The Sailor Who Fell from Grace With the Sea

by Yukio Mishima

Whereas most men choose to become sailors because they like the sea, Ryuji had been guided by an antipathy to land.

Fusako was dressed to go out. Her bare arms, moving not to embrace him but to pour morning coffee into cups, seemed unfamiliar. They were no longer the arms of the night.

Real danger is nothing more than just living. Of course, living is merely the chaos of existence, but more than that it’s a crazy mixed-up business of dismantling existence instant by instant to the point where the original chaos is restored, and taking strength from the uncertainty and the fear that chaos brings to re-create existence instant by instant.

The skinned neck, draped gracefully on the floor, seemed to be wearing a cat mask. The cat was only an exterior, life had posed as a cat.

But after thinking it over, Noboru erased the third count. It was obviously a contradiction of the first two, which were aesthetic, idealistic, and therefore objective value judgments. The subjective problem in the third charge was only proof of his own immaturity, not to be construed as a crime on Ryuji’s part.

He would be thirty-four in May. It was time to abandon the dream he had cherished too long. Time to realize that no specially tailored glory was waiting for him. Time, no matter if the feeble eaves lamps still defied the green-gray light of morning by refusing to come awake, to open his eyes.

Ryuji hadn’t slept at all. He washed his face with “young water,” the first water drawn in the year,

‘Son, nobody is going to provide you with a purpose in life; you’ve got to make one for yourself.’

Though Ryuji didn’t realize it, the distant influence of the sea was at work on him again: he was unable to distinguish the most exhaulted feelings from the meanest, and suspected that essentially important things did not occur on land. No matter how hard he tried to reach a realistic decision, shore matters remained suffused with the hues of fantasy.

As he hurried to banish from his mind merely dutiful concern for this reticent, precocious, bothersome child, this boy whom he didn’t really love, Ryuji managed to convince himself that he was brimming with genuine fatherly affection.

Whenever he dreamed of them, glory and death and woman were consubstantial.