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 coming-of-age story told from the perspectives of the story’s three main characters: Ryuji Tsukazaki, a sailor; the widow Fusako Kuroda, an importer of European finery; and her misfit son Noboru, a boy poised on the tenuous cusp between childhood and adolescence.

In a Yokohama suburb during the postwar years, the fatherless 13-year-old Noboru joins a gang of youths from good families led by The Chief, a psychopathic fellow 13 year old. They scorn the uselessness of mankind — especially fathers, “the vilest things on earth” — and then kill and dissect a cat to practice their “absolute dispassion.”

The Chief gives the other boys sermons on rejecting the adult world as an illusion filled with all things hypocritical and sentimental. He schools them in removing all traces of emotion and challenges their loyalty. The whole set up of this group is very disturbing and seeing it from inside NoBoru’s head as he takes these messages on board as truth made my skin crawl.

One summer night, Noboru’s Westernized mother, Fusako, hooks up with the sailor Ryuji. Noboru witnesses the beginning of their relationship through a peep-hole he had discovered in his room – and through which he had been dispassionately watching his mother undress on many other occasions.

 At first, Noboru is enamored of Ryuji, whom he believes to embody a certain purity. But when Ryuji commits the unthinkable felony of marrying Fusako, a price must be paid. The Chief decides to kill Ryuji as a punishment befitting a sailor who has fallen from grace with the sea.

This is a very disturbing tale of youth corrupted and a vivid portrait of post-war Japan and mind of a child growing up in the shadow of a charismatic and dangerous peer.