This is by Yukio Mishima (1925-70). It was originally published in 1963, and John Nathan's wonderfully smooth English translation came out in 1966.

It's another that I read with Henry Eliot's online book group, which is where I learnt that the original Japanese title (Gogo no Eiko) translates literally as Tugging in the Afternoon. This picks up on the book's nautical setting, and also offers a pun, as the word eiko can be written in two different ways, with one pair of characters meaning "tugging", and the other "glory" (there's a lot of strange stuff about glory in this book, which we'll come to in a minute). As this title would sound pretty bizarre in English, though, especially with the disappearance of the pun, Mishima (a friend of Nathan's) suggested a few alternative titles in Japanese, and together they settled on the elegant and evocative one that we have now.

One of the huge pluses of book groups is that they encourage you to read stuff you would otherwise skip. As I said in this book note, I'd kind of given up on Mishima, having not enjoyed his Forbidden Colours (1951). I'm glad I gave him another go. Sailor is a weird, dark, disturbing book, but it is beautifully written, and very powerful.

Mishima led an unconventional life, to put it mildly. And he lived through a uniquely awful period of Japanese history. Traces of all this emerge in the book in scene after scene of terrifying brilliance.


A really beautiful cover...

Layer by layer, it goes like this:

Noburu, 13, lives in Yokohama with his widowed businesswoman mother, Fusako, and is fascinated by the sea and all that sails on it. When mother and son get the opportunity to visit the Rakuyo, currently in port, they meet Ryuji, the Second Mate. Fusako (lonely) and Ryuji (starting to tire of his career on the briny) strike up a relationship. Since Noburu has discovered a peephole that offers views of his mother's bedroom, he rapidly clocks more of that relationship than they initially realize...


Yamashita Park, Yokohama, c. 1960

Meanwhile, Noburu's other line of influence is a mysterious group of contemporaries led by the sinister "Chief". They meet "to discuss the uselessness of Mankind, the insignificance of Life". That's the sort of thing many teenagers discuss, but there's a distinctly harder edge here. Killing is good, decrees the Chief, necessary for "breaking the endless chain of society's loathsome taboos". In a gruesome scene, Noboru is instructed to kill a kitten, and thinks afterwards: "I can do anything, no matter how awful." Ominous words.

Ryuji's brief leave is up, and he sets sail, but he continues to correpond with Fusako. The next time he returns, he asks her to marry him. She accepts (not before having him checked out by a private detective). Noboru is appalled that this strong, tough sailor -- "this splendid hero who once shone so brightly -- has morphed into a soft-centred husband- and father-to-be. The Chief's gang despise fathers (it was a point of pride for Noboru that he didn't have one): "Fathers," says the lead boy, "are the flies of this world... Filthy, lecherous flies broadcasting to the whole world that they've screwed our mothers." So when Ryuji, acting from the best intentions, starts to do the compassionate-father thing (not to mention helping Fusako at her shop, and generally seeking to master her life-lessons), Noboru is even more alienated. He calls for an emergency meeting of this creepy gang, and a plan is drawn up (which sounds worryingly like what happened to the kitten, only on a larger scale). They use Noboru to lure him to their secluded den, and pretend to listen to his nautical tales while offering him tea that we know has been laced with a drug...

That, mercifully, is where we leave them... But we have little hope that Ryuji will come out of this alive.


Miyajima, 2015

***

So that's the first layer. The second is bound up with the elusive concept of "glory". This affects both Ryuji and Noboru. The sailor has felt for many years that he's destined for glory of some kind. But for him to attain this glory, there must first be some sort of cataclysm: "There must be a special destiny in store for me; a glittering special-order kind no ordinary man would be permitted." Once you know the end, these words take on a dreadful irony.

Back from his latest trip, and welcomed by Fusako, he wrestles with himself about whether it's time to abandon that dream of glory: "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 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?... Are you going to give up that luminous freedom?"

But eventually, as we've seen, he decides for the land. There's no glory to be found anywhere, and it's time to stop.

Unbeknownst to him, the gang, as we've seen, have other plans. Ryuji's fall from grace as a model of masculinity "seemed to indicate the end of a dream they shared, and its replacement by a bleak, dreary future". So the Chief issues his ominous challenge to his acolytes: "Would you like to make that sailor a hero again?"

