Set in the Japanese port city of Yokohama in the early 1960s, The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea is at heart a political allegory. After Japan lost World War II, the occupying Americans imposed a liberal democracy and capitalist economy that enabled the nation to grow and reconstruct, but—according to traditionalists like the novel’s author, Yukio Mishima—also crushed its people’s spirit and identity. Thus, by the 1960s, Japan faced a stark choice between its native traditions and Western modernity. The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea transforms this grand political transition into family drama. Namely, the sailor Ryuji Tsukazaki abandons a glorious life of voyaging around the world for a drab job selling imported European clothing in his Westernized fiancée’s shop. In other words, he sacrifices his own values and ends up subservient to the West—just like Japan itself. In contrast, Noboru and the chief refuse to accept Western influence, and they ultimately murder Ryuji to make him do the same. This extreme act represents the triumph of Japanese tradition. The novel uses this allegory to make a bold, controversial case that Japan should reject Western values and return to its former imperial might.
The novel emphasizes foreign influences in 1960s Japan to suggest that the nation lost an essential part of its identity when the American occupation imposed democracy and modern capitalism on it. The entire book takes place in and around Yokohama’s port, postwar Japan’s commercial link to the rest of the world. Its central character, Ryuji Tsukazaki, is a sailor who was supposed to fight in the war but ended up working on a freighter (the Rakuyo) helping transport goods around the world instead. Similarly, his attraction to the sea—which is a key symbol of Japanese identity—is tied to the Japanese Empire’s goals of expansion and global domination. Thus, Ryuji’s job shows that Japan maintains its spirit of militarism and empire after the war, but that the country is forced to redirect that spirit toward more mundane pursuits like trade. In contrast, Ryuji’s lover, Fusako, lives an extravagant Western lifestyle, which suggests that many Japanese people rejected their own culture after the war and embraced Western culture instead. The novel repeatedly describes her expensive Western furniture and notes that she doesn’t follow any Japanese traditions (except on New Year’s Day). She also runs a store where wealthy Japanese businesspeople and celebrities buy imported European goods. Thus, she represents how Japan’s postwar economy and culture were structured around foreign influence. Finally, the book constantly references the American occupation in order to emphasize how it changed Japan. For instance, when Noboru first discovers the peephole that lets him see into his mother’s bedroom, he wonders if an American soldier built it during the occupation. He reacts with visceral disgust to the idea of a foreigner modifying his family home. Similarly, the very end of the book, Noboru’s gang murders Ryuji at an abandoned U.S. military base, a setting that represents how, after the occupation, Japanese people were forced to make do with the changed society that the U.S. left behind.
The novel’s conclusion represents Japan’s potential to reassert itself against the West and overcome its position of weakness. First, Ryuji’s marriage to Fusako stands for Japan’s capitulation to the West after the war. The book makes this link clear when Ryuji proposes to Fusako during the sunrise on New Year’s Day. The rising sun is a longstanding national symbol of Japan—after all, the country’s Japanese name means “Land of the Rising Sun”—and New Year’s Day symbolizes the beginning of a new era. Thus, this scene strongly suggests that Ryuji and Fusako’s engagement is a metaphor for Japan’s fate after World War II. When Ryuji stops sailing and starts helping out at Fusako’s store instead, this represents Japan’s transformation from a global power into a mere cog in the Western-dominated global economy. Yet Ryuji’s fate also shows why Mishima thought Japan made a mistake by handing power over to foreigners. Just before Ryuji dies, he realizes that he has turned from a valiant adventurer pursuing “forever and the unknown” into just another aging sailor telling stories about his travels. (Early in the novel, Ryuji explains that he hates nothing more than hearing other sailors’ tall tales.) Like Japan after the war, all Ryuji truly has left are his memories, because he has given up on achieving glory. This sense of unachieved glory is partially an expression of Japan’s sense of moral and cultural loss after the war, which took away its chance to become a world-leading superpower. Finally, Ryuji’s murder at the hands of Noboru’s gang is a metaphor for Mishima’s desire to defeat Western influence and reestablish traditional imperial rule in Japan. Noboru and the chief decide that it’s unacceptable for Ryuji to quit sailing to become a shopkeeper and father, so they plot his murder. This fits into their broader philosophy of breaking modern cultural taboos in order to rebuild a traditional society based on pure power and domination. The boys believe that they are inherently superior to other people and have a special right to rule over the world. Therefore, they argue that the unimaginative laws and social norms that adults impose on them don’t apply. These laws represent the laws imposed by the U.S. occupation, which Mishima believed couldn’t fairly apply to Japan’s unique people, culture, and history. The boys see murdering Ryuji as a way to vindicate themselves and protect his honor, and the novel sets this murder up as an allegory for Japan reasserting its national might.
