The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea

Yukio Mishima. Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea, The

Vintage International: New York, New York, 1965

Heart

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Japanese Fiction/Literature

Imagine a sailor, and you imagine a man lonely in his struggles and stoic in his survival amidst the beautiful tyranny of the unconquerable sea, the vast blue emptiness that covers our globe. So devoid of stability, devoid of safety, devoid of love; a place where a man might set himself against impossible odds and yet triumph gloriously whether his end lay at harbor or at the bottom of the deep blue. The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea tells the tale of a man leaving his life of eternal goodbyes for love, stability, and safety. His falling out with the great and glorious unknown not only marks the end of his life at sea, but also the end of Imperial Japan.

Yukio weaves his

tale with a copious use of symbolism and metaphor that evokes a yearning for the Japan of years past, a time when the glorious life of the samurai was honored and respected above all. The sailor, Ryuji, falls in love with a widow on shore while his ship stops in Japan to reload. The first time he spends with her is passionate and short-their meetings are marked by vivid visual and auditory imagery. He begins another exodus only a few days later, and Fusako, the widow, and her son, Noboru, come to the docks to watch him leave. His parting is marked by detailed imagery and concise metaphor. “The first stridulous blast of the horn came at fifteen minutes to six. Noboru, listening, knew that the phantom he had watched two nights before was real, understood that he was present at the spot where all dreams began and ended. Then he saw Ryuji; he was standing next to the Japanese flag.”(Yukio, 90) The blast of the horn hearkens to the love-making Ryuji and Fusako had enjoyed, and the Noboru had witnessed. In leaving Ryuji’s return is uncertain, as the sea is dangerous. To truly understand the text, one must know a little of Yukio Mishima, a man raised in a traditional samurai family. He watched the culture of the west invade his country and rips its own culture out from beneath it, to be replaced by rampant capitalism and democracy. Yukio believed that Japan should return to the ways of the samurai, evidenced by his suicide in the seppuku manner after writing his masterpiece and giving a speech idealizing the old traditions of Japan. From this historical standpoint the hidden metaphors become clear, placing Ryuji’s dangerous life at sea in line with the dangerous life of a samurai who must fight to survive and achieve glory. It also becomes clear that this pseudo-samurai is representative of the veridical Japan as Ryuji is placed decisively next to the Japanese flag. While a large part of the meaning in the novel lies with Ryuji, Noboru’s story controls most of the plot. Noboru is portrayed as the malleable youth of a country without the morals of the past. He is driven by a friend who is abandoned by his parents to believe that the world is filled with nothingness, that nothing has meaning and that only in maintaining the order within the nothingness is there any meaning; a strange philosophy that is reminiscent of nihilism. Noboru is at first enamored with the life of a sailor when Ryuji meets his mother, but as time progresses and Ryuji abandons the temerarious and glorious life at sea for the comfort of the land, Noboru becomes disenchanted. He and his band take it upon themselves to mete out justice for the faults in Ryuji’s new life decisions.

The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea is a poignant story that can be difficult to apprehend because each phrase carries so much meaning. Not a word is wasted on pointless description, which I enjoyed as a stark contrast to Tess of the d’Urbervilles and other Victorian manuscripts. I found the material of the book at first hard to swallow, as much of the content is taboo in the United States, but when this is dealt with and true meaning is drawn from the book it is a delightfully enjoyable read. It is heavy and deep, but it leaves one with an allegory to remember, not just an interesting story to read for the moment.