The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea: An Exploration of Purpose and Masculinity

This post contains major spoilers for The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea by Yukio Mishima. That being said, the plot is simple and secondary to the themes and symbols. Continue at your own discretion.

What does it mean to strive for glory, for greatness? What passions lie in the hearts of men as they choose between the promise of the Grand Cause and the comfort of the hearth? Yukio Mishima's The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea is a short book that puts us right in the middle of this conflict between two polar opposite interpretations of masculinity, and in doing so, thrusts us into an exhibition of modern life as a whole. Sailor intimately handles multiple difficult themes in a nuanced and elegant way, which is a spectacular achievement considering its short page count. This post isn't going to go into an in-depth analysis of the book, but rather, discuss some of its most thought-provoking ideas, the ones that keep running through my mind.

The Crisis of Purpose

I don't think it would be controversial for me to say that one of the greatest struggles of humanity has been the search for a purpose to one's life. This topic hardly comes up in conversations, perhaps as a way to suppress some form of existential dread. Throughout history, humanity has built up various systems to help itself cope with the base nihilism arising from simple self-reflection, such as religion, traditions, and interlocking webs of kinship. With religiosity at an all time low, traditions being oftentimes shunned, and loneliness ever rising, the modernism brought by the interplay between liberal and socialist ideas has cast away these traditional systems of purpose. Conservatives have been gallant in their fight to keep existing traditions, and occasionally, revert to old ones, and oftentimes they are a tempering force against the ravages of modernity. Meanwhile, fascists and other radical groups have taken these ideas to the extreme, resulting in unparalleled amounts of suffering.

Mishima, in Sailor, focuses on this loss of purpose, zooming into the loss of Japanese tradition and the acceptance of modern Western ideas. The sea is one of the most commonly occurring symbols in Sailor, with its meaning changing based on the context it was brought up in. In many cases, it refers to the Grand Cause, that great purpose in life worth dying for. Ryuji, the sailor in question, started sailing in order to fulfill this Grand Cause, whatever it may be. Fusako, with her lifestyle, coastal life, and store selling foreign objects, represents Western-style modernization, and it was Ryuji's love for Fusako that finally caused him to abandon the Grand Cause and decide on settling down.

And who can blame him?

With Fusako representing the modern life with all of its conveniences, the sea, which Ryuji rejected, can also represent the traditional life, with its beauty, chaos, and utter lack of mercy. Considering Mishima's background (more on that later), it is clear that he portrays Ryuji as having made a mistake when abandoning the sea, but the representation of his inner conflict is fair and complex; the sea is not made to look safe or inviting, just mesmerizing. After storms in the Caribbean and visiting various ports, Ryuji, emblematic of post-War Japan, made the decision to modernize in the Western style, with its acceptance of capitalism, the nuclear family, and internationalization. In doing so, he has rejected the heroism characteristic of past eras, the Bushido Mishima cares so deeply about. He might have settled down, but at the end of the book, he encounters a deep sense of regret:

"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.

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.

This regret grows from the deep roots of an irrational belief: that there is something else out there, somewhere in the sea, worth dying for. There is some source of glory that cannot be fully understood, and yet can be absolutely realized as a purpose of life. Mishima reckons with the irrationality of tradition and the values of the past, and finally rejects this rationalism through Ryuji's final epiphany. Glory, and the need to die well, does not make sense, and yet this is, according to Mishima, the best medicine for our existential dread, in line with many of those systems of purpose we have built up over millennia.

The Sailor Who Fell From Grace with the Sea is thus as prescriptive as it is descriptive, and I can't say that I fully agree with both the description and its prescription. There are systemic problems with modern society that have indeed arisen from the rejection of tradition and related support systems, but the reversion to the old ways is insufficient. The world has progressed greatly in various aspects since the Enlightenment due to modernist perspectives on science and the unleashing of free enterprise. With the state of modern culture and the variety of all of society's constituents, merely being reactionary is insufficient. The nihilism that has gripped large portions of society isn't a smudge that can be painted over with the broad strokes of traditionalism, although it would be wise to keep that one color in mind when maintaining the canvas of society.

The Crisis of Masculinity

What is masculinity? The Cambridge dictionary defines it as "the characteristics that are traditionally thought to be typical of or suitable for men", a concise definition that captures masculinity's relationship with gender and culture. Masculinity, as a cultural artifact, changes throughout the generations. It can be argued that this change arises from a constant crisis of masculinity, that need to conform to established masculine traits in society that manifests itself in every culture in every time period.

Appealing to our most rudimentary biological instinct, most men want to fulfill the male archetype, which has traditionally been associated with heroism, stoicism, and excellence. One notable example of the former is the archetypal Roman citizen, who is both soldier and farmer, exemplified in its most famous form by the legend of Cincinnatus. This idea of a "protector/provider instinct" is a quintessential part of our understanding of masculinity, and in Soldier, it manifests itself nicely in Ryuji finally taking up these roles in the family.

