The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea 1/3

      This blog post is about pages 1-70 in the book, The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea by Yukio Mishima. These pages introduce the characters and the dilemma of one of them. The Setting of this book mainly takes place in a coastal town somewhere in Japan with it changing when Ryuji, a Sailor, recalls a story. The main characters so far are a mother Fusako, her son Noboru, and a sailor Ryuji.

     This book started off, in my opinion, very abnormally. It introduced the two main characters, Noboru and Fusako, within their house with Noboru's father's death not being explained, leaving him out of the picture. When Noboru goes to sleep Fusako locks his door, which isn't even the weirdest part, this is devastating to him being a teenage boy. During one of these nights, he saw a beam of light and discovered a hole going into his mother's room which leads to him spying on her. The book picks up after this with the mother and son visiting a ship due to Noboru's fascination with them. They tour the ship with the second mate Ryuji wich Fusako seems to immediately have a connection to even though it's never said directly. Since Ryuji is there for a few days with his ship at the port he is invited by Fusako. The very next day Noboru is supposed to go swimming with his friends but instead meets with his friends. It starts off normal with them eating a picnic. What surprised me was that none of their names were mentioned, but Yukio decided to name them by numbers by how important they think they are, and there is the chief. After the picnic they find a stray kitten to bring back to the chief's house. He explains how they are much more educated than the other kids and how they're naive. He ordered Noboru to kill the kitten which he complied and the chief butchered the kitten explaining the anatomy. Noboru explained that he was proud of killing something for the first time, but I believe by the way he starts acting after for a short while that he was also affected negatively by this. The chapter ends after him going home to Noboru to flaunt his knowledge of ships to Ryuji. After this, it is revealed that he has to leave to get to the next city.