Rating: 
Summary: Afternoon of Glory
Review: It is difficult to separate Mishima the man from Mishima the author. When reading books like "The Sailor who Fell from Grace with the Sea" (Japanese title is "Gogo no Eiko," or "Afternoon of Glory"), one cannot help but think of his suicide, his politics, his private army, etc... However, a masterpiece such as this deserves to be judged on its literary merits rather than the politics of its author."The Sailor who Fell from Grace with the Sea" is a stark book, running both cold and passionately hot as the children who attempt to be intellectually dispassionate, all the while feeling the fluxing emotions of adolescence. A young boy's hero, a Sailor full of bravado and the masculine glory of searching for the horizon and always leaving women behind, finds himself changing his ideals with inklings of romantic love and home and hearth and comfort. The young boy who idolizes him cannot forgive these trespasses. The Sailor must remain a pure hero, uncorrupted by sentimentality. The purity of the mother is a running theme in Japanese fiction, and Mishima plays with societies ideas of mothers and sons. A mother is supposed to live for her son, and cannot be a woman to any other man. A husband is supposed to be distant and other. An unattainable ideal, but not an actual person. Such knowledge of Japanese society helps inform this book, but it is not necessary. The emotions on display are raw and offer and uncompromising glimpse into the psyche of another culture but are also understandable by people of every culture. In fact, in an interesting note, "The Sailor who Fell from Grace with the Sea" is far more famous in the United States than it is in Japan, where it is counted as one of Mishima's lesser books. Perhaps it is a work more in tune with the American psyche than the Japanese.
Rating:
Summary: Afternoon of Glory
Review: It is difficult to separate Mishima the man from Mishima the author. When reading books like "The Sailor who Fell from Grace with the Sea" (Japanese title is "Gogo no Eiko," or "Afternoon of Glory"), one cannot help but think of his suicide, his politics, his private army, etc... However, a masterpiece such as this deserves to be judged on its literary merits rather than the politics of its author. "The Sailor who Fell from Grace with the Sea" is a stark book, running both cold and passionately hot as the children who attempt to be intellectually dispassionate, all the while feeling the fluxing emotions of adolescence. A young boy's hero, a Sailor full of bravado and the masculine glory of searching for the horizon and always leaving women behind, finds himself changing his ideals with inklings of romantic love and home and hearth and comfort. The young boy who idolizes him cannot forgive these trespasses. The Sailor must remain a pure hero, uncorrupted by sentimentality. The purity of the mother is a running theme in Japanese fiction, and Mishima plays with societies ideas of mothers and sons. A mother is supposed to live for her son, and cannot be a woman to any other man. A husband is supposed to be distant and other. An unattainable ideal, but not an actual person. Such knowledge of Japanese society helps inform this book, but it is not necessary. The emotions on display are raw and offer and uncompromising glimpse into the psyche of another culture but are also understandable by people of every culture. In fact, in an interesting note, "The Sailor who Fell from Grace with the Sea" is far more famous in the United States than it is in Japan, where it is counted as one of Mishima's lesser books. Perhaps it is a work more in tune with the American psyche than the Japanese.
Rating: 
Summary: Artful facade masks a deep, psychologically-enthralling tale
Review: Mishima is as artful in his language as he is in the selection of pure imagery to tell this tale of nihilism at its exaggerated worst. The characters are memorable--Ryuji and Fusako are portraitured in fine detail. The boys are, if hard-swallowed in their precocity, at least full-fleshed in their savagery. Harkens to memories of William Golding's "Lord of the Flies". The text stirs the imagination like an art gallery--the book is filled with sumptuous forms and patterns that betray an aesthetic eye for the picturesque. Yukio Mishima is a devastatingly brilliant writer of enormous ingenuity in his craft. Dark, savage, and psychologically-labyrinthine, Mishima's gift for probing deeply into underlying human desires is one of the best I've ever encountered.
Rating: 
Summary: The Sailor Who Fell from Grace With the Sea
Review: Mishima's "The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea" is a beautifully written, picturesque short novel about idealism and the conflict between compassion and dispassion. The main character is Noboru, a bright, fatherless 13-year-old boy who hangs out with a few of his schoolmates in a gang. The "chief" of the gang, who thinks far beyond the level of a typical 13-year-old, is the gang's philosophical guide and leader. The chief believes that life is merely a result of the chaos of existence; that society is useless; that fathers, as procreators of society, are condescending and deceitful; and that school is a simulation of the society of adults and therefore is useless as well. He instructs Noboru to perform a morbid rite of passage, the purpose of which seems to be to demonstrate that there is nothing mystical about life; living beings are made up of nothing more than earthly materials and mechanical components, so destroying a living being is no different than breaking a machine.
