Noboru’s mother closed his bedroom door and locked it.
The novel opens with a mother putting her son to bed in an unwitting act of profound humiliation. That decision to lock her song inside his bedroom at night is the mechanism by which the series of events is powered. Eventually, this act will prove to be ironic foreshadowing for both parent and child.
At thirteen, Noboru was convinced of his own genius (each of the others in the gang felt the same way) and certain that life consisted of a few simple signals and decisions; that death took root at the moment of birth and man’s only recourse thereafter was to water and tend it; that propagation was a fiction; consequently, society was a fiction too: that fathers and teachers, by virtue of being fathers and teachers, were guilty of a grievous sin.
Although the narrative focuses on the boy’s relationship to his widowed mother and her sailor lover once the boy discovers a secret peephole through which he watches them at night, central to the plot is the group of friends with whom the boy hangs out. Around the same age as Noboru, the group’s leader has convinced them that because they geniuses, they are special and endowed with privileges, once of which is the hidden authority to permit the rest of society to do things, only a few of which are permissible to the group.
“I suppose the sea is permissible to a certain extent. As a matter of fact, it’s probably more permissible than any of the few other permissible things.”
The group of friends identify themselves to each other by a number rather than name. Noburu, for instance, is Number Three. The leader of the group, however, is referred to as The Chief. Noburu, who has mythologized his mother’s sailor level by this point aches for a career on the sea to be one of the “permissible” things which the geniuses permit not least because he dreams of escaping from the dreariness of his home and escaping to the sea himself.
“He betrayed number three. He became the worst thing on the face of this earth, a father.”
The betrayal here is the sailor’s decision to leave the life of a mariner behind him, marry Noboru’s mother and take over as manager of his mother’s clothing boutique. It need not even be said, of course, that in the eyes of the sinister coterie of teenage geniuses secretly running the world, such a thing cannot possibly be deemed permissible. And so the sailor must pay.