However, this means that Ryuji must be rejecting some other notion of masculinity. Mishima portrays the sea, the Grand Cause, as something truly heroic. This is an alternative perspective on heroism, excellence, and masculinity as a whole; not being tied up in what makes us mediocre in order to strive for what can possibly make us great. The isolation and hardship of the sea strengthened Ryuji, and made him stoic, and giving it all up made him, in the eyes of his soon-to-be-stepson Noboru, soft and weak.

Why does Mishima reject the social approach to masculinity for the individual approach? Becoming a good father, husband, or son is surely masculine enough?

As a man, my take is that these two competing visions of masculinity aren’t black-and-white or mutually exclusive. A man striving to be masculine chooses a point on these orthogonal axes, with some level of compromise between the two. One of my favorite aspects of Sailor is that, despite Mishima's clear preference against one of of these visions, he also considers what the reaction to Western modernism might look that, and the flaws of this reactionary masculinity are highlighted in the perspectives of the character Noboru.

Noboru is part of a group of 13-year-olds who reject the conventions of adulthood. To them, society, with all of its arbitrary morality, is a distraction. Their usual meetings discuss "the uselessness of Mankind, the insignificance of Life". While the sea might be a worthy goal in some limited capacity, only in death does true beauty arise, and only death can redeem the fallen Ryuji, the sailor who fell from grace with the sea. Noboru represents another generation with a crisis of masculinity, except here, there is an over-correction that associates masculinity with all of its traditionally worst aspects: aggression, callousness, and isolation. As the leader of the group said to Noboru:

"Don't you realize there is no such thing as a hero in this world?"

We see echoes of this in modern day, with hyper-masculine "alpha male" influencers who extol the "virtues" of hustle culture and the "red pill" while rejecting the "vices" of long-term relationships and talking about your feelings. In this manosphere, masculinity takes on a rigid definition, one detached from inter-personal relationships, one that rejects true tradition and instead substitutes it with a tradition-adjacent aesthetics or some form of master morality (in the Nietzschean sense, in contrast with slave morality). This is most obvious when many of Noboru's complains about Ryuji written in his journal deal with the aesthetic:

CHARGES AGAINST RYUJI TSUKAZAKI
ONE: smiling at me in a cowardly, ingratiating way when I met him this noon.
TWO: wearing a dripping-wet shirt and explaining that he had taken a shower in the fountain at the path - just like an old bum.
THREE: deciding arbitrarily to spend the night out with Mother, thereby placing me in an awfully isolated position

(N.B.: After some thinking, he erased the third count for not being aesthetic.)

Noboru is emblematic of contemporary edgy teenagers who, in their innocence and obliviousness, reject all that they cannot understand. I have come across analyses that suggest that Noboru is a traditionalist who rejects Western modernism, but I feel that this doesn't accurately reflect the complexity of his relationship with tradition and masculinity; he cannot be a traditionalist if he rejects the institutions holding tradition in place. His idea of masculinity is a reactionary one that has a character distinct from both Grand Cause masculinity and Protector/Provider masculinity, and this third path (some sort of aesthetic masculinity) is merely more intertwined with the former than with the latter.

So where does that leave us?

I doubt that Mishima was able to convince many people on why Grand Cause masculinity is the ideal path for a man, but it's interesting to me how Mishima represented masculinity, with all of its overlooked complexity, in a short book with only two male characters.

The Art and the Artist

I think reading The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea without knowing much about the author and his life will result in a more superficial experience. Mishima was a hyper-traditionalist who eventually performed seppuku after a failed coup in which he tried to restore the divinity of the Emperor and repeal the anti-war article of the post-War constitution. His life is complex, and many of his experiences are reflected in the themes of his books.

With this in mind, it would be tempting for those who find his viewpoints detestable to detach the art from the artist, and appreciate the art by itself. However, it is when viewed with the artist's life in context that the themes come to life. Knowing that Mishima killed himself in service of his Grand Cause shows that he was no hypocrite; the book is an honest manifesto of what he believed in. I would reckon most people would not agree with his life or the message of Sailor, but that doesn't stop Sailor from being a beautifully written novella covering overlooked themes and ideas that we are forced to consider if we want to understand the crisis of masculinity and the role of systems of purpose. Mishima, through his life, reifies the abstract ideas of the book.

There is not much point in avoiding reading Sailor just because you disagree with Mishima.

My goal for the year is to read more classic books, and this seemed like a short enough read to start off the year with. What I didn't expect was how this book was able to convey such density of meaning, while also being beautiful to read. The prose in this book is excellent, and it feels as if each sentence has multiple layers of meaning to unpack. After I was done reading the book, I spent a long while thinking about the ideas shared in the book, and this thinking culminated in me writing this breakdown of the more macro ideas of the book I thought are worth sharing.

This is very much unlike my usual essays, but I did enjoy writing this. Thanks for sticking to the end, and I hope my perspectives were useful in your understanding of the book. If you haven't read it yet, I hope you pick it up!