The Sailor Who Fell From Grace with the Sea

After the unbecoming bloatedness of The Secret History, a concise and very beautiful novel. (Think waif-like Japanese model standing next to Anna Nicole Smith in her heyday.)

The cartoon below does I think capture the essential outline of Mishima's story. As to what it is actually about, I'd venture to say it deals with the crisis of 'maturity' that many an adult has to face. (Though the idea that a group of teenage males might have formed a violently nihilistic philosophy in anticipation of it, is perhaps this novel's particular contribution to our culture.)

Reaching middle age, merchant-seaman Ryuji Tsukazaki meets lonely widow Fusako and through her overcomes his "antipathy to land", shedding his long-standing and fairly optimistic conviction that his life on the high seas would lead him towards a personal moment of glory, reserved by fate for him alone.

He therefore proposes to Fusako, a situation which will require him to transform himself into the land-lubbing father of her thirteen-year-old son Nobouru. He does not, cannot, realise that Noboru is his nemesis; that the boy belongs to a twistedly heterodox gang of boys who regard fatherhood as the very worst state of man ("fathers are the flies of this world...a reality-concealing machine"), and that they will ultimately seek to punish him for abandoning his path to glory, for becoming such a "disgraceful charicature". They collectively decide to do this before they turn fourteen and the Japanese state can punish them. Few that have reached a certain age and resigned themselves to mediocrity can have unknowingly tossed themselves into such a snakepit!

I'd recommend this novel without hesitation. I love how the story emerges naturally from the simple combination of a physical situation (a locked bedroom, a peephole) with an existential human drama, and how Mishima subtly urges us to consider how the evil that inhabits the mind of Noboru might in fact derive from the icy hauteur of his mother, even though she appears otherwise decent and fully committed to the un-reality and un-freedom of the well-to-do adult world. (This is most pointedly suggested in the scenes where Fusako meets up with her client Yoriko, a beautiful film actress whom she rather callously dismisses as flawed and vulgar.)