Reading the Classics

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The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea tells of a band of savage 13-year-old boys who reject the adult world as illusory, hypocritical, and sentimental, and train themselves in a brutal callousness they call ‘objectivity’. When the mother of one of them begins an affair with a ship’s officer, he and his friends idealize the man at first; but it is not long before they conclude that he is in fact soft and romantic. They regard their disappointment in him as an act of betrayal on his part, and react violently.

The dual aspects of the samurai ethos and literary production define and inform Mishima Yukio's life and work. Born into a samurai family, Mishima also died as a samurai when he committed seppuku, ritual suicide by disembowelment, after completing his final novel, in 1970. Prior to his suicide, Mishima developed a prodigious body of work that defines him as one of Japan's most significant and prolific authors of the 20th century.