Whether intentionally or otherwise, Ryuji’s murder at the end of the novel foreshadows Mishima’s lifelong dream of overthrowing Japanese democracy and reinstating its former empire. The novel’s connections to Mishima’s personal life are undoubtedly complex, but his nostalgia for a Japan that was ruled by traditional culture—and, more controversially, that ruled much of Asia in a brutal overseas empire—is abundantly clear.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Japanese Nationalism and Identity ThemeTracker
Japanese Nationalism and Identity Quotes in The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea
Noboru couldn’t believe he was looking at his mother’s bedroom; it might have belonged to a stranger. But there was no doubt that a woman lived there: femininity trembled in every corner, a faint scent lingered in the air.
Then a strange idea assailed him. Did the peephole just happen to be here, an accident? Or—after the war—when the soldiers’ families had been living together in the house…He had a sudden feeling that another body, larger than his, a blond, hairy body, had once huddled in this dusty space in the wall. […] He ran to the next room. He would never forget the queer sensation he had when, flinging open the door, he burst in.
Drab and familiar, the room bore no resemblance to the mysterious chamber he had seen through the peephole: it was here that he came to whine and to sulk.
He never cried, not even in his dreams, for hard-heartedness was a point of pride. A large iron anchor withstanding the corrosion of the sea and scornful of the barnacles and oysters that harass the hulls of ships, sinking polished and indifferent through heaps of broken glass, toothless combs, bottle caps, and prophylactics into the mud at harbor bottom—that was how he liked to imagine his heart. Someday he would have an anchor tattooed on his chest.
Assembled there were the moon and a feverish wind, the incited, naked flesh of a man and a woman, sweat, perfume, the scars of a life at sea, the dim memory of ports around the world, a cramped breathless peephole, a young boy’s iron heart—but these cards from a gypsy deck were scattered, prophesying nothing. The universal order at last achieved, thanks to the sudden, screaming horn, had revealed an ineluctable circle of life—the cards had paired: Noboru and mother—mother and man—man and sea—sea and Noboru…
He was choked, wet, ecstatic. Certain he had watched a tangle of thread unravel to trace a hallowed figure. And it would have to be protected: for all he knew, he was its thirteen-year-old creator.
“If this is ever destroyed, it’ll mean the end of the world.” […] I guess I’d do anything to stop that, no matter how awful!
But as the years passed, he grew indifferent to the lure of exotic lands. He found himself in the strange predicament all sailors share: essentially he belonged neither to the land nor to the sea. Possibly a man who hates the land should dwell on shore forever. Alienation and the long voyages at sea will compel him once again to dream of it, torment him with the absurdity of longing for something that he loathes.
Ryuji hated the immobility of the land, the eternally unchanging surfaces. But a ship was another kind of prison.
Sometimes, as he stood watch in the middle of the night, he could feel his glory knifing toward him like a shark from some great distance in the darkly heaping sea, see it almost, aglow like the noctilucae that fire the water, surging in to flood him with light and cast the silhouette of his heroic figure against the brink of man’s world. On those nights, standing in the white pilot-house amid a clutter of instruments and bronze signal bells, Ryuji was more convinced than ever:
There must be a special destiny in store for me; a glittering, special-order kind no ordinary man would be permitted.
The cloud-dappled sky was partitioned by an intricate crisscross of hawsers; and lifting up at it in reverence like a slender chin was the Rakuyo’s prow, limitlessly high, the green banner of the fleet fluttering at its crest. The anchor clung to the hawsehole like a large metal-black crab.
“This is going to be great,” Noboru said, brimming over with boyish excitement.
