The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea

Noboru belongs to a gang of boys led by 'the chief,' who preaches a cold, adolescent nihilism built on rejecting sentiment as illusion, fathers as fools, and glory as the only thing worth respecting in another human being. Their training in this philosophy is literal: the boys dissect a stray cat together as an exercise in seeing without flinching, proof to themselves that they can look at anything the adult world flinches from. Mishima plays the gang's rhetoric completely straight rather than as childish posturing, which is what makes it dangerous: these boys mean every word.

Ryuji, a sailor having an affair with Noboru's widowed mother Fusako, is first admitted to the gang's private mythology as living proof of their creed, a man who has chosen the sea's indifferent freedom over land's soft compromises, watched by Noboru through a peephole into his mother's bedroom in scenes that fuse erotic curiosity with something closer to worship. When Ryuji decides to leave the sea, marry Fusako, and take up an ordinary life as a shopkeeper and stepfather, the gang doesn't read it as a happy ending but as apostasy, the exact betrayal of glory their whole code was built to guard against.

The chief's central teaching is that ordinary adult emotion, love, grief, tenderness, is a kind of sentimental corruption that dulls a person's ability to see the world as it actually is, glorious and indifferent. Mishima uses the chief's speeches, delivered to boys young enough to take every word literally, to dramatize an idea he returned to across his career: that purity and glory are inherently violent standards, incompatible with domestic compromise, and that anyone claiming both a heroic identity and an ordinary life is lying to themselves about which one they've actually chosen. Fusako, meanwhile, notices none of this: she reads her son's silence as ordinary adolescent moodiness rather than as the outward sign of a private tribunal already convening against the man she's about to marry.