The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea Book

I'm in the process of reading Mishima's four-book cycle, The Sea of Fertility. (I've read the first two.) Sailor is not one of the cycle and I found it disappointing - a bit of implausibility but maybe it's intended to be more of a fantasy.



A thirteen-year old boy discovers a peephole into his widowed mother's bedroom and watches her have sex with a sailor. His mother, 33, and the sailor, about the same age, fall in love. The sailor leaves the sea and they intend to get married.

The boy is a member of an intellectual gang - bright 13-year-old kids, not thugs. But they turn into thugs as their leader makes them do things like kill cats and skin them. Although the boy admires the sailor and his sea stories, he also keeps a list of ways the sailor has embarrassed him in front of his friends with stupid jokes and stories and showering in the park under a drinking fountain. He shows the list to the gang. The boys are all under age 14'important because they know they cannot be charged with a serious crime at that time in Japan. The gang hatches a plot to kill the sailor.



I just found it a stretch. The blurbs say the book offers Mishima's "…vision of the homicidal hysteria that lies latent in the Japanese character." Really?

Older photo of the port of Yokohama, where the story is set from shippingwondersoftheworld.com
The author from carlabrahamsson.com