A psychological tale of calculated murder unfolds in this short but evocative novel by Yukio Mishima (1925–70) about a boy, his widowed mother, and her new relationship with a sailor whose career serves as a testament to his distaste for land rather than a love of the sea.
The novel, divided in two parts, begins in summer. A 13-year-old boy, Noboru, and his mother, Fusako, live in Yokohama, Japan, in a home that has been fatherless and husbandless for five years. Fusako spends her days maintaining her deceased husband’s luxury boutique while her son finds male companionship among a group of seemingly innocent, though rebellious, 13 year olds. As the story begins, Fusako locks Noboru in his room as punishment for sneaking out of the house to join the other boys. Noboru begins to rummage through his room and discovers a peephole looking into his mother’s bedroom. A disturbing pattern emerges in the weeks that follow: Fusako scolds her son for spying on her, watching her naked body through the peephole. When she is kind and gentle to him instead, he goes to bed without spying, but the images of her body haunt his dreams.
His ritual takes on darker significance when his mother returns one night with a drunken sailor just passing through Yokohama whom she met when she took Noboru for a tour of a merchant ship docked in the harbor. As he watches through the peep hole this sailor named Ryuji make love to his mother, he hears the sound of a ship’s horn in the harbor, which triggers a series of associations in the boy’s mind, leading him to understand the circle of life, what he calls the universal order. He imagines the scene as a perfect whole that should never be destroyed.
The sailor Ryuji harbors his own complex psychology. Considered by his shipmates as eccentric and unsociable, he sees himself a stranger to both land and sea. He feels destined for glory, a glory created especially for him and for no other man. He imagines that true love is a one-time occurrence that requires death. Ryuji is unable to articulate his thoughts about relationships when he speaks with Fusako, unable to tell her that he has had dreams about a woman he is sure is this widowed mother, and instead he utters banal, senseless conversation.
The day after the sexual encounter, Noboru tells his mother he is going swimming but instead spends the day with his gang of friends. It quickly becomes clear that the gang is not simply a group of innocent adolescents but instead a calculating, bloodthirsty body of disciples. To cultivate the gang leader’s philosophy of absolute inhumanity and dispassion, Noboru is asked to beat a kitten to death, which the group then skins and dismembers. On the way home Noboru encounters his mother’s lover by accident in a park. Noboru hoped Ryuji would have the character and actions of a hero but instead he feels embarrassed by the sailor’s uncultivated behavior in front of his friends. Noboru begins to draft a list of charges against Ryuji in his diary.
Because Ryuji’s ship leaves the next day, the sailor and Fusako must decide on the nature of their relationship and whether it should continue. Both mother and son have the opportunity to speak more with the sailor and both decide that he fills an important gap in each of their lives. For Fusako, he is a lover, a replacement of her lost husband, and a new father for her son. For Noboru, Ryuji and his stories of the sea provide the necessary ingredient for the boy’s imagined adventures. The sailor departs with his ship but maintains contact with Fusako.
In the second half of the novel, set in winter, Ryuji returns from his travels. Fusako and Noboru both notice a change in his character. He seems unnatural, less a man of the sea, less of a hero. He has abandoned hopes of glory and resigned himself to a life on land. These changes trigger Noboru’s anger and the boy adds more charges against Ryuji in his diary. On New Year’s Day, the ex-sailor asks Fusako to marry him. The lone sailor begins to work at Fusako’s boutique and inherits the roles of husband and father.
During a meeting with his gang, Noboru tells of the devastating changes in Ryuji, expresses his anger at this hero-turned-father, and recites his list of charges against him. The gang leader enigmatically assures Noboru that the ex-sailor can be made a hero again. When Fusako discovers the peephole in her bedroom, she asks Ryuji to step in as a father figure to discipline the boy. His leniency confirms his utter mediocrity and complete lack of heroism in the eyes of Noboru, who in turn seeks revenge. He calls an emergency meeting with his gang members to decide on drastic measures against Ryuji. The gang leader reminds the boys that the law cannot punish children under 14 years of age, and that if they plan to act, they must do so quickly. They sentence Ryuji to the same torture they had inflicted upon the kitten.
Noboru and the boys lure Ryuji to an isolated spot near the sea under the pretense of hearing stories of his father-to-be’s sailing adventures. As Ryuji looks out across the water, the seascape triggers thoughts of what he could have been and the glory he could have savored. While he is lost in his musings, the boys serve Ryuji tea spiked with sleeping pills. The story ends as Ryuji notices the tea’s bitterness and concludes that the taste of glory is always bitter. What happens next is left to the imagination.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Chasseguet-Smirgel, Janine. “Body and Cosmos: Pasolini, Mishima, Foucault.” American Imago: Studies in Psychoanalysis and Culture 61, no. 2 (Summer 2004): 201–221.
Hagiwara, Takao. “The Metaphysics of the Womb in Mishima Yukio’s The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea.” Journal of the Association of Teachers of Japanese 33, no. 2 (October 1999): 36–75.
Nathan, John. Mishima: A Biography. Boston: Little, Brown, 1974.
Categories: Japanese Literature, Literature, Novel Analysis
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