The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea by Yukio Mishima is written extremely well and much better than I had expected. It is a short novel that is written in such a way that it always keeps you wondering what will happen next.

Noboru Kasuga is thirteen-years old and is in a group with five other boys his age that discuss "…the uselessness of Mankind..." and "the insignificance of Life." (48) The five boys have a chief, whose words they believe are the only truths that exist.

One day, Noboru sees his widowed mother, Fusako, and Ryuji Tsukazaki, a sailor, in his mother's bedroom through a hole in his room wall. Noboru idealizes the sailor at first, but later concludes that he is "soft and romantic." Noboru and his friends believe that the world is empty and that they are its guardians. Thus, they act violently because of their disappointment with the sailor.

The ending just keeps you wondering what will happen next, even though you have a feeling about what will happen. You are just left wanting to know more about what would actually happen after.

Now I really want to read Yukio Mishima's The Decay of the Angel, his last novel, before he committed a ritual suicide (seppuku) and many of his other novels as well.

Although he is a well-known Japanese writer, Yukio Mishima was unknown to me before I read this novel. "Sailor" is the story of a 13-year old Japanese boy, Noboru, and how he comes to terms with the new man his widowed Mother is involved with.

Mishima is definitely using "Sailor" to discuss the feelings of glory and inspiration we all feel at times but can never fully convey. Like Noboru's mother, Ryuji, our dreams often sound drab and cliched when we give them voice. For Ryuji youthful enthusiasm gives way to acceptance and resignation to a normal life when he settles down with Noboru's mother and leaves the life of a sailor. In Noboru's youth he is gripped by the megalomaniac fantasies of a person convinced of his own superiority. He and his gang are destined for supremacy and absolute power. In ending the novel as he did Mishima is symbolically representing the end of adolescent fantasy and dreams of glory and the beginning of the acceptance of fate that is illustrated so clearly by Ryuji's life as recounted throughout "Sailor".

As a fan of Yasuanri Kawabata, I was anxious to read a book by his protégé. I was not let down by the quality and engaging prose he uses. While Kawabata lingers over aesthetic details, Mishima is more concerned with philosophical statements and psychological archetypes. This novel runs a gamut from Mishima's icy respect for Modernist existentialism to his warm endorsement of analytic psychology (the influence of Jung is even more obvious than that of Freud). Readers of Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartré will find Mishima fascinating.