Read Online The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea by Yukio Mishima - Free Book Online

stood at the anchor davit, and the rankling fall of the barometer that warned of an approaching typhoon: he was sensible again of the sea’s nightmarish power working endlessly on his moods, his passions.
    Noboru, just as he had seen storm billows a minute before, beheld one by one in the sailor’s eyes the phantoms he had summoned. Surrounded by visions of distant lands and by white-paint nautical jargon, he was being swept away to the Gulf of Mexico, the Indian Ocean, the Persian Gulf. And the journey was made possible by this authentic Second Mate. Here at last was the medium without which his imagination had been helpless. How long he had waited for it!
    Rapturous, Noboru shut his eyes tight.
    The two-horsepower motor in the air conditioner whispered to the room. It was perfectly cool now, and Ryuji’s shirt had dried. He clasped his rough hands behind his head: the ridges in the finely laced rattan nestled coolly against his fingers.
    His eyes roved the dim room and he marveled at the golden clock enthroned on the mantel, the cut-glass chandelier depending from the ceiling, the graceful jade vases poised precariously on open shelves: all delicate, all absolutely still. He wondered what subtle providence kept the room from rocking. Until a day before, the objects here had meant nothing to him, and in a day he would be gone; yet, for the moment, they were connected. The link was a glance met by a woman’s eyes, a signal emanating from deep in the flesh, the brute power of his own manhood; and to know this filled him with a sense of mystery, as when he sighted an unknown vessel on the open sea. Though his own flesh had fashioned the bond, its enormous unreality with respect to this room made him tremble.
    What am I supposed to be doing here on a summer afternoon? Who am I, sitting in a daze next to the son of a woman I made last night? Until yesterday I had my song—“the sea’s my home, I decided that”—and the tears I cried for it, and two million yen in my bank account as guarantees of my reality—what have I got now?
    Noboru didn’t realize that Ryuji was sinking into a void. He didn’t even notice that the sailor wasn’t looking in his direction any more. Lack of sleep and a succession of shocks had exhausted him, the bloodshot eyes he had told the housekeeper were from the salt water were beginning to close. He pondered, as he rocked toward sleep, the glistening figures of absolute reality twice glimpsed since the night before during lapses in the unmoving, tedious, barren world. . . .
    He saw them as marvelous gold embroideries leaping off a flat black fabric: the naked sailor twisting in the moonlight to confront a horn—the kitten’s death mask, grave and fang-bared—its ruby heart. . . . gorgeous entities all and absolutely authentic: then Ryuji too was an authentic hero . . . all incidents on the sea, in the sea, under the sea—Noboru felt himself drowning in sleep. “Happiness,” he thought. “Happiness that defies description. . . .” He fell asleep.
    Ryuji looked at his watch: it was time to go. He knocked lightly on the door leading to the kitchen and called the housekeeper.
    “He’s fallen asleep.”
    “That’s just like that boy.”
    “He might catch a chill. If there’s a blanket or something—”
    “I’ll get one from upstairs.”
    “Well—I’ll be going now.”
    “I suppose we can expect you back tonight?” A smirk appeared around the housekeeper’s eyes and trickled down her face as she glanced once, quickly, ogling up at Ryuji.

CHAPTER SEVEN
    S INCE dark antiquity the words have been spoken by women of every caste to sailors in every port; words of docile acceptance of the horizon’s authority, of reckless homage to that mysterious azure boundary; words never failing to bestow on even the haughtiest woman the sadness, the hollow hopes, and the freedom of the whore: “You’ll be leaving in the morning, won’t you? . . .”
    But Fusako was