The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea

This is the first novel by the late Japanese author, Yukio Mishima, that I've ever read. And this will not be the last. I liked the the prose he used in this novel. Reading The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea was like entering a theater without knowing what the film showing would be like, and leaving it surprised and unbelieving with how the film ended. Not that it's bad. As to how the author wrote it, the novel is excellent, although quite disturbing. I felt like the novel was merely an examination of (or a close look on) the dynamics of relationships in a middle-class, fatherless Japanese when a stranger, a sailor, suddenly entered their life. But I was wrong. The ending almost made me fall off the couch.

{20 December 2009}