A sailor at sea lives far away from the foolishness of land-based society, so it's no wonder that Noboru develops an admiration for Ryuji, the sailor who becomes romantically involved with Noboru's mother, Fusako. Noboru is so interested in the sea and ships -- symbols of rugged individualism and the rejection of society -- that his knowledge of the subject rivals Ryuji's. However, when Ryuji decides to give up the sailor's life to marry Fusako and become her business partner, Noboru is disillusioned and wonders if Ryuji is just like all the fathers that the chief berates. As Ryuji starts to metamorphose from Noboru's image of the tough sailor into a sentimental, lenient society dweller, Noboru angrily compiles a list of Ryuji's "infractions". When the chief of Noboru's gang reviews this list, he decides that Ryuji must suffer the consequences. In the last chapter of the book the gang lead Ryuji unsuspectingly to his doom.
When the chief tells Noboru that there are no heroes in the world, Noboru listens but wants to believe that there truly are; he wants to find a heroic ideal in the sailor his mother has just met. The novel illustrates this problem with idealism: We create imaginary heroes because when we try to identify real-life ones, we are inevitably disappointed by their human fallibility.
Mishima's novel is extremely descriptive and somewhat disturbing. Noboru watches his mother dress and undress in her room from a hole in the wall that separates his room from hers. He sits in his dresser drawer watching her lye on her bed naked and when she gets up to gaze at herself in the mirror Noboru gets upset because he can no longer see her. He also watches his mother and her boyfriend in bed together.
The boy has to dissect a cat as a ritual for the gang he is in. Mishima clearly describes the process Noboru has to go through and everything that happened to the poor cat.
Rating:
Summary: The Sailor Who Fell from Grace With the Sea
Review: Mishima's "The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea" is a beautifully written, picturesque short novel about idealism and the conflict between compassion and dispassion. The main character is Noboru, a bright, fatherless 13-year-old boy who hangs out with a few of his schoolmates in a gang. The "chief" of the gang, who thinks far beyond the level of a typical 13-year-old, is the gang's philosophical guide and leader. The chief believes that life is merely a result of the chaos of existence; that society is useless; that fathers, as procreators of society, are condescending and deceitful; and that school is a simulation of the society of adults and therefore is useless as well. He instructs Noboru to perform a morbid rite of passage, the purpose of which seems to be to demonstrate that there is nothing mystical about life; living beings are made up of nothing more than earthly materials and mechanical components, so destroying a living being is no different than breaking a machine.
A sailor at sea lives far away from the foolishness of land-based society, so it's no wonder that Noboru develops an admiration for Ryuji, the sailor who becomes romantically involved with Noboru's mother, Fusako. Noboru is so interested in the sea and ships -- symbols of rugged individualism and the rejection of society -- that his knowledge of the subject rivals Ryuji's. However, when Ryuji decides to give up the sailor's life to marry Fusako and become her business partner, Noboru is disillusioned and wonders if Ryuji is just like all the fathers that the chief berates. As Ryuji starts to metamorphose from Noboru's image of the tough sailor into a sentimental, lenient society dweller, Noboru angrily compiles a list of Ryuji's "infractions". When the chief of Noboru's gang reviews this list, he decides that Ryuji must suffer the consequences. In the last chapter of the book the gang lead Ryuji unsuspectingly to his doom.
When the chief tells Noboru that there are no heroes in the world, Noboru listens but wants to believe that there truly are; he wants to find a heroic ideal in the sailor his mother has just met. The novel illustrates this problem with idealism: We create imaginary heroes because when we try to identify real-life ones, we are inevitably disappointed by their human fallibility.
Mishima's novel is extremely descriptive and somewhat disturbing. Noboru watches his mother dress and undress in her room from a hole in the wall that separates his room from hers. He sits in his dresser drawer watching her lye on her bed naked and when she gets up to gaze at herself in the mirror Noboru gets upset because he can no longer see her. He also watches his mother and her boyfriend in bed together.
The boy has to dissect a cat as a ritual for the gang he is in. Mishima clearly describes the process Noboru has to go through and everything that happened to the poor cat.
Rating:
Summary: A chilling look at post-modernity
Review: Of the numerous works of Mishima's that I have thus far read, this one is by far the most chilling, disturbing, and threatening. Like all of Mishima's works, this book deals with post WW2 Japan and Jeapanese Society subsequent to a feeling of national defeat. In this particular book, Mishima depicts the young generation as rebellious against the adult world--although it is unclear as to whether this directly relates to the post-war response. Interpreting the older generation as sentimental and weak, the children in this book seek to reconstruct a world that is rigid and strong--a world that refuses compomise and lenience. Even at young ages--13-14--the children of this book seek to make the world conform to their ideology, an ideology of passionlessness. This book will not leave you satisfied. It will leave you conflicted. And that, i think, was Mishima's objective. This is a book that punches you in the gut and makes you really think about the shifting of the world into and through the post-modern era. It assesses the danger in the post-modern mind-set, yet shows, simultaneously, a certain sense of forseen inevitability to that oncoming world. I highly reccommend this book to anyone and everyone, but I also warn you that this book will engage you, and you will not win. That is, certainly, part of its beauty. After finishing it, the book has yet to find its way back onto my bookshelf. It is still sitting front and center on my desk.
