Glory, Heroism, and Death Theme Analysis

And the zone of black. […] He tried all the obscenity he knew, but words alone couldn’t penetrate that thicket. His friends were probably right when they called it a pitiful little vacant house. He wondered if that had anything to do with the emptiness of his own world.

At thirteen, Noboru was convinced of his own genius (each of the others in the gang felt the same way) and certain that life consisted of a few simple signals and decisions; that death took root at the moment of birth and man’s only recourse thereafter was to water and tend it; that propagation was a fiction; consequently, society was a fiction too: that fathers and teachers, by virtue of being fathers and teachers, were guilty of a grievous sin. Therefore, his own father’s death, when he was eight, had been a happy incident, something to be proud of.

He never cried, not even in his dreams, for hard-heartedness was a point of pride. A large iron anchor withstanding the corrosion of the sea and scornful of the barnacles and oysters that harass the hulls of ships, sinking polished and indifferent through heaps of broken glass, toothless combs, bottle caps, and prophylactics into the mud at harbor bottom—that was how he liked to imagine his heart. Someday he would have an anchor tattooed on his chest.

Assembled there were the moon and a feverish wind, the incited, naked flesh of a man and a woman, sweat, perfume, the scars of a life at sea, the dim memory of ports around the world, a cramped breathless peephole, a young boy’s iron heart—but these cards from a gypsy deck were scattered, prophesying nothing. The universal order at last achieved, thanks to the sudden, screaming horn, had revealed an ineluctable circle of life—the cards had paired: Noboru and mother—mother and man—man and sea—sea and Noboru…

He was choked, wet, ecstatic. Certain he had watched a tangle of thread unravel to trace a hallowed figure. And it would have to be protected: for all he knew, he was its thirteen-year-old creator.

“If this is ever destroyed, it’ll mean the end of the world.” […] I guess I’d do anything to stop that, no matter how awful!

But as the years passed, he grew indifferent to the lure of exotic lands. He found himself in the strange predicament all sailors share: essentially he belonged neither to the land nor to the sea. Possibly a man who hates the land should dwell on shore forever. Alienation and the long voyages at sea will compel him once again to dream of it, torment him with the absurdity of longing for something that he loathes.

Ryuji hated the immobility of the land, the eternally unchanging surfaces. But a ship was another kind of prison.

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 a clutter of instruments and bronze signal bells, Ryuji 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.

The cloud-dappled sky was partitioned by an intricate crisscross of hawsers; and lifting up at it in reverence like a slender chin was the Rakuyo’s prow, limitlessly high, the green banner of the fleet fluttering at its crest. The anchor clung to the hawsehole like a large metal-black crab.

“This is going to be great,” Noboru said, brimming over with boyish excitement.

That was their first encounter. She would never forget his eyes as he confronted her in the corridor. Deep-set in the disgruntled, swarthy face, they sought her out as though she were a tiny spot on the horizon, the first sign of a distant ship. That, at least, was the feeling she had. Eyes viewing an object so near had no business piercing that way, focusing so sharply—without leagues of sea between them, it was unnatural. She wondered if all eyes that endlessly scanned the horizon were that way. Unlooked-for signs of a ship descried—misgivings and delight, wariness and expectation…the sighted vessel just barely able to forgive the affront because of the vast reach of sea between them: a ravaging gaze. The sailor’s eyes made her shudder.

The terrifyingly deliberate prelude and the sudden, reckless flight; the dangerous glitter of silver in a twist of fraying cable—standing under her open parasol, Fusako watched it all. She felt load after heavy load of freight being lifted from her and whisked away on the powerful arm of a crane—suddenly, but after long and careful preparation. She thrilled to the sight of cargo no man could move winging lightly into the sky, and she could have watched forever. This may have been a fitting destiny for cargo but the marvel was also an indignity. “It keeps getting emptier and emptier,” she thought. The advance was relentless, yet there was time for hesitation and languor, time so hot and long it made you faint, sluggish, congested time.

