Yukio Mishima The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea (1963)
I picked this up some years ago, vaguely recalling that the bloke from Death in June was a fan - which seemed like a recommendation back then. Mishima was Japan's most celebrated author, or one of them. If low on chuckles, The Sailor gets off to an intriguing start, assuming here that this is mostly thanks to the author as much as the translator. A young boy discovers a peephole which allows him to spy upon his mother while she's on the job with a random sailor. I gather that the boy forms a cruel, elitist gang with others from his school in order to torture the sailor for reasons which may or may not have become clear had I finished the thing; but I got to the page where the kids torture and kill a kitten and found that I had thrown the book across the room, which hasn't happened since Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land. I can't deal with gratuitous animal torture because it upsets me, which I presume is the author's intent, and somehow it's always cats so it seems like nasty, lazy button pushing, a cheap effect; and the preamble about breaking the endless chain of society's loathsome taboos just means you're an arsehole, Yukio.
Godzilla aside, I don't have any particular investment or even necessarily any interest in Japanese tradition or culture, so unsmiling men frowning into the sunset while thinking really hard about honour doesn't do much for me in and of itself. Wikipedia claims Mishima was bullied at school for reading books, which is doubtless why Noboru in The Sailor seems to be one of those lone wolf preying on the sheeplike herd of weak, sentimental humanity types, although I could be wrong because, as I say, I didn't actually make it past the end of chapter five. Had I done so, perhaps I would have discovered that Noboru is to be pitied rather than admired, but I guess I'll never know. Have you ever noticed how the aforementioned lone wolves always seem to be overcompensating for failing in the Darwinian terms they themselves often claim to have embraced? Show me almost any scowling, black-clad poetry binging representative of the spiritual elite, and I'll show you someone who wouldn't last five fucking minutes down Catford high street on a Saturday night.
My theory is that had Mishima been born American, and a couple of decades later, his work would have been mostly published on Amazon CreateSpace as eBooks, and he'd be spinning scowling patriotic yarns about freedom fighters defending the last of the white race against Obama's NWO. Luckily, he wasn't, and so we get to view his elegantly composed mania through an Orientalist lens, essentially giving him the benefit of the doubt because each word is set carefully in place with much honour like in one of those Samurai rituals or summink; so we imagine we're watching Kurosawa when actually it's probably closer to that nebulous shit beloved of Hitler and his pals, the honour of suffering and other Death in June albums in the making. Almost anything can be made to appear philosophical when you transgress the limits of just how seriously you are prepared to take yourself.
I could be wrong, of course, given that I didn't finish the thing; but honestly, I couldn't give a shit.
I picked this up some years ago, vaguely recalling that the bloke from Death in June was a fan - which seemed like a recommendation back then. Mishima was Japan's most celebrated author, or one of them. If low on chuckles, The Sailor gets off to an intriguing start, assuming here that this is mostly thanks to the author as much as the translator. A young boy discovers a peephole which allows him to spy upon his mother while she's on the job with a random sailor. I gather that the boy forms a cruel, elitist gang with others from his school in order to torture the sailor for reasons which may or may not have become clear had I finished the thing; but I got to the page where the kids torture and kill a kitten and found that I had thrown the book across the room, which hasn't happened since Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land. I can't deal with gratuitous animal torture because it upsets me, which I presume is the author's intent, and somehow it's always cats so it seems like nasty, lazy button pushing, a cheap effect; and the preamble about breaking the endless chain of society's loathsome taboos just means you're an arsehole, Yukio.
Godzilla aside, I don't have any particular investment or even necessarily any interest in Japanese tradition or culture, so unsmiling men frowning into the sunset while thinking really hard about honour doesn't do much for me in and of itself. Wikipedia claims Mishima was bullied at school for reading books, which is doubtless why Noboru in The Sailor seems to be one of those lone wolf preying on the sheeplike herd of weak, sentimental humanity types, although I could be wrong because, as I say, I didn't actually make it past the end of chapter five. Had I done so, perhaps I would have discovered that Noboru is to be pitied rather than admired, but I guess I'll never know. Have you ever noticed how the aforementioned lone wolves always seem to be overcompensating for failing in the Darwinian terms they themselves often claim to have embraced? Show me almost any scowling, black-clad poetry binging representative of the spiritual elite, and I'll show you someone who wouldn't last five fucking minutes down Catford high street on a Saturday night.
My theory is that had Mishima been born American, and a couple of decades later, his work would have been mostly published on Amazon CreateSpace as eBooks, and he'd be spinning scowling patriotic yarns about freedom fighters defending the last of the white race against Obama's NWO. Luckily, he wasn't, and so we get to view his elegantly composed mania through an Orientalist lens, essentially giving him the benefit of the doubt because each word is set carefully in place with much honour like in one of those Samurai rituals or summink; so we imagine we're watching Kurosawa when actually it's probably closer to that nebulous shit beloved of Hitler and his pals, the honour of suffering and other Death in June albums in the making. Almost anything can be made to appear philosophical when you transgress the limits of just how seriously you are prepared to take yourself.
I could be wrong, of course, given that I didn't finish the thing; but honestly, I couldn't give a shit.
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