preview

Essay on Yukio Mishima's The Sailor Who Fell From Grace with the Sea

Decent Essays

Yukio Mishima’s novel The Sailor who fell from Grace with the Sea, represents the conflicts between pre-WW2 Japan and post-WW2 Japan, the author constructs the novel with characters whose lives are pulled into conflicting directions that portray the changing culture of Japan during that era. In the novel Fusako, the mother of Noboru and the girlfriend of Ryuji, is a woman who is caught up by conflicts, that many post-WWII Japanese women would face, which take place in her life and are direct cause of her actions throughout the novel. Fusako’s conflicts symbolize the issues faced by post-WWII Japan. Fusako is a woman with who has needs for intimacy but seeks these needs as if she was man, she has to deal with the needs of her growing boy, …show more content…

“It is said in Japan that a woman who drifts past thirty and remains unmarried will become the topic of gossip and comment, the assumption being that there must be something wrong with her to explain her marital status” (Friedman), and since Fusako is thirty-three this might justify her desire for another husband. Since Fusako is the one rushing to have intimate relations with the sailor, it is safe to say that she acting somewhat like a man since they are usually the first ones to seek intimacy. All of this represents the author’s representation of Fusako as a woman with womanly needs but also with the urge to get intimate quickly like a man, implying the use of gender confusion in the novel. The years leading to the start of the world wars, many women in the Japanese society, just like those of many other societies, were assigned only to do work in the home, “in the early years of the war, Japanese women were relegated to various volunteer associations, which did not involve direct factory work. However, by 1943, the loss of men required that able women work in factories” (Japanese Women).How those this pertain to the novel? Well, we could assume that Fusako was one of those women that the Japan relied on to help with the war. With that being said, it is implied that she was given a high

Get Access