Finished yet another of Bowie's Top 100 Recommendations, and as before, his taste has proven to be absolutely impeccable. Although Mishima is more famous for his book Spring Snow, (which Bowie actually references in his song "Heat"), it is The Sailor Who Fell From Grace with the Sea that made the list. Instantly, I had to find out why, and this book certainly delivered.
For a mere 178 pages, this book sure packs a punch. It was as if A Clockwork Orange met Nausea met The Illiad met Moby Dick, but thrown into Japanese culture in the 1960s. Like The Chronicles of Prydain, not a single word is wasted. However, instead of a fantasy tale for children, Mishima uses his precise wording to create a chillingly great symbolic meditation on the themes of glory, honour, death, suffering, grief, violence, sexuality, youth, and existentialism. Yet somehow, he manages to bundle up all of these musings in a fairly straight-forward narrative about a thirteen-year-old boy named Noboru, his widowed mother Fusako, and their lives after the sailor Ryuji enters into it.
I highly recommend it as a companion piece to, or if you're a fan of, any of the aforementioned works. The ending left me with the type of (literal) spine-tingling foreboding, yet finality, that only a few other works have managed to inspire. I felt as if my soul had been pierced with a type of grim not-quite-empathy that the story offered in its tale of brutal not-quite-realism in its portrayal of worldly cruelty and universal chaos. I know this will certainly be a work I will come to reference again and again in my life, and it's a wonderful introduction to Japanese literature. 5/5.
Some choice quotes below (warning: they're definitely not spoiler free):
"At twenty, he had been passionately certain: there's just one thing I'm destined for and that's glory; that's right, glory! He had no idea what kind of glory he wanted, or what kind he was suited for. He knew only that in the depths of the world's darkness was a point of light which had been provided for him alone and would draw near someday to irradiate him and no other.
And it seemed increasingly obvious that the world would have to topple if he was to attain the glory that was rightfully his. They were cosubstantial: glory and the capsized world. He longed for a storm. But life aboard ship taught him only the regularity of natural law and the dynamic stability of the wobbling world. He began to examine his hopes and dreams one by one, and one by one to efface them as a sailor pencils out the days on the calendar in his cabin.
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 clutter of instruments and bronze signal bells, Ryjui 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.
At the same time, he liked popular music."
"He remembered her asking: "Why haven't you ever married?" And he remembered his simpering answer: "It's not easy to find a woman who is willing to be a sailor's wife."
What he had wanted to say was: "All the other officers have two or three children by now and they read letters from home over and over again, and look at pictures their kids have drawn of houses and the sun and flowers. Those men have thrown opportunity away -- there's no hope for them any more. I've never done much, but I've lived my whole life thinking of myself as the only real man. And if I'm right, then a limpid, lonely horn is going to trumpet through the dawn someday, and a turgid cloud laced with light will sweep down, and the poignant voice of glory will call for me from the distance -- and I'll have to jump out of bed and set out alone. That's why I've never married. I've waited, and waited, and here I am past thirty."
But he hadn't said anything like that; partly because he doubted a woman would understand. Nor had he mentioned his concept of ideal love: a man encounters the perfect woman only once in a lifetime and in every case death interposes -- an unseen Pandarus -- and lures them into the preordained embrace. This fantasy was probably a product of the hyperbole of popular songs. But over the years it had taken on substance in some recess of his mind and merged there with other things: the shrieking of a tidal wave, the ineluctable force of high tide, the avalanching break of surf upon a shoal. . . ."
"For a while they had left the city with packed lunches and gone all the way to Yamauchi Pier in Kanagawa. For a while they had roamed around the railroad siding behind the sheds on the warf, and then held the usual meeting to discuss the uselessness of Mankind, the insignificance of Life. They liked an insecure meeting place where intrusion was always a possibility."
"'Your ideas about people are still pretty naïve,' the thirteen-year-old cheif said coldly. 'No adult is going to be able to do something we couldn't do. There's a huge seal called 'impossibility' pasted all over this world. And don't ever forget that we're the only ones who can tear it off once and for all.' Awe-stricken, the others fell silent."
"Dimples dented the chief's cheeks, white even in summer. 'They don't even know the definition of danger. They think danger means something physical, getting scratched and a little blood running and the newspapers making a big fuss. Well, that hasn't got anything to do with it. 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.'"
"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."
"But after thinking it over, Noboru erased the third count. It was obviously a contradiction of the first two, which were aesthetic, idealistic, and therefore objective value judgements. The subjective problem in the third charge was only proof of his own immaturity, not to be counted as a crime on Ryuji's part."
