The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea Essay

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Yukio Mishima’s The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea, is the story of three people: Fusako, a widow who owns her own luxury brand store, her son, thirteen-year old Noboru and a sailor Ryuji Tsukazaki. The novel examines the constantly evolving relationships among the three and explores their relations with ideas of glory, loyalty and even death. Many minor characters are also featured to complicate and characterize the protagonists. Mishima uses one character called Yoriko juxtaposed with the protagonist, Fusako to reveal conflicts that are not on the surface in order to comment on the dangers of westernization and modernity. Yoriko is introduced fairly early in the book as Fusako’s best customer, early- on establishing Fusako and Yoriko’s relationship as one of a seller and buyer. Yoriko, wearing a “huge sunflower as a hat” and obsessed with “winning a best- actress award” is initially portrayed as the epitome of westernization (Mishima 32). The juxtaposition of Yoriko and Fusako brings out a new side of Fusako. Before, Fusako used to be the exemplar of …show more content…

After the demilitarization and westernization of Japan after World War II, there is an absence of an emperor, which parallels with Fusako’s situation as there is an absence of a male figure in the form of a husband and a father for Noboru. The decline of male power is demonstrated between conflict between Yoriko and Fusako when Yoriko talks about how her ex-fiancé, “was planning to kick the rest of [her] family out as soon as [they] got married so he could sit around swilling beer while [she] supported [them]... That’s men for you” (124-125). The sluggish diction is used to represent males in the novel which demonstrates the dissipation of male figures in society and from Mishima’s point of view, the negative effects of this occurring as the result of

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