“That sailor is terrific! He’s like a fantastic beast that’s just come out of the sea all dripping wet. Last night I watched him go to bed with my mother.”
“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. You won’t find another job as dangerous as that. There isn’t any fear in existence itself, or any uncertainty, but living creates it. And society is basically meaningless, a Roman mixed bath. And school, school is just society in miniature: that’s why we’re always being ordered around. A bunch of blind men tell us what to do, tear our unlimited ability to shreds.”
Noboru seized the kitten by the neck and stood up. It dangled dumbly from his fingers. He checked himself for pity; like a lighted window seen from an express train, it flickered for an instant in the distance and disappeared. He was relieved.
The chief always insisted it would take acts such as this to fill the world’s great hollows. Though nothing else could do it, he said, murder would fill those gaping caves in much the same way that a crack along its face will fill a mirror. Then they would achieve real power over existence.
The thought of parting with her the next day was painful, but he had a maxim to countermand his pain, an insubstantial refrain which played over and over in his dreams: “The man sets out in quest of the Grand Cause; the woman is left behind.” Yet Ryuji knew better than anyone that no Grand Cause was to be found at sea. At sea were only watches linking night and day, prosaic tedium, the wretched circumstances of a prisoner.
Are you going to give up the life which has detached you from the world, kept you remote, impelled you toward the pinnacle of manliness? The secret yearning for death. The glory beyond and the death beyond. Everything was “beyond,” wrong or right, had always been “beyond.” Are you going to give that up? […]
And yet Ryuji had discovered on the return leg of his last voyage that he was tired, tired to death of the squalor and the boredom in a sailor’s life. He was convinced that he had tasted it all, even the lees, and he was glutted. What a fool he’d been! There was no glory to be found, not anywhere in the world.
A minute later, far to the right of the floating lumber and surprisingly high up, a gauzy red ring loomed in the slate-gray sky. Immediately the sun became a globe of pure red but still so weak they could look straight at it, a blood-red moon.
“I know this will be a good year; it couldn’t be anything else with us here like this, watching the first sunrise together. And you know something? This is the first time I’ve ever seen the sunrise on New Year’s Day.” Fusako’s voice warped in the cold. Ryuji heard himself bellow in the resolute voice he used to shout orders into the wind on the winter deck: “Will you marry me?”
“There is no such thing as a good father because the role itself is bad. Strict fathers, soft fathers, nice moderate fathers—one’s as bad as another. They stand in the way of our progress while they try to burden us with their inferiority complexes, and their unrealized aspirations, and their resentments, and their ideals, and the weaknesses they’ve never told anyone about, and their sins, and their sweeter-than-honey dreams, and the maxims they’ve never had the courage to live by—they’d like to unload all that silly crap on us, all of it!
[…]
They’re suspicious of anything creative, anxious to whittle the world down into something puny they can handle. A father is a reality-concealing machine, a machine for dishing up lies to kids, and that isn’t even the worst of it: secretly he believes that he represents reality.”
The moment he huddled inside the chest he was calm again. The trembling and the trepidation seemed almost funny now; he even had a feeling he would be able to study well. Not that it really mattered: this was the world’s outer edge. So long as he was here, Noboru was in contact with the naked universe. No matter how far you ran, escape beyond this point was impossible.
Bending his arms in the cramped space, he began to read the cards in the light of the flashlight.
abandon
By now this word was an old acquaintance: he knew it well.
ability
Was that any different from genius?
aboard
A ship again; he recalled the loudspeaker ringing across the deck that day when Ryuji sailed. And then the colossal, golden horn, like a proclamation of despair.
absence
absolute
Noboru listened feeling as though he were about to suffocate. Can this man be saying things like that? This splendid hero who once shone so brightly?
Every word burned like fire. He wanted to scream, as his mother had screamed: How can you do this to me? The sailor was saying things he was never meant to say. Ignoble things in wheedling, honeyed tones, fouled words not meant to issue from his lips until Doomsday, words such as men mutter in stinking lairs. And he was speaking proudly, for he believed in himself, was satisfied with the role of father he had stepped forward to accept.
He is satisfied. Noboru felt nauseous.
“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.”
Still immersed in his dream, he drank down the tepid tea. It tasted bitter. Glory, as anyone knows, is bitter stuff.
