Childhood, Compliance, and Conflict: The Characterization of Noboru in The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea Anonymous College

Yukio Mishima’s The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea follows the struggles of a young band of boys who strive to restore a sailor, Ryuji, to his former glory by taking his life and subjecting his remains to dissection. They became acquainted with the process by which they would come to achieve this task, following their brutal killing of a young cat. Reassured that there was ‘nothing to worry about,’ (Mishima 165) they believed the only discernable disparity between the dissection of a cat, a stray animal, and that of Ryuji, a grown man, lay in their physical size, as implied in their chief’s apathetic contention that ‘the job’s a little bigger this time’ (Mishima 165), preceding their commencement of this task. Though the execution of such absurd and extreme measures would advert to a sense of heightened loyalty and honor with which these boys must have preached and practiced the pillars of their nihilistic mindset, Mishima constantly attributes the protagonist of this novel, Noboru, with behavioral traits and characteristics which depict him as a boy whose actions and relations with his fellow Nihilist friends, in particular, the Chief, that question his adherence to this way of thought.

A scene of particular...