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

noticed a shadow fall across the lawn and looked up in surprise. The old watchman from the warehouse, his elbows propped on a drum, was peering in at them.
    “You boys sure picked a messy place for a picnic.” With admirable poise, the chief beamed a scrubbed, schoolboy smile at the old man and said: “Would it be better for us to go somewhere else? We came down to watch the ships, and then we were looking for a shady place to have lunch. . . .”
    “Go right ahead; you’re not doing any harm. Just be sure not to leave any litter around.”
    “Yes, sir.” The smiles were boyish, innocent. “You don’t have to worry about that—we’re hungry enough to eat the wrappings and everything, right, you guys?”
    They watched the hunchback shuffle down the path, treading the border between sunlight and shadow. Number four was the first to speak: “There are plenty of that type around—about as common as you can get, and he just loves ‘the youngsters.’ I’ll bet he felt so generous just now.”
    The boys shared the sandwiches and raw vegetables and little cakes in their lunches and drank iced tea from small thermos bottles. A few sparrows flew in over the siding and alighted just outside their circle, but no one shared even a crumb with the birds. Matchless inhumanity was a point of pride with every one of them.
    These were children from “good homes,” and their mothers had packed them rich and varied lunches: Noboru was a little ashamed of the plainish sandwiches he had brought. They sat cross-legged on the ground, some in shorts, some in dungarees. The chief’s throat labored painfully as he wolfed his food.
    It was very hot. Now the sun was flaming directly above the warehouse roof, the shallow eaves barely protecting them.
    Noboru munched his food in nervous haste, a habit his mother often scolded him for, squinting upward into the glare as he ate as if to catch the sun in his open mouth. He was recalling the design of the perfect painting he had seen the night before. It had been almost a manifestation of the absolutely blue sky of night. The chief maintained that there was nothing new to be found anywhere in the world, but Noboru still believed in the adventure lurking in some tropical backland. And he believed in the many-colored market at the hub of clamor and confusion in some distant seaport, in the bananas and parrots sold from the glistening arms of black natives.
    “You’re daydreaming while you eat, aren’t you? That’s a child’s habit.” Noboru didn’t answer; he wasn’t equal to the scorn in the chief’s voice. Besides, he reasoned, getting mad would only look silly because they were practicing “absolute dispassion.”
    Noboru had been trained in such a way that practically nothing sexual, not even that scene the night before, could surprise him. The chief had taken great pains to insure that none of the gang would be abashed by such a sight. Somehow he had managed to obtain photographs picturing intercourse in every conceivable position and a remarkable selection of pre-coital techniques, and explained them all in detail, warmly instructing the boys about the insignificance, the unworthiness of such activity.
    Ordinarily a boy with merely a physical edge on his classmates presides at lessons such as these, but the chief’s case was altogether different: he appealed directly to the intellect. To begin with, he maintained that their genitals were for copulating with stars in the Milky Way. Their pubic hair, indigo roots buried deep beneath white skin and a few strands already strong and thickening, would grow out in order to tickle coy stardust when the rape occurred. . . . This kind of hallowed raving enchanted them and they disdained their classmates, foolish, dirty, pitiful boys brimming with curiosity about sex.
    “When we finish eating we’ll go over to my place,” the chief said. “Everything’s all ready for you know what.”
    “Got a cat?”
    “Not yet, but it