Symbolism in The Sailor Who Fell

from Grace with the Sea

An Analysis
 Thesis
• In his novel The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with
the Sea, Yukio Mishima integrates a complex
system of symbols to amplify the ideas of
freedom, responsibility, and perspective.
• Specifically, the land, the sea and the sound of a
ship horn come to represent Mishima’s
pessimistic and solipsistic view of existence and
his belief that freedom is destroyed by social
convention.
 Defining Terms
• Solipsism as the philosophical claim that knowledge of
anything outside of one’s own mind is unsure. Hence, a
truly “objective” truth or reality is impossible to know
because reality is filtered through our individual
perceptions; hence, if a tree falls in a forest and there is
nobody there to hear it, does it make a sound?
• This idea is reflected through the outlook of the boys and
their arguments against Ryuji specifically, and fathers in
general.
• Objectivism, in opposition to solipsism, holds that there is
knowable reality outside of human consciousness; the
world would continue to exist should we not exist in it.
 Sea vs. Land
• The most overtly powerful symbols in the text
are the sea and land.
• Through his characterization of Ryuji, Mishima
suggests that the sea represents the limitless
possibility of idealism and dreams.
• This contrasts directly with Fusako and the
land on which she lives. The land comes to
represent reality, compromise and
practicality.
 An Ocean of Possibility
• After spending his first night with Fusako,
Ryuji finds himself contemplating his life as a
sailor where he could “feel his glory knifing
towards him like a shark from some great
distance in the darkly heaping sea, see it
almost, like the noctilucae that fire the water,
surging in to flood him with light and cast the
silhouette of his heroic figure against the brink
of man’s world” (17).
 Noctilucae
• In this passage Mishima uses the sea as a
representation of the ideal world – the world
unbound by the practical necessities of the
land. Unmarried, Ryuji is free to roam the
earth in search of his “great” destiny. In part
this reflects the samurai code of aspiration
towards honor and greatness. The image of
the silhouette derives from the Greek
philosopher Plato’s ‘theory of forms’.
 Ocean and Love
• Ryuji even goes so far as to claim that the sea is
representative of a woman’s body. Although he
shies from discussing the sea with Fusako, Ryuji
wishes he had told her that “To a man locked up
in a steel ship all the time, the sea is too much like
a woman. Things like her lulls and storms, or her
caprice, or the beauty of her breast reflecting the
setting sun, are all obvious (41).
 Sea of Love
• More importantly, again we see the
representation of an unattainable goal or
perfect form.
• If anything, Ryuji is a misguided idealist
forever searching for the perfect realm, be it
his greatness as a hero or the woman whom
he will marry.
• In the real world, these do not exist except in
flashes or moments.
 Wed by Death
• Even Ryuji’s concept of meeting a woman is
idealized, as considers himself “a paragon of
manliness and she the consummate woman;
and from the opposite corners of the earth
they came together in a chance encounter,
and death wed them” (39). This foreshadows,
almost too clearly, the novel’s disturbing end
as his decision to give up the sea ultimately
leads to his murder at the hands of the boys.
 Peephole
• The narrowness and limited nature of humans’ perspective is another
major theme of the novel; this is represented by the peephole.
• We are introduced to this notion early in the text as Noboru witnesses his
mother and Ryuji making love.
• He sees this event through the narrow view of a peephole: “The night was
humid. The space in side the chest was so stuffy, he could scarcely
breathe.”
• This “stuffy” breathless space becomes symbolic of the narrow and limited
view with which Noboru sees the world. Like Ryuji, he believes that there
is a perfect form or state of being.
• Later, when Noboru is told by the housekeeper that his mother is not
coming home so that she can spend her last night with Ryuji before he
sets sail, he crawls into his cubby and “pressed his eye to the peephole”
where he sees “the room as a whole, feverish with a vestige of the noon
heat, was as black as the inside of a large coffin, everywhere a shade of
darkness, and alive with jostling particles of something Noboru had never
seen, the blackest thing in all the world” (82).
 Perspective
• This ‘tunneling’ effect is evident again when
Fusako first meets Ryuji on the deck of his ship as
he gives her and Noboru a tour. She comments
on his eyes which are “deep-set in their
disgruntled swarthy face,” and which “sought her
out as though she were a tiny spot on the horizon,
the first sign of a distant ship” (29).
• Clearly, Ryuji’s preoccupation with himself and his
own glory is a significant character flaw; one, in
fact, that is at least partly responsible for his own
inability to see the boys’ plot to kill him.
 Tunnel Vision
• Ryuji’s narcissism is evident at several points in the text,
but nowhere more emphatically than in his recollection
of his conversation with Fusako on the evening leading
up to their first sexual encounter:
• “…I’ve lived my whole life thinking of myself as the only
real man…”
• “Exaltation swelled Ryuji’s voiced when he touched on
the misery of his life, and while he was recalling the total
in his bankbook he couldn’t help digressing from the
sea’s power and benevolence, which was the story he
had long to tell, in order to boast about his own prowess
like a very ordinary man indeed. It was just another
particular aspect of his vanity” (41).