“It was the sea that made me begin thinking secretly about love more than anything else; you know, a love worth dying for, or a love that consumes you. To a man locked up in a steel ship all the time, the sea is too much like a woman. Things like her lulls and storms, or her caprice, or the beauty of her breast reflecting the setting sun, are all obvious. More than that, you’re in a ship that mounts the sea and rides her and yet is constantly denied her. It’s the old saw about miles and miles of lovely water and you can’t quench your thirst. Nature surrounds a sailor with all these elements so like a woman and yet he is kept as far as a man can be from her warm, living body. That’s where the problem begins, right there—I’m sure of it.”

“That sailor is terrific! He’s like a fantastic beast that’s just come out of the sea all dripping wet. Last night I watched him go to bed with my mother.”

“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.”

Noboru seized the kitten by the neck and stood up. It dangled dumbly from his fingers. He checked himself for pity; like a lighted window seen from an express train, it flickered for an instant in the distance and disappeared. He was relieved.

The chief always insisted it would take acts such as this to fill the world’s great hollows. Though nothing else could do it, he said, murder would fill those gaping caves in much the same way that a crack along its face will fill a mirror. Then they would achieve real power over existence.

Noboru tried comparing the corpse confronting the world so nakedly with the unsurpassably naked figures of his mother and the sailor. But compared to this, they weren’t naked enough. They were still swaddled in skin. Even that marvelous horn and the great wide world whose expanse it had limned couldn’t possibly have penetrated so deeply as this…the pumping of the bared heart placed the peeled kitten in direct and tingling contact with the kernel of the world.

Since dark antiquity the words have been spoken by women of every caste to sailors in every port; words of docile acceptance of the horizon’s authority, of reckless homage to that mysterious azure boundary; words never failing to bestow on even the haughtiest woman the sadness, the hollow hopes, and the freedom of the whore: “You’ll be leaving in the morning, won’t you?…”

The thought of parting with her the next day was painful, but he had a maxim to countermand his pain, an insubstantial refrain which played over and over in his dreams: “The man sets out in quest of the Grand Cause; the woman is left behind.” 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.

For Ryuji the kiss was death, the very death in love he always dreamed of. The softness of her lips, her mouth so crimson in the darkness he could see it with closed eyes, so infinitely moist, a tepid coral sea, her restless tongue quivering like sea grass…in the dark rapture of all this was something directly linked to death. He was perfectly aware that he would leave her in a day, yet he was ready to die happily for her sake. Death roused inside him, stirred.

Noboru, as he affected childishness, was standing guard over the perfection of the adults, the moment. His was the sentinel’s role. The less time they had, the better. The shorter this meeting was, the less perfection would be marred. For the moment, as a man leaving a woman behind to voyage around the world, as a sailor, and as a Second Mate, Ryuji was perfect. So was his mother. As a woman to be left behind, as a beautiful sailcloth full-blown with happy memories and the grief of parting, she was perfect too. Both had blundered dangerously during the past two days but at the moment their behavior was beyond reproach. If only Ryuji didn’t say something ridiculous and spoil it all before he was safely under way. Peering from beneath the broad brim of his straw hat, Noboru anxiously studied first one face and then the other.

“Mr. Tsukazaki, when will you be sailing again?” Noboru asked abruptly.
His mother turned to him with a shocked face and he could see that she had paled. It was the question she most wanted to ask, and most dreaded. Ryuji was posing near the window with his back to them. He half closed his eyes, and then, very slowly, said: “I’m not sure yet.”

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 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? […]

And yet Ryuji 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.

A minute later, far to the right of the floating lumber and surprisingly high up, a gauzy red ring loomed in the slate-gray sky. Immediately the sun became a globe of pure red but still so weak they could look straight at it, a blood-red moon.

“I know this will be a good year; it couldn’t be anything else with us here like this, watching the first sunrise together. And you know something? This is the first time I’ve ever seen the sunrise on New Year’s Day.” Fusako’s voice warped in the cold. Ryuji heard himself bellow in the resolute voice he used to shout orders into the wind on the winter deck: “Will you marry me?”

