The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea by Yukio Mishima

The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea by Yukio Mishima

Finished August 9, 2026

Usually in these posts I assume spoilers are a given, but for perhaps the first time I want to be very clear: SPOILERS AHEAD

At the risk of really underselling this book, my impulse is just to say “everyone in the story is incredibly stupid while thinking they’re incredibly intelligent.”

Noboru is stupid (and a kitten killer):

What Noboru lifted between two fingers now was no longer a kitten. A resplendent power was surging through him to the tips of his fingers and he had only to lift the dazzling arc seared into the air by this power and hurl it again and again at the log. He felt like a giant of a man. Just once, at the second impact, the kitten raised a short, gurgling cry…

Ryuji is stupid in kind of a “man” way occasionally somewhat endearing (but still totally stupid):

In the grand dream Ryuji had treasured secretly for so long, he was a paragon of manliness and she the consummate woman; and from the opposite corners of the earth they came together in a chance encounter, and death wed them. Outdistancing tawdry farewells then, with streamers waving and strains of “Auld Lang Syne,” and far from sailors’ fickle loves, they were to descend to the bottom of the heart’s great deep where no man has ever been…

Noboru and his friends are really stupid, actually:

That morning, the boys had left the city with packed lunches and gone all the way to Yamauchi Pier in Kanagawa. For a while they had roamed around the railroad siding behind the sheds on the wharf, and then held the usual meeting to discuss the uselessness of Mankind, the insignificance of Life. They liked an insecure meeting place where intrusion was always a possibility.

Fusako is stupid, too, in a very typically female but mostly harmless way:

Fusako had never dreamed that Yoriko could be practical and she was astonished when, having listened to the whole story, the actress promptly prescribed a course of action.

A page later, Fusako to Yoriko:

“I never realized you were so”—there was a new respect in her voice—”so capable.”

And then another page later:

From that moment Fusako loathed the actress, and her hatred was charged with the indignation of an honest, respectable bourgeois.

But really, most importantly, Noboru and his “friends” are really, really, insufferably stupid:

“This is our last chance,” the chief repeated. “If we don’t act now we will never again be able to obey freedom’s supreme command, to perform the deed essential to filling the emptiness of the world, unless we are prepared to sacrifice our lives. And you can see that it’s absurd for the executioners to risk their own lives. If we don’t act now we’ll never be able to steal again, or murder, or do any of the things that testify to man’s freedom. We’ll end up puking flattery and gossip, trembling our days away in submission and compromise and fear, worrying about what the neighbors are doing, living like squealing mice. And someday we’ll get married, and have kids, and finally we’ll become fathers, the vilest things on earth!

“We must have blood! Human blood! If we don’t get it this empty world will go pale and shrivel up. We must drain that sailor’s fresh lifeblood and transfuse it to the dying universe, the dying sky, the dying forests, and the drawn, dying land.”

I think maybe “the chief” should be the first to donate his blood to this grand cause, actually.

So, at the risk of sounding like someone who has only read two Japanese novels, this story did remind me a bit of Kokoro not just in that certain distinct Japanese “flavor” but also the underlying thread of the pretentiousness/selfishness/arrogance/hypocrisy of youth. Kids who think they’re smarter than adults, smarter than everyone; kids whose lives haven’t been particularly hard so they have to bemoan the worse-than-hell suffering of just existing that only the sheltered who haven’t experienced hell can lecture on.

To be clear, I don’t think the book is stupid. I actually think it’s worth a read. But (at the risk of sounding like the pretentious little shits in the book) I do think every single character was on the stupid scale.

Though replaying some of the scenes in my mind I have to laugh because really this book pared down is just a perfect illustration of daddy issues.

Rating: alternate title: “daddy doesn’t love me” 3 stars