The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea by Yukio Mishima
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I do not understand this book. A sailor comes home on leave. He falls in love with a lady. The lady’s son watches them being intimate through a hole in the wall. The son and his friends kill a cat. The sailor leaves again, then comes back.
And then, when the sailor decides to stay home with his beloved, the son and his friends murder him.
What?
Although, take a peek at the author’s life story and it makes a bit more sense. But raises another question.
This guy was a finalist for the 1963 Nobel Prize for Literature? In the year this novel came out?
I’m going to be thinking about this novel for a long time. Because I understand the weirdest, most experimental American novel more than I understand this extremely realist Japanese novel from the 60s. There must be allegorical elements I don’t have the context to grasp.