While Noboru wandered through private dreams Tsukazaki stood at Fusako’s side, and the heat of his body in the sultry chart room was beginning to oppress her: when the parasol she had leaned against a desk clattered suddenly to the floor, she felt as if she herself, fainting, had fallen.
—The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea by Yukio Mishima
He hadn’t been able to explain his ideas of glory and death, or the longing and the melancholy pent up in his chest, or the other dark passions choking in the ocean’s swell.
—The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea by Yukio Mishima
He remembered her asking: “Why haven’t you ever married?” And he remembered his simpering answer: “It’s not easy to find a woman who is willing to be a sailor’s wife.” What he had wanted to say was: “All the other officers have two or three children by now and they read letters from home over and over again, and look at pictures their kids have drawn of houses and the sun and flowers. Those men have thrown opportunity away—there’s no hope for them any more. I’ve never done much, but I’ve lived my whole life thinking of myself as the only real man. And if I’m right, then a limpid, lonely horn is going to trumpet through the dawn someday, and a turgid cloud laced with light will sweep down, and the poignant voice of glory will call for me from the distance—and I’ll have to jump out of bed and set out alone. That’s why I’ve never married. I’ve waited, and waited, and here I am past thirty.” But he hadn’t said anything like that; partly because he doubted a woman would understand. Nor had he mentioned his concept of ideal love: a man encounters the perfect woman only once in a lifetime and in every case death interposes—an unseen Pandarus—and lures them into the preordained embrace. This fantasy was probably a product of the hyperbole of popular songs. But over the years it had taken on substance in some recess of his mind and merged there with other things: the shrieking of a tidal wave, the ineluctable force of high tide, the avalanching break of surf upon a shoal. . . .
—The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea by Yukio Mishima
That morning, the boys had left the city with packed lunches and gone all the way to Yamauchi Pier in Kanagawa. For a while they had roamed around the railroad siding behind the sheds on the wharf, and then held the usual meeting to discuss the uselessness of Mankind, the insignificance of Life. They liked an insecure meeting place where intrusion was always a possibility.
—The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea by Yukio Mishima
They think danger means something physical, getting scratched and a little blood running and the newspapers making a big fuss. Well, that hasn’t got anything to do with it. Real danger is nothing more than just living. Of course, living is merely the chaos of existence, but more than that it’s a crazy mixed-up business of dismantling existence instant by instant to the point where the original chaos is restored, and taking strength from the uncertainty and the fear that chaos brings to re-create existence instant by instant.
—The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea by Yukio Mishima
Besides, he reasoned, getting mad would only look silly because they were practicing “absolute dispassion.”
—The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea by Yukio Mishima
As if staring into a deep well, Noboru peered after the kitten as it plummeted down the small hole of death. He sensed in the way he lowered his face to the corpse his own gallant tenderness, tenderness so clinical it was almost kind. Dull red blood oozed from the kitten’s nose and mouth, the twisted tongue was clamped against the palate. “C’mon up close where you can see. I’ll take it from here.” Unnoticed, the chief had put on a pair of rubber gloves that reached up to his elbows; now he bent over the corpse with a pair of gleaming scissors. Shining coolly through the gloom of the shed, the scissors were magnificent in their cold, intellectual dignity: Noboru couldn’t imagine a more appropriate weapon for the chief.
—The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea by Yukio Mishima
Seizing the kitten by the neck, the chief pierced the skin at the chest with the point of the blade and scissored a long smooth cut to the throat. Then he pushed the skin to the sides with both hands: the glossy layer of fat beneath was like a peeled spring onion. The skinned neck, draped gracefully on the floor, seemed to be wearing a cat mask. The cat was only an exterior, life had posed as a cat.
—The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea by Yukio Mishima
Noboru tried comparing the corpse confronting the world so nakedly with the unsurpassably naked figures of his mother and the sailor. But compared to this, they weren’t naked enough. They were still swaddled in skin. Even that marvelous horn and the great wide world whose expanse it had limned couldn’t possibly have penetrated so deeply as this . . . the pumping of the bared heart placed the peeled kitten in direct and tingling contact with the kernel of the world.
—The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea by Yukio Mishima
Noboru had scrubbed his hands, but what if there was blood somewhere else on his body or on his clothes? What if he reeked of dead kitten? What if his eyes betrayed him—like those of a criminal encountering an acquaintance just after the crime?
—The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea by Yukio Mishima
For Ryuji the kiss was death, the very death in love he always dreamed of.
—The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea by Yukio Mishima
Are you getting cold? . . . Are you getting cold? Ryuji asked again and again, and all the time he was directing another question to himself: Are you really going to give it up? The feeling of the sea, the dark, drunken feeling that unearthly rolling always brings? The thrill of saying goodbye? The sweet tears you weep for your song? Are you going to give up the life which has detached you from the world, kept you remote, impelled you toward the pinnacle of manliness? The secret yearning for death. The glory beyond and the death beyond. Everything was “beyond,” wrong or right, had always been “beyond.” Are you going to give that up? His heart in spasm because he was always in contact with the ocean’s dark swell and the lofty light from the edge of the clouds, twisting, withering until it clogged and then swelling up again, and he unable to distinguish the most exalted feelings from the meanest and that not mattering really since he could hold the sea responsible—are you going to give up that luminous freedom?
—The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea by Yukio Mishima
“There is no such thing as a good father because the role itself is bad. Strict fathers, soft fathers, nice moderate fathers—one’s as bad as another. They stand in the way of our progress while they try to burden us with their inferiority complexes, and their unrealized aspirations, and their resentments, and their ideals, and the weaknesses they’ve never told anyone about, and their sins, and their sweeter-than-honey dreams, and the maxims they’ve never had the courage to live by—they’d like to unload all that silly crap on us, all of it! Even the most neglectful fathers, like mine, are no different.
—The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea by Yukio Mishima