This, in a macabre way, is their bid for glory. The Chief has checked that they can't be punished, because they're under 14. This is their last chance: "If we don't act now ... we'll end up puking flattery and gossip, trembling our days away in submission and compromise and fear... We must have blood! Human blood!"

Ironically, Ryuji, at the boys' hiding-place and as yet oblivious to their intentions, is inwardly questioning his decision to turn away from the sea: "Whenever he dreamed of them, glory and death and woman were consubstantial. 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."

Ruefully, he concludes: "Now perilous death had rejected him..." Little does he know... It turns out that woman has indeed indirectly brought him death -- but there will be no glory.

Or will there...? This is the really creepy part. He takes the cup he is offered: "Still immersed in his dream, he drank down the tepid tea. It tasted bitter. Glory, as anyone knows, is bitter stuff."

It is as though Mishima is suggesting that these boys are giving Ryuji the death he would have wanted; at some level the sailor is conniving with, welcoming even, his victimhood. Twisted stuff...

For Noboru, for whom "hard-heartedness was a point of pride", this is another stage in his initiation.



***

But wait, there's more... There's nationalism. Many commentators see the story as an allegory critiquing the way post-war Japan embraced Western culture and values. In this reading, Fusako stands for the West, and Ryuji for debased and Westernized Japan. Her shop is full of imported goods; she has little connection with Japanese culture; and -- having tempted Ryuji to live a quiet life, and give up on his dreams of glory -- she turns him into a subordinate, subjecting him to various cultural and commercial tasks. The Chief and his band, on the other hand, stand for the austerity and purity and clear-sightedness of the old and (would-be resurgent) Japan; they unflinchingly eliminate those who capitulate.

There's also misogyny... It's not as overt as it seemed to be in Forbidden Colours. And I'm not claiming that every negative depiction of a woman constitutes misogyny. Even so... There's a kind of tone... The very first paragraph shows Fusako locking Noboru in his bedroom as punishment for a misdemenour, which he finds acutely humiliating. Whenever she displeases him, he uses the peephole to invade her privacy, which he sees as an appropriate punishment for her cruelty. When the existence of the peephole is discovered, she sets about him like a wrestler (the description is larded with words like "ferociously strong", "panting", "glaring", "grotesquely massive and threatening" and "gasping"; and we're told: "She had brushed against 'reality', a thing she dreaded worse than leeches").

An emasculating figure, she is portrayed as the undoing of Ryuji, and the language around her often seems to point in the direction of darkness and/or manipulation and/or unavailability. Examples:

-- "Her sweat and perfumed fragrance reaching him on the breeze seemed to clamour for his death. 'DIE! DIE! DIE!' it screamed..."
-- Noburu, peering into his mother's darkened room, sees that it's "black as the inside of a large coffin, everywhere a shade of darkness, and alive with jostling particles of something Noburu had never seen, the blackest thing in all the world".
-- "Her voice oozed the joy a woman takes in consoling a man."
-- "To a man locked up in a steel ship all the time, the sea is too much like a woman... You're in a ship that mounts the sea and rides her and yet is constantly denied her."

As Henry Eliot points out, many of the components of Sailor -- honour, death, dispassion, purity -- are to some extent shared by Mishima himself, and have their roots in the traditional samurai code of Bushido.



***

Eliot also pointed out that in 1976, Lewis John Carlino made the book into a movie that starred Kris Kristofferson. He took the story completely out of Japan, and set it in Devon, England. Given it is replete with cultural connotations, it's hard to see how this could ever have worked. And, for some, it definitely didn't. John Simon, an American critic, said it was 'very pretty to look at and makes absolutely no sense'.


Not such a good cover...


And a truly appalling promotional poster... And while we're on the subject of images and taglines, this blogger draws our attention to a 1971 Berkeley Medallion edition that boasts the tagline: "A Novel of the Homicidal Hysteria that Lies Latent in the Japanese Character, by One of the Most Gifted and Acclaimed Writers of Our Time". Unbelievable...

That the broad scenario is not UNIQUE to Japan now seems abundantly apparent. One of our group members referenced Adolescence, and it's hard not to see parallels. Sadly, processes like these -- hyper-masculine desire for glory + (often justified) discontent with what society offers + shades of misogynism + groupthink ==> violence -- are starkly evident in many cultures at the moment.

All up, unsettling but thought-provoking; beautiful but appalling. Having thought my Mishima days were over, I would now read more.