Ryuji had told the same sort of sea story before, but this time his delivery seemed different. The tone of his voice reminded Noboru of a peddler selling sundry wares while he handled them with dirty hands. Unsling a pack from your back and spread it open on the ground for all to see: one hurricane Caribbean-style—scenery along the banks of the Panama Canal—a carnival smeared in red dust from the Brazilian countryside—a tropical rainstorm flooding a village in the twinkling of an eye—bright parrots hollering beneath a dark sky…No doubt about it: Ryuji did have a pack of wares.

“There is no such thing as a good father because the role itself is bad. Strict fathers, soft fathers, nice moderate fathers—one’s as bad as another. They stand in the way of our progress while they try to burden us with their inferiority complexes, and their unrealized aspirations, and their resentments, and their ideals, and the weaknesses they’ve never told anyone about, and their sins, and their sweeter-than-honey dreams, and the maxims they’ve never had the courage to live by—they’d like to unload all that silly crap on us, all of it!

[…]

They’re suspicious of anything creative, anxious to whittle the world down into something puny they can handle. A father is a reality-concealing machine, a machine for dishing up lies to kids, and that isn’t even the worst of it: secretly he believes that he represents reality.”

The moment he huddled inside the chest he was calm again. The trembling and the trepidation seemed almost funny now; he even had a feeling he would be able to study well. Not that it really mattered: this was the world’s outer edge. So long as he was here, Noboru was in contact with the naked universe. No matter how far you ran, escape beyond this point was impossible.
Bending his arms in the cramped space, he began to read the cards in the light of the flashlight.

abandon
By now this word was an old acquaintance: he knew it well.

ability
Was that any different from genius?

aboard
A ship again; he recalled the loudspeaker ringing across the deck that day when Ryuji sailed. And then the colossal, golden horn, like a proclamation of despair.

absence

absolute

To beat the boy would be easy enough, but a difficult future awaited him. He would have to receive their love with dignity, to deliver them from daily dilemmas, to balance daily accounts; he was expected in some vague, general way to comprehend the incomprehensible feelings of the mother and the child and to become an infallible teacher, perceiving the causes of a situation even as unconscionable as this one: he was dealing here with no ocean squall but the gentle breeze that blows ceaselessly over the land.

Though Ryuji didn’t realize it, the distant influence of the sea was at work on him again: he was unable to distinguish the most [exalted] feelings from the meanest, and suspected that essentially important things did not occur on land. No matter how hard he tried to reach a realistic decision, shore matters remained suffused with the hues of fantasy.

Noboru listened feeling as though he were about to suffocate. Can this man be saying things like that? This splendid hero who once shone so brightly?
Every word burned like fire. He wanted to scream, as his mother had screamed: How can you do this to me? The sailor was saying things he was never meant to say. Ignoble things in wheedling, honeyed tones, fouled words not meant to issue from his lips until Doomsday, words such as men mutter in stinking lairs. And he was speaking proudly, for he believed in himself, was satisfied with the role of father he had stepped forward to accept.
He is satisfied. Noboru felt nauseous.

“I’m sure you all know where our duty lies. When a gear slips out of place it’s our 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.”

At that moment, the pool was terrifically deep. Deeper and deeper as watery blue darkness seeped up from the bottom. The knowledge, so certain it was sensuous, that nothing was there to support the body if one plunged in generated around the empty pool an unremitting tension. Gone now was the soft summer water that received the swimmer’s body and bore him lightly afloat, but the pool, like a monument to summer and to water, had endured, and it was dangerous, lethal.

“We must have blood! Human blood! If we don’t get it this empty world will go pale and shrivel up. We must drain that sailor’s fresh lifeblood and transfuse it to the dying universe, the dying sky, the dying forests, and the drawn, dying land.”

Gradually, as he talked to the boys, Ryuji had come to understand himself as Noboru imagined him.

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.

Still immersed in his dream, he drank down the tepid tea. It tasted bitter. Glory, as anyone knows, is bitter stuff.