Reviews - Sjömannen som föll i onåd hos havet

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Sjömannen som föll i onåd hos havet

Following my enjoyment of Banana Yoshimoto’s Kitchen last time I quickly decided to pick up another famed work of Japanese literature to see if it was just pot luck. Yukio Mishima’s The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea (1963, trans. 1965) is a hugely popular work by one of Japan’s best-known writers. The novel concerns Noburu, a young boy who is the member of a pseudo-gang of other youths who like to precociously discuss philosophy and morality. Things quickly turn however when Noburu’s mother starts going out with a sailor named Ryuji. This greatly upsets Noburu who plots to terrorise Ryuji with seemingly no mercy. I thoroughly enjoyed this short book. Like with Yoshimoto, I admire Mishima’s minimalism, the sparseness of his prose. I like to think of Japanese literature as an attempt to see who can create the most beauty with the least amount of words. I suppose the emoji is the endgame then. The novel is unrelenting and disturbing at times, its overall atmosphere is one of unease and dread. When reading the novel you can sense that it is building toward something uneasy and the final couple of pages stick around in your head for hours after you’ve finished. The audacity and the brazenness of this book is one of the many reasons why is has become a staple of Japanese literature in the Anglophone world. Just don’t read it if you really like cats.