East Asian Literary Fiction

The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea

by Yukio Mishima

A sailor falls in love with a widow, and her son's secret gang of thirteen-year-old boys watches with cold contempt. Mishima dissects adolescent nihilism and the adult world's sentimental compromises with surgical precision: the boys have trained themselves in what they call objectivity, a brutal philosophy that rejects emotion and pity. When the romance threatens their vision of purity, they prepare to act. Spare, unsettling, and merciless.

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