Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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60 of 64 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
BARBARIC LYRICISM, June 1, 2000
By A Customer
In post-World War II Yokohama, Japan, a seaport town, the sailor Ryuji, has become disillusioned with his life at sea and finds himself craving what the land has to offer. Ultimately, he marries the widow, Fusako, the owner of a Western imports shop and mother of Noboru, an adolescent boy struggling to come to terms with his own sense of identity and place in the world. These three people, as well as the presence of the land and the sea, itself, form the central characters in Yukio Mishima's haunting masterpiece of tragedy, The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea.As a true sailor, one whose ultimate quest is inexorably bound to the sea, Ryuji has become Noboru's hero. In Noboru's eyes, Ryuji can do no wrong--until one day Noboru sees Ryuji and Fusako making love. At that point, the young boy realizes his hero has fallen. Ryuji has lost his attachment to the sea, has failed at his quest and is becoming more and more a lover of life on land. When he finally falls under Fusako's spell and forsakes the sea entirely, Noboru, who, himself, has come to feel that only violence can grant him the power and control he seeks, realizes that Ryuji's only salvation lies in death. The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea is a highly symbolic and multi-layered novel. While it is not necessary to have knowledge of Japanese culture or politics in order to enjoy the book, it does add yet another dimension of meaning to the story as well as deepen an understanding of Mishima, himself. Noboru clearly represents "traditional" Japan. His values are those of an old, patriarchal Japan, and when the story opens, Ryuji symbolizes all the values Noboru holds most dear--stoicism, strength of spirit and the Samurai tradition. Fusako, on the other hand, embodies the "new, Westernized" Japan, and as Ryuji comes, more and more, to embrace both Fusako's lifestyle and "new" Japan, his fall from grace continues, a state Noboru's honor cannot abide. The book can thus be seen as a metaphor representing modern-day Japan; a Japan that many feel will only become truly great once more when she forcibly purges herself of all Western influence. Like all of Mishima's works, this book is astounding in its juxtaposition of savage barbarism and lyrical beauty, with strong currents of eroticism throughout. Mishima wisely chooses to use third person multiple viewpoint, heightening our understanding of the three major characters, for we learn to see them not only as they see themselves, but also as others see them. Although The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea is a short book, its impact is enormously powerful. Mishima was an amazing writer who was never afraid to venture into the darkest regions of the human soul. His work forces us to do the same, and, in my opinion, we are all better for having done it.
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29 of 30 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Afternoon of Glory, March 4, 2004
It is difficult to separate Mishima the man from Mishima the author. When reading books like "The Sailor who Fell from Grace with the Sea" (Japanese title is "Gogo no Eiko," or "Afternoon of Glory"), one cannot help but think of his suicide, his politics, his private army, etc... However, a masterpiece such as this deserves to be judged on its literary merits rather than the politics of its author."The Sailor who Fell from Grace with the Sea" is a stark book, running both cold and passionately hot as the children who attempt to be intellectually dispassionate, all the while feeling the fluxing emotions of adolescence. A young boy's hero, a Sailor full of bravado and the masculine glory of searching for the horizon and always leaving women behind, finds himself changing his ideals with inklings of romantic love and home and hearth and comfort. The young boy who idolizes him cannot forgive these trespasses. The Sailor must remain a pure hero, uncorrupted by sentimentality. The purity of the mother is a running theme in Japanese fiction, and Mishima plays with societies ideas of mothers and sons. A mother is supposed to live for her son, and cannot be a woman to any other man. A husband is supposed to be distant and other. An unattainable ideal, but not an actual person. Such knowledge of Japanese society helps inform this book, but it is not necessary. The emotions on display are raw and offer and uncompromising glimpse into the psyche of another culture but are also understandable by people of every culture. In fact, in an interesting note, "The Sailor who Fell from Grace with the Sea" is far more famous in the United States than it is in Japan, where it is counted as one of Mishima's lesser books. Perhaps it is a work more in tune with the American psyche than the Japanese.
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17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Conjuring Up Mythologies, April 2, 2003
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.
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