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Summary: Mishima's portrait of deadly adolescents is unrivaled
Review: This perfectly crafted novel seems more relevent today than ever. Mishima's prose, in a gorgeous translation by John Nathan, is rich, multi-layered, and next to flawless; those who consider it "overwritten" forget what its subject is. This is the only novel I've read that captures so well a certain, dangerous passage of adolescence, and its myopic visions of purity and strength. Mishima's children have sublimated their teenage disgust for the adult world into an ideal: a cold, terrifying one. The stark, flame-like prose, with its deep colors, is the perfect expression of their world and its extremes (and the yin-yang is a pretty good symbol for those black-and-white years). At the same time, Mishima toys with the youths' ideals, shows how a cold ideology can mask a furious pettiness, even sexual perversion. The book is a true tragedy, a complex but absolute collision between two minds, two worlds; and Mishima brings all his usual shadings and ambivalence to the characters, so the bizarre events follow with logic and chilling conviction. And the book is also much more than this; it bears many revisits. I envy those who will be reading it for the first time.
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Summary: This Slim Volume is Packed
Review: This slim 181-page 1967 novel, though easy to devour in one sitting, is in fact packed with taboo eroticism, murderous violence, dense symbolism, and political metaphor. One of the evidences of its quality comes from the quality of the reviews here, some of the best I've read on Amazon.com for any book.This book is even more relevant now than when it was written for at least two reasons: 1. The hot-90s-news-item status of sociopathic boys from broken families (Kip Kinkle, Columbine, Jonesboro, etc.) and 2. The strange way this full-blooded book is brutal and delicate by turns, a much-needed antidote to the passionless moderation of our era. Another reviewer points out that it contains a grand metaphor of the condition of post-World-War-II Japan. This seems true. The 13-year-old protagonist Noboru stands for the imperial Japan of the PAST, which was proud, protected from influence and invasion by the sea, and loyal for centuries to a samurai code of honor (which included "nanshoku" or boy-love in a form similiar to Greek pederasty). The samurai (theatrical, close-knit, and homoerotic) had much appeal for Mishima, a political reactionary. Noboru's mom Fusako represents Japan's FUTURE since she has grown wealthy through westernizing, i.e., importing western goods, and the sailor Ryuji is Japan's PRESENT, at the point of metamorphosis from the stringency of military values to the embrace of domesticity with a woman and her western luxuries. When Noboru watches his mother make love to Ryuji through a peephole, then, the reader is not only shocked by a scene of incestuous voyeurism but also, through the metaphor, horrified that the nation of Japan is adulterating itself, turning in the wrong direction--away from its former purity, freedom, and uniqueness. And when Noboru and his middle school gang plot against Ryuji, whom they once hero-worshipped as boys will do, it presages Mishima's own plot against modern Japan, which ended in a failed coup and his own ritual suicide. The book is macho in theme, but highly sensitive in its prose, containing Mishima's usual gorgeous sentences. It is among his best novels, which I think also include "Confessions of a Mask" and "Temple of the Golden Pavilion." By all means read it! It's anything but dull. The book's ending, while somewhat telegraphed, is still shocking and amazing, as Mishima turns his prose up yet another notch to sing the praises of masculine freedom even as Ryuji loses it: "I could have been a man sailing away forever...He recalled...the West Indies, seething with languor and melancholy, teeming with condor and parrots and, everywhere you looked, palms." But the book is not only about Japan. It's about men and masculinity too, another of Mishima's obsessions. The sweet dream of male freedom and its inevitable disappointment is as relevant and modern as the 90s Men's Movement and films like "Fight Club," and "American Beauty." Gay authors have given us the loveliest fever dreams of transgressive male tribes living on the margins, men without women or society, though there are exceptions like Twain, Hemingway, and Kerouac. I think of William Burroughs' amoral teens in "Wild Boys" or his pirate tale "Cities of the Red Night." Then there's Samuel Delaney's "Dhalgren," with its sci-fi street gangs and Jean Genet's "Miracle of the Rose" with its prison Mettray.
