Sex and Existentialism
Reflections on a Classic of Modern Japanese Literature
Every year I teach Yukio Mishima’s novella, The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea, and every year my students are mesmerized by its brutal investigation of sexuality and the meaning of life. Recently, though, it appears that changes in the American political climate have made them less receptive to its message.
Mishima (1925–1970) was a controversial twentieth-century Japanese novelist, famous both for his disturbing fiction as well as for his death by ritual suicide. These is no consensus about what his single best work is, but this novella a good place to start.
The main character is Noboru Kuroda, a thirteen-year-old boy who lives with his widowed mother, Fusako. Noboru discovers a hole in the wall behind a chest of drawers which allows him to peep into his mother’s bedroom. He watches her undress, look at herself in the mirror, and even masturbate. Noboru is a bright, intense boy, and belongs to a group of five other boys, led by “the chief.” The chief succinctly expresses the group’s existential philosophy: “All six of us are geniuses. And the world, as you know, is empty” (161). The “geniuses” are looking for something that will fill this emptiness, “in much the same way that a crack along its face will fill a mirror” (57).
Noboru is fascinated with the sea and ships, so his mother arranges for a tour of a merchant vessel in the port. The First Mate is Ryuji Tsukazaki. Ryuji, too, has been looking for something meaningful in his life, and went to the sea to find it. Fusako invites Ryuji out to dinner, and then later discreetly brings him to her bedroom. But Noboru is watching again. At first, Noboru admires Ryuji. He seems heroic for his rejection of conventional society (symbolized by his turning toward the sea [12, 179]) and his quest for glory (represented by his constant journeys on the ocean). But Ryuji abandons the life of the sea to marry Fusako, and become another ordinary land-dweller. Noboru must do something desperate to avenge this betrayal. (And I cannot say more than that without spoiling the story for you.)
An engaging tale. But what is it really about? It strikes me as a very “male” novel. Although told in a stark and extreme form, the issues Noboru and Ryuji wrestle with are issues all men face. Young men wish to do something “glorious” with their lives. They struggle at it for a few years, knowing that they are not making much progress, but believing that their time will come. But then come the responsibilities of a wife and child. At that point, like Ryuji, other men often decide, “[i]t was time to abandon the dream he had cherished too long. Time to realize that no specially tailored glory was waiting for him” (110).
Sons, like Noboru, begin by idolizing their fathers. But then they realize that their fathers are really just ordinary men, men who have compromised their ideals, and given up their dreams. Some sons come to despise their fathers for it, vowing never to become what their fathers have.
The Freudian themes in the story are also obvious. The “chief” explains that fathers are “filthy, lecherous flies broadcasting to the whole world that they’ve screwed with our mothers” (138). Although Noboru expresses no direct sexual desire for his mother, he is clearly fascinated by her sexuality. His own father is dead, and Ryuji becomes, at first, the perfect “fantasy father.” Noboru brags to his friends that Ryuji is “different. He’s really going to do something.” When pressed for details of what, he replies, “I can’t say exactly, but it’ll be something…terrific” (50, ellipsis in original). But Ryuji betrays the fantasy. He turns out to be more ordinary in his views and even style of life than Noboru hoped. And worst of all he stays to become Noboru’s actual father.
Fathers, in the Oedipal fantasy, must be either perfect and absent or dead.
Is there a lesson to be drawn from all this? Yes, but the lesson depends on one’s general philosophical perspective. A Nietzschean existentialist would draw the conclusion that the “chief” and the other boys are right. There is something sad, almost pathetic, in the conventionality that Ryuji succumbs to. In deciding how to treat his new “son,” Ryuji comforts himself with the observation, “[m]ost books and magazines would agree” (171) with what he is doing. On the other hand, a Confucian would trace the emptiness of the boys’ lives to the lack of parental affection and guidance. One of the boys says of his father, “[h]e slaps me across the face. Sometimes he even punches” (138). The world seems empty to those denied the love of others.
The novel was written and is set in post-war Japan. This was a time when some form of nihilism was increasingly attractive. Traditional values like loyalty and filial piety had led to the disasters of World War II, but the modern world seemed to have nothing to offer other than the most banal consumerism. (The cult sci-fi film Matango[1963]is in part a critique of the nihilism of post-war Japan.) In the novella, Fusako runs a store that imports high-end Western clothing, so her “seduction” of Ryuji can be read as a metaphor for the seduction of Japan by Western values. This reading gains support from Mishima’s melodramatic death by seppuku (ritual suicide) following his attempt with some co-conspirators to instigate a far-right coup.
However, I think that Mishima’s death was more a piece of high-camp performance art than any serious political statement about the decadence of contemporary Japan. In fact, there is a way in which Mishima’s work is perfectly continuous with centuries of classical Japanese literature that emphasize the quest to achieve makoto (sincerity) in a world that seems to reward inauthenticity. The problem of how to express ninjō (one’s own authentic human feelings) in the face of giri (one’s socially defined obligations) was central to classics of samurai literature like Chūshingura (the story of the 47 samurai). Mishima was smart enough to know that this problem did not appear when Japan surrendered in 1945 and would not disappear if Japan again became an imperial power.
At the end of my Introduction to Chinese & Japanese Literature, I ask my students to name the work they most enjoyed reading and the work they least enjoyed reading. Every year, among works of Japanese literature, they least like The Tale of Genji and most like The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea. I consider their dislike of Genji a sign of my failure as a teacher, since — in addition to being the world’s first true novel and penned by a woman — The Tale of a Genji is an artfully written and moving work of literature. But I also understand my students’ concerns: Genji is a serial rapist and he “grooms” a child to become his lover.
But despite their concerns with the themes of The Tale of Genji, my students have generally been fascinated by The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea — until this year. Experienced teachers know that each class of students has its own group personality, so the fact that these students find the novella repellent may not reflect anything significant. However, with their glorification of violence, emphasis on authenticity over compromise, denigration of compassion, and misogyny, Mishima’s works invite fascist readings. Earlier generations of students, for whom fascism seemed as relevant as the Norman Conquest, could overlook these themes and enjoy the novel as surreal escapism. This generation of students does not have that luxury. Some of my students this year compared Noboru to a contemporary incel. Another student commented that she did enjoy the book while she was reading it, because she interpreted it as a parody of a far-right worldview, but she was horrified when she later read about Mishima’s life and realized that he was not being ironic.
Quotations and page references in this review all refer to John Nathan’s excellent 1965 translation. Nathan is also responsible for the colorful English title. The original Japanese is literally “Afternoon Towing.” But the Japanese for “towing” has resonances with “glory,” and Mishima himself apparently approved the English rendering. The first color photo that accompanies this review is a still from the 1976 film version, which changes the setting to England. Starring the often-talented Kris Kristofferson and Sarah Miles, this banal soft-porn film manages to preserve everything that is lurid about the original novel while ignoring all the deep themes it raises.
The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea is a story so extreme that it reminds us of the brutality of ancient myths about the gods. But the value of a myth is precisely that it reflects things deep in ourselves and in human existence that an ordinary story cannot express.
Originally published at https://medium.com on December 8, 2020.