"Are you getting cold? . . . Are you getting cold? Ryuji asked again and again, and all the time he was directing another question to himself: Are you really going to give it up? The feeling of the sea, the dark, drunken feeling that unearthly rolling always brings? The thrill of saying goodbye? The sweet tears you weep for your song? 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 sweet 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? His heart in spasm because he was always in contact with the ocean's dark swell and the lofty light from the edge of the clouds, twisting, withering until it clogged and then swelling up again, and he unable to distinguish the most exalted feelings from the meanest and that not mattering really since he could hold the sea responsible -- are you going to give up that luminous freedom?
And yet Ryjui 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. Not in the Northern Hemisphere. Not in the Soutehrn Hemisphere. Not even beneath that star every sailor dreams about, the Southern Cross!"
"A freighter sketched in black let fly four arrow markers: the arrow at the left indicated YOKOHAMA, the arrow at the right, NEW YORK; the third arrow aspired to HEAVEN and the last plummeted toward HELL. Scrawled in English capitals and emphatically circled were the words ALL FORGET, and there was a self-portrait, a sailor with mournful eyes wearing a pea coat with upturned collar and smoking a seaman's pipe."
"Naturally Noboru stuck close to Ryjui during the vacation and listened to sea stories by the hour, gaining a knowledge of sailing none of the others could match. What he wanted, though, was not that knowledge but the green drop the sailor would leave behind when someday, in the very middle of a story, he started up in agitation and soard out to sea again.
The phantoms of the sea and ships and ocean voyages existed only in that glistening green drop. But with each new day, another of the fulsome odors of shore routine adhered to the sailor: the odor of home, the odor of neighbors, the odor of peace, odors of fish frying and pleasantries and furniture that never budged, the odor of household budget books and weekend excursions . . . all the putrid odors landsmen reek of, the stench of death."
"Gradually they realized how grave the situation was. It seemed to indicate the end of a dream they shared, a bleak dreary future. And maybe they had been wrong: maybe there was no such thing as the ultimate after all."
"'As I've said before, life consists of simple symbols and decisions. Ryuji may not have have known it, but he was one of those symbols. At least, according to number three's testimony it seems that he was.
'I'm sure you all know where our duty lies. When a gear slips out of place it's out job to force it back into position. If we don't, order will turn to chaos. We all know that the world is empty and that the important thing, the only thing, is to try to maintain order in that emptiness. And so we are guards, and more than that because we also have executive power to insure that order is maintained.'"
"'This law is the adults' way of expressing the high hopes they have for us. But it also represents all the dreams they've never been able to make come true. They've assumed just beacuse they've roped themselves so tight they can't even budge that we must be helpless too; they've been careless enough to allow us here, and only here, a glimpse of blue sky and absolute freedom.'"
"'If we don't act now we will never again be able to obey freedom's supreme command, to perform the deed essential to filling the emptiness of the world, unless we are prepared to sacrifice our lives. And you can see that it's absurd for the executioners to risk their own lives. If we don't act now we'll never be able to steal again, or murder, or do any of the things that testify to man's freedom. We'll end up puking flattery and gossip, trembling our days away in submission and compromise and fear, worrying about what the neighbors are doing, living like squealing mice. And someday we'll get married, and have kids, and finally we'll become fathers, the vilest things on earth!'"
"I could have been a man sailing away forever. He had been fed up with all of it, glutted, and yet now, slowly, he was awakening again to the immensity of what he had abandoned.
The dark passions of the tides, the shriek of a tidal wave, the avalanching break of surf upon a shoal . . . an unknown glory calling for him endlessly from the dark offing, glory merged in death and in a woman, glory to fashion of his destiny something special, something rare. At twenty he had been passionately certain: in the depths of the world's darkness was a point of light which had been provided for him alone and would draw near someday to irradiate him and no other.
Whenever he dreamed of them, glory and death and woman were cosubstantial. Yet when the woman had been attained, the other two withdrew beyond the offing and ceased their mournful wailing of his name. The things he had rejected were now rejecting him."
"Now perilous death had rejected him. And glory, no doubt of that. And the retching drunkenness of his own feelings. The piercing grief, the radiant farewells. The call of the Grand Cause, another name for the tropical sun; and the women's gallant tears, and the dark longing, and the sweet heavy power propelling him toward the pinnacle of manliness -- now all of this was done, finished."
"Still immersed in his dream, he drank down the tepid tea. It tasted bitter. Glory, as anyone knows, is bitter stuff."
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