The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea by Yukio Mishima Page A

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?
    And yet Ryuji had discovered on the return leg of his last voyage that he was tired, tired to death of the squalor and the boredom in a sailor’s life. He was convinced that he had tasted it all, even the lees, and he was glutted. What a fool he’d been! There was no glory to be found, not anywhere in the world. Not in the Northern Hemisphere. Not in the Southern Hemisphere. Not even beneath that star every sailor dreams about, the Southern Cross!
    Now they could make out the lumber yards beyond the canal: roosters had crowed at the sky until a coy blush spread across her face. Finally the mast lamps blinked out and ships withdrew like phantoms into the fog that shrouded the harbor. Then, as an angry red began to smolder along the edges of the sky, the space of park behind them unfurled into whitish emptiness and the skirts on the beacon beam fell away, leaving only glinting needlepoints of red and green light.
    It was very cold; leaning against the railing with their arms around each other, they stamped their feet.
    “It can’t be long now,” Fusako said, her voice rising above the chatter of small birds. The lipstick she had dashed on before they left the house, a spot of vivid red rising out of the whiteness of her chilled, drawn face, looked beautiful to Ryuji.
    A minute later, far to the right of the floating lumber and surprisingly high up, a gauzy red ring loomed in the slate-gray sky. Immediately the sun became a globe of pure red but still so weak they could look straight at it, a blood-red moon.
    “I know this will be a good year; it couldn’t be anything else with us here like this, watching the first sunrise together. And you know something? This is the first time I’ve ever seen the sunrise on New Year’s Day.” Fusako’s voice warped in the cold. Ryuji heard himself bellow in the resolute voice he used to shout orders into the wind on the winter deck: “Will you marry me?”
    “What?”
    Annoyed at having to repeat himself, he blurted things better left unsaid: “I’m asking you to marry me. I may be just a dumb sailor but I’ve never done anything I’m ashamed of. You may laugh when I say this, but I have nearly two million yen saved up—you can see my bankbook later. That’s everything I have to my name and I’m going to give it all to you whether you marry me or not.”
    His artless proposal touched the worldly lady more deeply than he knew. Overjoyed, Fusako began to cry.
    The sun was blazing now, too dazzlingly bright for Ryuji’s anxious eyes, and the whistle-wailing, gear-grinding cacophony of the harbor was surging toward full pitch. The horizon was misted over, the sun’s reflection spreading like a reddish haze over the surface of the water.
    “Yes—of course I will. But I think there are some problems we ought to discuss first. There’s Noboru, for example, and my work at the shop. Can I make just one condition? What you’ve just said, I mean—if you’re planning to leave again soon—it would be hard. . . .”
    “I won’t be sailing again for a while. As a matter of fact . . .” Ryuji faltered, and was silent.
    There wasn’t a single Japanese room in Fusako’s house; her mode of living was thoroughly Western except on New