 The Fall
• In this last passage we see a marked contrast between
the real worlds of “bankbooks” and practical
responsibility of making money and a living contrasted
with the “sea’s power and benevolence”.
• One can conclude that Mishima has set up a dialectic
in which the land and its requirements of function,
civics and rules destroys the visionary dreamer of the
sailor.
• When Ryuji gives up his life as a sailor and thus his
dreams of greatness, he “falls from grace” and is
necessarily killed for this sin.
 The Horn
• A third symbol that is present in the text is the
deliberate and layered reference to the sound of a
ship’s horn.
• On one level the horn is the sensory phenomenon that
links the world of ideals to the world of reality. As
Noboru witnesses Ryuji and his mother having sex,
“the full long wail of a ship’s horn surged through the
open window and flooded the dim room – a cry of
boundless, dark demanding greif; pitch-black and
glabrous as a whale’s back and burdened with all the
passions of the tides, the memory of voyages beyond
counting, the joys , the humiliations: the sea was
screaming” (12).
 The Horn
• In this passage, the horn represents the penis. For
Noboru, who is maturing and coming into
manhood, “in that instant everything packed away
inside Noboru’s breast since the first day of his life
was released and consummated [italics
mine]…then, at the signal from the horn, the
parts merged into a perfect whole…the universal
order at least achieved, thanks to the sudden,
screaming horn, had revealed an ineluctable circle
of life –the cards had paired: Noboru and mother
– mother and man- man and sea- sea and
Noboru…(13).
 The Horn
• The impression on the young boy of this moment is
significant: “he was choked, wet, ecstatic. Certain he
had watched a tangle of thread unravel to trace a
hallowed figure. And it would have to be protected:
for all he knew, he was its thirteen-year-old creator”
(13).
• As the penis is one of the two organs of creation, it is
interesting that Noboru sees himself as the “creator”
of the moment. His idealized view of Ryuji and of
masculinity is created in this moment and it is no
accident that the blasting of a horn announces its
significance.
 The Horn
• A second layer of representation is applied to the horn later
in the after Noboru accidentally runs into Ryuji in the town
square. They return home together and as Noboru dozes
off to sleep sitting next the sailor, he considers “the
glistening figures of absolute reality twice glimpsed since
the night before during lapses in the unmoving, tedious,
barren world…He saw them as marvelous gold
embroideries leaping off the flat black fabric: the naked
sailor twisting in the moonlight to confront a horn – the
kitten’s death mask, grave and fang-bared-it’s ruby
heart…gorgeous entities all and absolutely authentic: then
Ryuji too was an authentic hero…all incidents on the sea,
in the sea, under the sea – Noboru felt himself drowning in
sleep.
 The Horn
• In this passage, Noboru has linked, through
the image of the horn, the sexual encounter
with the evisceration of the kitten. In the
young boy’s eyes, both moments offer a
glimpse into the ideal world – a world
concealed by the ordinary, mundane and
artificial constructs of society.
 The Horn
• Mishima again uses the horn to represent the destructive
force of compromise and marriage.
• After Fusako and Ryuji kiss before he returns to his duties
as a sailor. The kiss affects the two greatly, plunging them
“into private pools of sensation…His tight furious embrace
told her how desperately he wanted to affirm that she was
real and really with him.” However, for Ryuji “the kiss was
death, the very death in love he always dreamed of…He
was perfectly aware that he would leave her in a day, yet
he was ready to die happily for her sake. Death roused
inside him, stirred. Then the pale tremor of a ship’s horn
floated in from the direction of the Central Pier and settled
over the garden.
 The Horn of Death
• Mishima here develops yet another layer of
symbolism: love destroys the imagination and
freedom. The sound of the horn “would never
have registered in Ryuji’s ear if he hadn’t been
a sailor. Funny time of night for a freighter to
be pulling out-I wonder how they got her
loaded so fast. The thought broke the spell of
the kiss; he opened his eyes. And he could
feel the horn probing deep inside him, rousing
his passion for the Grand Cause.
 Symbolism
• In his novel Mishima uses the sea and land, a peephole
and the sound of a ship’s horn to convey some of the
major themes in the text.
• The sea represents the unattainable ideals of destiny
and honor. The land comes to symbolize the
destructive forces of habit and custom.
• The peephole becomes a powerful device expressing
the narrowing perspectives of the novel’s characters.
• Finally, the sound of a ship’s horn represents the
bridge between the world of ideals and the world of
reality. It is a bridge that ultimately destroys Noboru’s
love of his mother and Ryuji’s dreams of greatness.
 Works Cited
Mishima, Yukio. The Sailor Who Fell from Grace
with the Sea. Random House: New York, 1993.