The Sailor who Fell from Grace with the Sea

About

A widowed mother falls in love with a sailor, and her thirteen-year-old son watches through a peephole in the wall. The boy belongs to a gang of adolescents who have rejected the adult world as sentimental and false. They have trained themselves to feel nothing — and when the sailor threatens to become an ordinary, domesticated man by marrying the boy's mother, the gang decides that something must be done. Yukio Mishima's novel is a suspenseful, lyrical study of adolescent ideology taken to its logical extreme. The boys' philosophy is repulsive and internally consistent, and Mishima presents it without flinching. A novel about the moment when purity of belief becomes indistinguishable from cruelty — told with the precision of someone who understood the attraction of both.

Awards

• ★Shinchosha Prize(1963 - Winner)