In our western world of declining masculinity, Mishima's prose-poem on behalf of rugged male liberty is a tonic for the gelded domesticated Dilberts of our time. It grieves over the transition of men from wolves to lap-dogs. It mourns the ineffectual father or the absent one (Noboru's died in the War). And therefore, it's as relevant in 2003 as it was in 1967.
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Summary: The sailor who fell from grace with the sea
Review: Written by Yukio Mishima and translated by John Nathan, this fictional story captures the tranquility of love and the harshness of reality. Split into two sections, summer and winter, this book combines the genres of love and horror to produce what is in the end a frightening and tragic tale of human brutality. Through the characters of Noboru, Fusako and Ryuji we are able to experience three very different perspectives on life. Noboru is a thirteen-year-old highly intelligent boy who in collaboration with his friends has chosen to reject the adult world. Fusako is Noboru's mother who is widowed and manages an elite family business. She is an idealist who dreams of perfection in a crystalline world. Ryuji, the sailor who literally falls from grace, falls in love with Fusako and gives up his life as a sailor in order to become the perfect husband and father. Together these three create a perfectly imperfect family. I thoroughly enjoyed this book for it's unique perspective and would definitely recommend it to others.
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Summary: Conjuring Up Mythologies
Review: Yukio Mishima's economically composed The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea (1965) is a short, grim novel that gracefully weaves together a number of complex themes and achieves its purpose without hitting a single false or awkward note. Mishima excels at depicting the constant state of tension that results from the disparity between the demands of man's social role and the truth of his inner reality; all of the book's characters struggle with at least these two conflicting elements of their psyches. Ryuji, the sailor of the novel's title, additionally lives part of his life in a very specific dream world of his own careful devising. In this fantasy, or is Ryuji perceiving a genuine layer of a deeper reality? Ryuji believes himself to be an archetypal hero fatally set aside from the rest of mankind but destined for some unimaginable, transcendent future glory. This private mythology and self - idealization provides Ryuji with a kind of charismatic halo which others find mysterious and very attractive, but difficult to specifically identify or even acknowledge. In contrast, Noboru, the young son of Ryuji's widowed fiancé Fusako, is snared between his docile, school - boy persona and his calculating, brutal, and sociopathic real self. When Ryuji and Noboru meet, the boy perceives the well - muscled sailor as a sterling example of steely, unfettered manhood, while Ryuji sees in Noboru and his mother an opportunity to make his peace with life and a chance to exchange his elitist, perhaps neurotic claims to a higher destiny for something warm and tangible. As they step tentatively towards one another with these ill - defined but inexorable expectations floating between them, each unwittingly places himself on a collision course with calamitous personal disaster. Like Muriel Spark's The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie (1961), The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea masterfully addresses themes of fascism, education, hero worship, betrayal, the enigma of sexual conduct, the inconvenient demands of society, and the painful results that can arise when the mentoring process is miscarried or goes terribly wrong. However, Mishima's cosmos is a much harsher place than the relatively ethical and homey world of the Marsha Blaine School For Girls. Mishima portrays formal Japanese society as one in which the polite, absolutely unassailable dictates of social roles and other artifices provide a fertile breeding ground for crippling human isolation, nihilism, deviance, and just - under - the - skin pathology. Like Erskine Caldwell's Journeyman, The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea also features an important character addictively viewing what he or she believes to be a higher reality through a small hole in a wall. Here, the vision revealed is the primal scene of creation from chaos: Oedipal themes color all of the novel's pages. The book can also be interpreted as a rough parable of Japanese history during the middle decades of the twentieth century. Though The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea manages to maintain its nuanced, balanced, and quietly poetic tone throughout, a protracted but ultimately ungratuitous scene of animal cruelty may repulse some readers.
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