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.