Places: The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea

*Yokohama. Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea, TheMajor Japanese seaport that represents the symbolic place where the land or human culture meets the sea or untamed nature. Noboru, like many boys, is fascinated by the dark call of dangerous foreign seas and the apparently unfettered life of a sailor. This fascination represents an adolescent and romanticized vision of life that is the opposite of the land-bound bourgeois existence he and his friends detest in the adult world they see in Yokohama. Noboru shares this view of the authentic life with Ryuji Tsukazaki who, when he was a young man, had become a sailor for similar reasons. Tsukazaki’s plan to marry Noboru’s mother and abandon his sailor’s life to become a manager in the Kuroda clothing shop in Yokohama is a large element in what the boy and his friends see as a betrayal of their romantic vision. It is also what gives the psychological impetus to the imminent act of terrible violence planned by the group of boys that looms at the novel’s conclusion.

Kuroda home. Stately home built by Noboru’s now-deceased father. From its hilltop location, it commands a beautiful view of Yokohama Bay. The family bedrooms are on the second floor, and Noboru is locked in his room every night by his overprotective mother, Fusako.

Bedrooms often serve as literary topos, or themes, in which the subjective and irrational sides of the human personality are prominent: Bedrooms are both places where people sleep (the subjective world of dreams) and places where sexual relations occur (the irrational world of sexuality). From a secret peephole in his own bedroom, Noboru regularly watches his mother undress and is filled with feelings of the utter emptiness and ugliness of existence. In this clearly Oedipal situation, the adolescent Noboru feels no arousal and seemingly denies any feelings. The author himself, a highly intelligent and sensitive person with his own deeply conflicted sensuality (married to a woman but also actively homosexual), seems, in his descriptions of Noboru in his bedroom, to portray his own difficulties with human sexuality.

From the bedroom, Noboru also dispassionately observes his mother’s love affair with Tsukazaki, whom she intends to marry. Noboru’s lack of all emotion at what he sees in his mother’s bedroom is the product of his involvement with a group of fellow students–all convinced, in typically adolescent bravado, of their own genius–who follow a philosophy of total nihilism and strive to view everything with dispassionate objectivity. The novel’s conclusion–in which the boys lure Tsukazaki to his execution–offers a chilling look into a nihilistic world devoid of human warmth, an irrational vision that begins symbolically, at the novel’s opening, in the boy’s bedroom with its secret peephole.

Kuroda clothing shop. Clothes shop located in Yokohama that was founded by Noboru’s father and is now operated by the mother. The shop deals with expensive fashion imported from Europe and America and serves the wealthy clientele of nearby Tokyo who include a number of famous movie actors and actresses. Yukio Mishima uses the shop as a vehicle to criticize the shallow world of the rich elite of postwar Japanese society, especially in the figure of the attractive, but superficial and insecure, actress with whom Fusako has lunch. The clothing shop is representative of the nonauthentic bourgeois life that Noboru and the other boys so violently reject.