Yukio Mishima's THE SAILOR WHO FELL FROM GRACE WITH THE SEA (Tr John Nathan , Narr Brian Nishii)

My January in Japan has taken me back to another classic, one which is so well known in the west that it has been adapted into a film starring well-known Asian screen idol... Kris Kristofferson? I'm gonna have to actually watch that at some point, aren't I?

Anyway, Yukio Mishima's The Sailor Who Fell From Grace with the Sea.

By the way, man oh man does this book have a spectacular collection of cover illustrations as edition after edition has come out since it was first translated into English some 60 years ago. I've shared some of my favorites here but there are so many good ones. Exercise your Google-fu for a moment and go feast your eyes!

The Sailor Who Fell From Grace with the Sea begins from the point of view of a not-quite pubescent boy, Noburu, who has a slightly unhealthy attachment to his young, widowed mother, so things go off the rails right away when he witnesses a version of the good old primal scene with a strange sailor taking the place of Noburo's daddy. The sailor, we learn, is not just another swabbie; he's managed to save up his pay and come out ahead of some mostly-legitimate business, so as far as stepfathers could go, young Noburo could do worse, but that's not how he and his gang of nearly feral buddies feel about things. At all.

Noburo is Number Three in the rigid hierarchy of this group of schoolboys, with Number One, or The Chief, being a classmate from a wealthy family who has been left largely to his own devices in a vast, nearly empty house, in which he has discovered the dubious pleasures of nihilism. The Chief has been busy training his friends to be intellectually rigorous, cold-hearted little monsters like himself for a long time (a prolonged scene depicting extreme animal cruelty merits a trigger warning, by the way. And it's a kitten!), so it's not long before Noburo's impulse to idolize and idealize Ryuji, who has been all over the world and seems to have done nothing that is not Manly AF, is a thing of the past as The Chief and the gang, who consider fathers to be the most useless and ridiculous things a human can be (unless it's a would-be father)  mock it out of him.

Is that Ludwig Van I hear in the background, my droogs?

Of course, Noburo had already begun to fall out of love with his idea of Ryuji as soon as Ryuji started doing ordinary things on land, showing up in public acting like just this guy, so once Noburo lets his friends persuade him he's the luckiest boy, maybe ever, because his father is dead, well, he's not going to welcome a stepfather with open arms, is he? No matter how happy his mother is to have Ryuji around. If Ryuji is sticking around with mom, Ryuji has given up his superhuman hero status forever, and he has chosen to do so like a chump. Uh oh.

Meanwhile, Noburo's mother, Fusako, really is very happy, for all that she was also extremely fortunate as women in 1950s/60s Japan went; she inherited a thriving imported clothing and accessories store when Noburo's father died, and has manifested as a talented businesswoman in her own right. The argument could be made that she would be giving up more than her son would if she took another husband, but Ryuji is enough of a stand-up guy not to have designs on sponging off her, taking over her business and shoving her to the background, or any of the other things we'd expect a shiftless sailor who showed up late on the scene to do. Ryuji is happy to wear the fine English tweed suits she gives him and to be her dutiful pupil in the import business, and is delighted to start calling Noburo son into the bargain. I mean, these two really lucked out, amirite?

But where would the drama be if they all just lived happily ever after, I ask you?

It all ends on a cliffhanger but the denouement of the last scene is pretty much assured; Mishima has just spared us the gory details, which after forcing us to watch what happens to the kitten already, gee, thanks Mr. Mishima. But it is nice to spend some time pondering if there is a way out that wasn't immediately apparent by the time Ryuji and the boys arrive at their destination and he settles down to tell them about his awesome life at sea. Should he maybe have stayed there?