Rating: 
Summary: for sensitive readers - look elsewhere
Review: Read this book if you are mature, able to understand the complex symbolism in it, and don't mind gruesome and incestuous situations described in great detail. I feel the back of the book did not warn me enough. Besides the parts that made me uncomfortable, the plot and characters gave me little reason to want to even finish the book. I would recommend this book to any reader with background knowledge of Japan's complex history and culture, but for any sensitive, and especially young reader, you probably won't get much out of it.
Rating:
Summary: Not for younger readers.
Review: The artsy-lit crowd just adores this book for its poetic nuance and daring treatments of sexuality and violence. That's OK, if you have studied Mishima's bizzare life, understand Japanese culture, and have enough life-experience to recognize existentialist/Verfremdungs-Effekt notions and place them in some kind of perspective. However, because of its literary acclaim the book is working its way into book lists for younger and younger readers. If you are buying this book for a young person, even if (or perhaps, especially if) you are buying it for your child to meet requirements for a high-school class, I strongly recommend that you read the book yourself. The book is not a difficult read. The language is clear and Nathan's translation does not stray into obscure usage. The story structure is well defined and easy to follow. The relationships among the characters are understandable. But the ideas expressed make this book an NC-17 in my rating system. The plot encompasses voyeurism, sex, ritual murder and suicide, animal cruelty in its most extreme form, and the glorification of death. These elements define a worldview which the characters accept as not only normal but satisfactory. Teens with any kind of sensitivity will find the book too horrifyingly disturbing to successfully please their English teachers with their book reports. Others may derive some of their own voyeuristic delight from reading a book with so much salacious material in it. A few may be attracted to and adopt the destructive (and self-destructive) ideas professed by the sympathetic characters. Even fewer may be mature enough to seek advice from their elders on how to interpret its themes and place the book in proper context. This book may revolve around an adolescent boy; that does not mean it is a great choice for an adolescent to read.
Rating:
Summary: not difficult to read and frightening
Review: This is as bizarre as Mishima gets. The book is kind of frightening, it's like a kind of horror story. Every one of Mishima's obsessions has found a way to this book: his idealisation of youth, or young males with their stubborn refusal of the adult world, the decay of male values (or samurai values) in Japan, the Buddhist emptiness of the objective world, fame, and those of you who've read 'Confessions of a mask' will, as the story goes on, recognize the sadomasochistic fantasies Mishima had confessed in the aforementioned novel. That's why I thought it was a great book. It surprised me with its complexity, because at first it seems a kind of a simple story, but as you read more and more, you get sucked into Mishima's bizarre world, and in the end there is so much you get from it. Technically it's written very well: every place, every action is described to great detail, often spiced up with beautiful metaphors (although sometimes the metaphors tend to be somewhat clichéd), all this is done in the purpose of making you really 'sense' the story.
It is also a very unusual storyline, even for Mishima, the ending did really shock me.
I think I could recommend this to beginners, as it is not difficult to read, and there aren't so many pages.
Rating:
Summary: Hail to the Chief!
Review: This is Mishima working at the height of his abilities, doing what he always did best: combining believable psychology with an electrifying vision of glory, power and death. It centers around a small group of characters undergoing relatively normal changes (a man and a woman fall in love, a boy has to deal with his complicated feelings for a potential stepfather and the man has to reconcile his desire for a home with his perverse love of the sea), the sort of thing a much more low-key introspective novel could have been written about, and then it goes insane. Whenever a character takes any action, it seems to have both a mundane motive (love, hatred, jealousy) and a completley superhuman motive. A malignant vision is lurking around the characters as they talk about simple things, kiss, or eat dinner. There is a character who seems completley born of that vision: the Chief, the leader of a gang of young intellectuals who is best described as pure evil, and whose speeches have a Shakespearian brilliance, even when they border on insanity. I love this kid. My only criticism is that it seems hurried at times, as though Mishima got incredibly psyched about the idea and decided to finish the book in one sitting. Passages rush along deleriously, sometimes stumbling on a weak or overly explicity metaphor, and sometimes shortening what seems like an important exchange. It's a very short book, and although its compact energy is its strength, it maybe could have stood to be a little longer. I certainly would have liked to read more. I should note that it isn't as explicitly violent as I for one was led to believe before I read it. There's only one scene with actual bloodshed (leading to the Chief's timeless remark, "Isn't all this blood a sight for sore eyes?"); the rest of the violence is implied, and nothing seems excessive or tasteless.
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