Reviews

The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea by Yukio Mishima

Only show reviews with written explanations

kavreb's review against another edition

3.0

The conflict between the grandiose and the mundane, between yearning for the stars and settling for the earth. A decision that sometimes has to be made, for our time on this earth is short and busy; but some people take it more seriously than others.

The sailor is a man with lofty ideas, but little to show for them besides that; yet, as the young boy in the middle of the book sees him, he is still a heroic figure, leaving the earthly pleasures in the hunt for something “more”. What the sailor comes to understand though is that the glory he seeks is fool's gold and the mundane things that he despises in his ambitious life is the true value of it - the short, mortal life, where selfishness often ends with pain for others.

But of course I would say so - I am one of those despised people, those that see no inherent lofty goals to life, and who are not willing to murder for some imagined greatness, nay, even despising that greatness, and all the little fools who see themselves as grand architects on the historical pages, and more than human; more than most their fellow humans, at least (what danger it is to think so - just look at the tantrums of Elon Musk …)

It's difficult to say what the book truly believes in, or even Mishima himself, based on these pages - the boys and their ideas seem abhorrent, but so might have been Mishima himself, and to an abhorrent person the abhorrent does not seem so, so who knows who we are really expected to empathise with? Within them I see the future dictators and merciless madmen ordering genocides, the university-educated bright young men whose self-righteousness and arrogance gives them the carte blanche to enact whatever atrocity they consider vital for their delusions (or outright criminal exploitation); but hey, that's just me, and I am no Great Man.

Still, the beauty of the prose (at least in the translation I read) feels undeniable, and it was the language and the attention to certain details that caught me from that very first page, and often held me. And so good is Mishima’s ability to take different perspectives that it's never clear if he’s propagating his own thoughts or just expressing the character so well.

The central conflict occasionally left me cold because I have already figured out my answer to the questions tearing the men and boys apart in the book. But I found their psychological development still of interest, and I especially appreciated the POV chapters of the lady Fusako, the boy’s mother - without those she would have remained as little but the sexist, humiliating view both the man and the boy had of her, but with her POV, we see her not as just an object, but as a human being, with her own life and desires; and an active participant in this drama.

A captivating and eloquent little book, the politics of which are suspect, while its ability to enchant isn't quite as much.