The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea Study Guide

The Japanese writer and right-wing militant Yukio Mishima was born as Kimitake Hiraoka to a respected family with deep roots in the traditional Japanese aristocracy and the samurai tradition. He attended an elite private school, where he excelled and studied a mixture of Japanese and European literature. A well-known Japanese literary magazine published Mishima’s first story when he was just 16 years old and deemed him one of the nation’s greatest young writers. In 1944, in the closing months of World War II, he was drafted into the Imperial Japanese Army. However, he failed his medical examination due to an illness and never went to war, where he likely would have died. After the war, the prominent writer Yasunari Kawabata helped Mishima publish his early writing, much of which focused on death, Japanese history, and same-sex love. While well-known, he was very controversial because of his strong affinity for traditional Japanese culture. In the mid-1950s, Mishima became an avid weight trainer and martial artist. He also married and had two children, even though he was widely known to be gay. In addition to his books, Mishima directed numerous plays. Starting in the 1960s, his work became highly political, and he was embroiled in a number of public scandals. In 1967, Mishima spent six weeks secretly undergoing military training and then helped found two right-wing ultranationalist civilian militias dedicated to protecting the Emperor. Finally, on November 25, 1970, Mishima and four other militia members attacked a military base and took a commander hostage. Then, Mishima gave an impassioned speech trying to convince the base’s soldiers to overthrow the government. Instead, the soldiers heckled and laughed at him. After his speech, Mishima yelled “Long live the Emperor!” and committed ritual suicide (seppuku). He is still best known for this act of terrorism, which is known as “The Mishima Incident” in Japan. To this day, scholars still debate whether Mishima sincerely wanted to overthrow the Japanese government or was just seeking the kind of dramatic, glorious death that he praised across his work. While the Japanese public widely ridiculed and condemned Mishima’s suicide, it also brought greater international attention to his work and helped cement his status as one of Japan’s most influential postwar writers.

The Sailor Who Fell from Grace in the Sea is set in the tumultuous social context of post-World War II Japan. After the war’s end in 1945, U.S.-led Allied forces occupied Japan for seven years and implemented a number of political and economic reforms. Most importantly, the Allies turned Japan’s government into a representative parliamentary system, dismantled its military and overseas empire, and redistributed land and property to limit the power of the nation’s wealthy traditional elite. They also extended the vote to women and left Emperor Hirohito (or Shōwa) on the throne, but stripped most of his powers. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, the Allies imposed a series of economic policies designed to foster capitalism and combat communism. The economy grew rapidly, around 10 percent per year. In particular, the Korean War contributed to industrial growth in cities like the naval port Yokohama, where The Sailor Who Fell with Grace with the Sea is set. When the occupation formally ended in 1952, the new Japanese government was significantly less powerful and more divided than ever before. Meanwhile, largely because of the presence of occupying American soldiers, Western culture began to have an outsized impact on life in Japan (and vice-versa). This Western influence is clear in The Sailor Who Fell with Grace with the Sea, in which two of the three main characters—Fusako Kuroda and her son Noboru—live a thoroughly Westernized lifestyle. In the 1960s, when Mishima wrote and set this novel, Japan also started reducing barriers to trade with the rest of the world. This contributed to a rapid growth in Japanese exports. Of course, the sailor Ryuji Tsukazaki’s journeys around the world are part of this economic expansion, which helped Japan grow into the world’s second-largest economy by 1970. But not everyone was happy with Japan’s new liberal democratic government and capitalist economy. Many politicians and cultural leaders—of whom Yukio Mishima was one of the most prominent—openly called for an end to Westernization and a return to the old system. In particular, Mishima wanted to restore greater power to the emperor. In fact, this novel is largely an allegory for Mishima’s militant belief that Japan should rekindle its traditional culture, reassert its military power overseas, and avenge its loss in the war.

While The Sailor Who Fell from Grace in the Sea is among the most popular of Yukio Mishima’s 34 novels, most critics don’t actually consider it one of his best or most significant. His most acclaimed novels include the semi-autobiographical coming-of-age novel Confessions of a Mask (1949) and The Temple of the Golden Pavilion (1956), a fictionalized version of the famous arson of a significant Buddhist temple. His masterpiece is widely considered to be his final work, the four-book series The Sea of Fertility: Spring Snow (1969), Runaway Horses (1969), The Temple of Dawn (1970), and The Decay of the Angel (1971). Mishima is also recognized for his plays, including both Western-style plays like Rokumeikan (1956) and Madame de Sade (1965) and his adaptations of traditional Japanese Kabuki and Noh dramas, like The Lady Aoi and The Sardine Seller’s Net of Love (both 1954). Mishima’s most important mentor, peer, and contemporary was his close friend Yasunari Kawabata, who won the 1968 Nobel Prize for Literature and is still widely celebrated for novels like Snow Country (1948), The Master of Go (1954), and The Old Capital (1962). A volume of Kawabata and Mishima’s correspondence has also been published in various languages. The most significant biographies of Mishima in English are Persona: A Biography of Yukio Mishima (2012) by Naoki Inose and Hiroaki Sato and Mishima: A Biography (2000) by John Nathan, Mishima’s friend and the definitive translator of The Sailor Who Fell from Grace in the Sea. Dozens more are available in Japanese. Another important portrait of Mishima is the American film Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985).