If you like novels that don’t waste a line but produce images that will remain burned in your memory, pick up Yukio Mishima’s The Sailor Who Fell From Grace with The Sea (Japanese: 午後の曳航, translated as Afternoon Tow). It is darkly funny, poetic, and absolutely brutal — a classic from a generation-defining, if contentious, Japanese post-war writer. While framing itself as a love story, Mishima’s novel soon bares its teeth by presenting the conflicts of masculinity, parenthood, modernity and tradition.
A wealthy widower, Fusako, lives with her 13-year-old son, Noburu, on the harbour of Ally-occupied Yokohama. The arrival of the sailor Ryuji seems to fulfil both her need for a husband and his need for a father figure. Yet Noburu’s growing disillusionment with the adult world, encouraged by his gang of young intellectual anarchists, threatens the harmony of the family unit.
Noboru’s perception is spurred by various incidents. He is shown around Ryuji’s naval ship in an encounter which introduces the sailor to his mother; he spies on the couple through a hole in his mother’s bedroom; and he partakes in a gruesome ritual led by the Chief of his friend group. Mishima gradually paints a complex picture of disaffected youth that feels relevant, considering the online radicalisation of teenagers, and particularly boys. Yet, it also speaks to the broader trend of generations rejecting their forbears’ values.
At the same time, Mishima explores the doubts, fears and lost hopes of its adult characters. Ryuji had once felt destined for greatness: he thought that by deferring settling down he could go where ordinary men could not, but now, in his thirties, the possibilities are slipping away from him. Meanwhile, Fusako is enraptured by this sailor’s appearance in her life, but the transient nature of his job reminds her that love is fleeting.
Only marriage can sever Ryuji’s contract to the sea, and at the same time dispel Fusako’s fears of becoming a ‘left behind woman’. But as Ryuji adopts his new position in the family, Noboru’s idolisation of him sours. In his mind, this surrogate father figure will be a poor substitute for the noble sailor who would not tie himself down.
Death is a pervading force in the novel. From Ryuji’s desire to be a tragic hero to the farewell call of the ship, ‘plunging everything into a moment of grief and ruthlessly tearing even the hearts of the uninvolved’, Mishima’s world is bleak yet buoyed by an underlying drollness. In Ryuji’s romantic fantasies, death always comes in the way — an idea that, on the one hand, is ‘probably the product of the hyperbole of popular songs’, but ultimately, he feels, is tied to his relationship with the sea — a force of nature that is both feminine and all-consuming. His inability to convey his poetic heroism to Fusako makes him, in some ways, tragicomic. Another memorable example is in the ritual violence of the gang of boys, in which Mishima makes an act of feline brutality into an absurd meditation on the nature of life: ‘The cat was only the exterior; life had posed as a cat’.
There is an underlying criticism in the novel of what Mishima saw as the increasing Westernisation of Japan post WW2, a theme prevalent in his works and politics. After the death of her first husband, Fusako has taken to running the family business, a luxury boutique that imports fine Western clothes, by herself. This aspect of the novel — with its inclusion of an unhappy actress who, as a customer of the shop, tries to befriend Fusako — again has ironic undertones. Mishima drives the point home when, anticipating their marriage, Fusako encourages Ryuji to wear English clothes and learn English, making a mockery of his sailor’s image. Noburo, in contrast, is part of a culturally displaced generation — we should hardly be surprised that he falls under the Chief’s incendiary spell. Mishima himself opposed the Constitution of Japan written by American Allies following the end of WW2, seeing it as an erosion of the Emperor’s supremacy and Japan’s national values. At the same time, the nihilism of Noburo’s friends could be seen as a response to the politics of Mishima’s leftist contemporaries, and predecessors such as the famously pessimistic writer Osamu Dazai.
However, The Sailor never just feels like a reaction. Its skilful switching of perspectives and sharp, vivid prose makes it both an immensely readable novel, and a great gateway into mid-20th-century Japanese literature.
