The sailor who fell from grace with the sea by Yukio Mishima

Book set in Yokohama, Japan. Reviewed on 2019/04: https://www.instagram.com/p/BwrpuruHQI0/

What I love about #mishima is his precision and obsession in shedding light on those corners of ours which we would have preferred forgotten or ignored. His prose is not asphyxiating or oppressive. Quite the contrary! #yukiomishima , like a good movie, wants to entice us, and hook us up from the beginning. You read and read and burn yourself deeper until you are completely cornered in a story full of the most basic and most horrible elements of our human existence. In #thesailorwhofellfromgracewiththeseait’s all about a #childmotherrelationship gone wrong. But where/when did it all go wrong? At the end you can’t but wonder that there is no #lossofinnocence because innocence was never there to begin with. And more than clues to decipher and questions to elucidate, I believe Mishima is striving at describing just a possibility. We are not fully one thing or another: good versus bad in a very defined and categorized way. With these stories, Mishima wants us to see the spectrum of all our #humanemotions including those we decide to shun, ignore and suppress, those we consider despicable, monstrous and heinous. We carry them around with us. We are all capable of them including children. They come embedded in the package since our conceptions. So what to do about it then? #highlyrecommended#japaneseliterature #vintage#vintagebooks #yokohama #sailor#oedipus #午後の曳航 #Gogonoeiko#三島由紀夫 #三島 #横浜 #port#theverybest