This is a book that is in no way easy to digest. Its prose, however, is too lyrical for its content. In it, we find a post-war Japanese setting, where a man, Ryuji, has decided to settle for a woman he just met and fell for. This man is a sailor, who from an early age thought he was destined for glory, for something that is reserved to no ordinary man.
The woman he fell for, Fusako, is a widow who works for a company that deals luxury goods. Fusako, we come to know, is constantly watching herself naked in the mirror, inspecting herself, so as to know who she is, what does she ought to do and who does she have to become.
We get to know this about Fusako due to a hole in the wall, through which her son, Noboru, glances the sight of her. Noboru is a kid who has seen it all, and who, at first, is in awe of the sailor that his mom just met. He is the masculine figure that could be his role model.
These three characters, I believe, represent the different approaches to the westernization of Japan in Mishima’s eyes. The man is someone who is willing to give up the traditional way of life as a sailor and settle for something that brings him no honour. The mom is at the juncture in which she truly does not what is she supposed to do: continue with tradition or start from scratch, embracing the new values and culture. We know what she is leaning to as no japanese items are to be found in her house. Finally, Noboru is the one who resembles most of Mishima’s own ideas: the westernization of Japanese culture will wreak havoc in everyone’s lives.
Yet Noboru is not someone who so clearly denounces that westernization is to be condemned. He, and his gang, are already poisioned by this influence. They are a group of kids who so fervently want to deny sentimentality, whose fathers are the worst thing that could have happened to them.
An ambivalence is seen in the kids for they deem much of the traditional japanese way of life praisable, but they also feel one of the key elements of western thought, especially towards the mid twentieth century: western thinkers are so eager to untangle every single one of the issues to its bare bones, that Noboru and friends do precisely this when they kill the cat.
They try no to be particular humans, as we clearly understand when they refer to eachothers by their numbers. They are trying to be objective, minimising the feelings and sentimientality to a minimum. This objectivity, so searched and fought for by the west, brings a nothingness that kills the tradition.
Freud claimed that the Father, as the author of the Law (i.e. the prohibition of incest), is necessarily tied to death: in the primitive horde, the sons killed the father and this is what instaured the Law. The symbolic father, as in the that which represents that Law, is the dead Father.
Yet this Father, Lacan claims, is always a symbolic one. If there is no real father, then a symbol will occupy the place of the father. Noboru’s father had been dead for five years when Ryuji came into his life. He will occupy the place of Father, and Noboru and his friends are against this. They will kill the new Father.
The killing of the original Father (in the primitive horde) happens only because the sons were denied the satisfaction of the sexual desires. This new Father (i.e. the one who tacitly embraces western tradition) is not killed for the same reason. The group of kids have trained themselves to not have sexual drives by exposing themselves to all kinds of pornography.
These kids want to be desire-less. And so their killing seems bleak, empty and unwarranted. They are doing it for no ulterior motive. The adoption of western values, Mishima seems to hint, can only end in the destruction of the traditional values of Japan. Knowing his life, it seems that Mishima foreshadowed the end of with this work, for even when fighting for the tradition he so feverishly believed in, he himself had already been poisoned (in his own ideals) by the western tradition.
Mishima, Y. (2019 [1965]). The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea. Vintage.