Japanese read: The Sailor who Fell From Grace with the Sea

Following a spin-off from my Murakami obsession, I resolved to delve into more Japanese literature. This led me to Yukio Mishima’s The Sailor Who Fell From Grace with the Sea, which grapples with the uneasy inhumanity of violence. Quiet, restless prose underscores the anarchic tone of the novel. A group of young boys train themselves in intellectual detachment. Misanthropy, the product of their angst, is focused on the family. They perceive the patriarch as a tyrannical force. Everyday living manifests the simple-minded platitudes of the adult world, scorned by this group of self-professed ‘geniuses’.

The opening scene introduces the teenaged Noboru. Locked in his room at night to prevent night-time adventures, self-containment reinforces Noboru’s isolation from his mother and the world. This world is disrupted by his mother’s affair with Ryuji, a naval officer. Abandoning his intangible yet profound love of the sea for the constancy provided by Fusoka, Noboru’s mother, Ryuji reconciles his desire for glory with a different kind of happiness. ‘Glory, as anyone knows, is bitter stuff’ reads the final line of the novel, and indeed, Ryuji’s unsuspecting involvement in Noboru’s world has sinister repercussions.

Violence is wedded with the macabre to produce an unsettling after-taste in the reader. Midway, a scene of protracted, animal cruelty appears. The closure works on the power of suggestion; violence does not need depiction to sear the imagination. Noboru’s flawed objectivity demonstrates that the human condition stems the cultivation of pure impartiality. Rich in metaphor, this brief and composed novel should be embraced by those who are prepared for the confrontational and shocking power of art.