I just finished my first Mishima novel, The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea, and this is one that's going to stick with me for a while. Still processing my thoughts on it but I found it to be a truly powerful work. It's far, far from what I'd call enjoyable though.
In fact, I found it to be a deeply macabre, cynical novel, bordering on outright nihilism. It seems to me to be a treatise on the futility of manhood and masculinity in a meaningless world. Noboru and his gang's meditations on emotion, feeling and vulnerability, and really any kind of positivity as a laughable weakness to be culled and mocked, is morbidly fascinating.
Or at least, that's how it starts until you get to that scene with the cat…Jesus Christ, I've read a lot of dark shit but this was sickening, especially in the cold, clinical way it's depicted. That's the point where the book turns into something darker and more hopeless – coincidentally the part where Noboru is meant to harden his heart to the world.
Ryuji's version of what a man is supposed to be is treated with disdain too. I found it pretty amusing that in the 1960s, Mishima found a way to portray a variation of the modern "performative male", because a lot of Ryuji's ideas around being a man comes across that way, as a checklist to be crossed off, especially when he becomes Noboru's surrogate father.
Ultimately though, this is a pretty hopeless story because to Noboru and the gang, their worldview is such that the only form of strength and true manhood is one of indifference and lack of emotion. The sequence with the chief talking about how being a father is the worst thing someone can do was striking, one of the most mesmerizing passages I've read in a while. The prose in general is pretty damn great, even in translation. Lots of passages that I read over and over to just enjoy the wordsmithing.
I'm not too aware of what Japanese society was like in the 50s-60s, and whether the story is an allegory or metaphor for whatever was happening there at the time, but it seems like Noboru and the gang could be the way they are because of neglectful, indifferent parenting? At least, Fusako comes across as a pretty self-absorbed, emotionally absent mother. Maybe it's Mishima's way of raging against shitty parenting? Or a scathing commentary on society's expectations of men?
Would love to see how others felt about the story and what your interpretations are. This is not a book I would recommend to everyone but it's incredible.
by keepfighting90