The connection between glory and death Anonymous 12th Grade

The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea aroused a lot of controversy in the world's literary society. As a classic example of Yukio Mishima's later works, it combined themes and motifs that were borderline acceptable and unusual for the period, such as child violence, exaltation of death and scenes of sexual intercourse. Celeste Heiter described the novel as ‘a study in contrast: summer and winter, land and sea, companionship and isolation, wanderlust and domestication, glory and nihilism’[1]. The description given by Heiter is applicable as Mishima does introduce ideas are binary opposites. For instance, the main focus of the novel is the connection between glory, usually connoted with longevity, and a completely opposite concept of death. This connection is elusive and vague at first, but becomes more conspicuous as the novel progresses.

Intrinsic with Mishima’s style, he masterfully lays out various aspects of rapidly changing oriental life under the veil of the rather ordinary love story of Fusako and Ryuji — a widowed businesswoman and a well-traveled sailor. Although the main accent is put on romantic relations between these two, this relationship is mostly used as an enigmatic tool and is not as fundamental for the...