of Mishima’s fiction by a Japanese scholar.

Viglielmo, Valdo H. “The Sea as Metaphor: An Aspect of the Modern Japanese Novel.” In Poetics of the Elements in the Human Condition, edited by Anna-Teresa Tyrnieniecke. Dordrecht, the Netherlands: Reidel, 1985. Offers an ingenious and credible interpretation of the multiple meanings of the sea.

Wolfe, Peter. Yukio Mishima. New York: Continuum, 1989. Excellent criticism of the novel and one of the best critiques in English. The novel is portrayed as “a work of warped genius” that “opens exciting realms of response, but only to slam them shut.”