Why The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea By Yukio Mishima

“Young people get the foolish idea that what is new for them must be new for everybody else too. No matter how unconventional they get, they're just repeating what others before them have done.” As says the author of The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea, Yukio Mishima. To better understand the novel and its characters we must first have a greater understanding of it’s author. To quote: “In his autobiographical novel Confessions of a Mask, Mishima revealed that he was a man incapable of feeling passion or even feeling alive unless he was embroiled in sadomasochistic fantasy, dripping with blood and death. He said that he had written the book to channel his own homicidal instincts…”

Mishima was a man of great passion, and
Barely any human, much less a thirteen year old would have any pride in such a thing. To practice and show their dispassion and inhumanity, they practice killing a cat. When it was Noboru’s turn to, dehumanize himself he first “checks himself for pity” (57). Then “hurled again and again on the log”(58). they believed that only murder can“fill the the worlds great hollows”(57) and by doing so “they would achieve real power over existence”(57). They practise complete dispassion, however, they are “overjoyed at the spattered blood on the log” after having killed the kitten. This desire they have to destroy their humanity to right the society and have power is a very unstable mental quality within the boys. On the contrary, this can be seen as their beliefs in the samurai and feudalist code, where they resort to cruelty to separate themselves from the taboos of the current societal norms. However this is still a quite psychotic trait in the sense that no one ever taught them the old Japanese culture nor have they ever witnessed it first hand yet they have clung to
I believe that this is what the gang has thought of and want to go beyond todays societal rules and live freely without the limitations that society puts upon them. That is why they commit such atrocious things, because they want to go against what is right and what is wrong within the current society. Their practices of violence and dispassion are meant to save them from the repressions of society. The Chief shares his views of life in that "real danger is nothing more than just living. Of course, living is merely the chaos of existence”(51). In a sense despite their age, these precocious are trying to reach the real life and meaning of living aside from the symbolic straightforward life everyone else is living. Therefore for them death is a very great thing that is a fitting end to mans life, exactly the same to the traditional Japanese belief. In part 2 chapter 6 the chief reminds Noboru that there is only on thing to make Ryuji a hero again, his death, the chief and the boys agree that is “for his own good”(163). This is a very psychotic belief to murder in order to better someone so that they do not further disgrace themselves in your