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The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea

Part of Vintage International

Author Yukio Mishima
Translated by John Nathan
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Paperback
$17.00 US
Knopf | Vintage
On sale May 31, 1994 | 192 Pages | 9780679750154
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Mishima tells of a band of savage thirteen-year-old boys who reject the adult world as illusory, hypocritical, and sentimental, and train themselves in a brutal callousness they call "objectivity." When the mother of one of the boys begins an affair with a ship's officer, he and his friends idealize the man at first' but it is not long before they conclude that he is in fact soft and romantic. They regard their disappointment in him as an act of betrayal on his part, and react violently.

Translated from the Japanese by John Nathan.

“Brilliant in the conciseness of its narrative.” —The Nation
 
“A major work of art.” —Time
 
“Mishima is like Stendhal in his precise psychological analyses, like Dostoevsky in his explorations of darkly destructive personalities.” —Christian Science Monitor
Yukio Mishima was born in Tokyo in 1925. He graduated from Tokyo Imperial University’s School of Jurisprudence in 1947. His first published book, The Forest in Full Bloom, appeared in 1944, and he established himself as a major author with Confessions of a Mask (1949). From then until his death, he continued to publish novels, short stories, and plays each year. His crowning achievement, The Sea of Fertility tetralogy—which contains the novels Spring Snow (1969), Runaway Horses (1969), The Temple of Dawn (1970), and The Decay of the Angel (1971)—is considered one of the definitive works of twentieth-century Japanese fiction. In 1970, at the age of forty-five and the day after completing the last novel in the Fertility series, Mishima committed seppuku (ritual suicide)—a spectacular death that attracted worldwide attention. View titles by Yukio Mishima

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Mishima tells of a band of savage thirteen-year-old boys who reject the adult world as illusory, hypocritical, and sentimental, and train themselves in a brutal callousness they call "objectivity." When the mother of one of the boys begins an affair with a ship's officer, he and his friends idealize the man at first' but it is not long before they conclude that he is in fact soft and romantic. They regard their disappointment in him as an act of betrayal on his part, and react violently.

Translated from the Japanese by John Nathan.

“Brilliant in the conciseness of its narrative.” —The Nation
 
“A major work of art.” —Time
 
“Mishima is like Stendhal in his precise psychological analyses, like Dostoevsky in his explorations of darkly destructive personalities.” —Christian Science Monitor

Author

Yukio Mishima was born in Tokyo in 1925. He graduated from Tokyo Imperial University’s School of Jurisprudence in 1947. His first published book, The Forest in Full Bloom, appeared in 1944, and he established himself as a major author with Confessions of a Mask (1949). From then until his death, he continued to publish novels, short stories, and plays each year. His crowning achievement, The Sea of Fertility tetralogy—which contains the novels Spring Snow (1969), Runaway Horses (1969), The Temple of Dawn (1970), and The Decay of the Angel (1971)—is considered one of the definitive works of twentieth-century Japanese fiction. In 1970, at the age of forty-five and the day after completing the last novel in the Fertility series, Mishima committed seppuku (ritual suicide)—a spectacular death that attracted worldwide attention. View titles by Yukio Mishima

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