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

won’t take long to find one. Nothing will take long.”
    Since the chief’s house was near Noboru’s, they had to take a train again to get there: the boys liked this sort of unnecessary, troublesome excursion.
    The chief’s parents were never home; his house was always hushed. A solitary boy, he had read at thirteen every book in the house and was always bored. He claimed he could tell what any book was about just by looking at the cover.
    There were indications that this hollow house had nourished the chief’s ideas about the overwhelming emptiness of the world. Noboru had never seen so many entrances and exits, so many prim chilly rooms. The house even made him afraid to go to the bathroom alone: foghorns in the harbor echoed emptily from room to empty room.
    Sometimes, ushering the boys into his father’s study and sitting down in front of a handsome morocco-leather desk set, the chief would write out topics for discussion, moving his pen importantly between ink-well and copper-engraved stationery. Whenever he made a mistake, he would crumple the thick imported paper and toss it carelessly away. Once Noboru had asked: “Won’t your old man get mad if you do that?” The chief had rewarded him with silence and a derisive smile.
    But they all loved a large shed in the garden in back where they could go without passing under the butler’s eye. Except for a few logs and some shelves full of tools and empty wine bottles and back issues of foreign magazines, the floor of the shed was bare, and when they sat down on the damp dark earth its coolness passed directly to their buttocks.
    After hunting for an hour, they found a stray cat small enough to ride in the palm of Noboru’s hand, a mottled, mewing kitten with lackluster eyes.
    By then they were sweating heavily, so they undressed and took turns splashing in a sink in one corner of the shed. While they bathed, the kitten was passed around. Noboru felt the kitten’s hot heart pumping against his wet naked chest. It was like having stolen into the shed with some of the dark, joy-flushed essence of bright summer sunlight.
    “How are we going to do it?”
    “There’s a log over there. We can smack it against that—it’ll be easy. Go ahead, number three.”
    At last the test of Noboru’s hard, cold heart! Just a minute before, he had taken a cold bath, but he was sweating heavily again. He felt it blow up through his breast like the morning sea breeze: intent to kill. His chest felt like a clothes rack made of hollow metal poles and hung with white shirts drying in the sun. Soon the shirts would be flapping in the wind and then he would be killing, breaking the endless chain of society’s loathsome taboos.
    Noboru seized the kitten by the neck and stood up. It dangled dumbly from his fingers. He checked himself for pity; like a lighted window seen from an express train, it flickered for an instant in the distance and disappeared. He was relieved.
    The chief always insisted it would take acts such as this to fill the world’s great hollows. Though nothing else could do it, he said, murder would fill those gaping caves in much the same way that a crack along its face will fill a mirror. Then they would achieve real power over existence.
    Resolved, Noboru swung the kitten high above his head and slammed it at the log. The warm soft thing hurtled through the air in marvelous flight. But the sensation of down between his fingers lingered.
    “It’s not dead yet. Do it again,” the chief ordered.
    Scattered through the gloom in the shed, the five naked boys stood rooted, their eyes glittering.
    What Noboru lifted between two fingers now was no longer a kitten. A resplendent power was surging through him to the tips of his fingers and he had only to lift the dazzling arc seared into the air by this power and hurl it again and again at the log. He felt like a giant of a man. Just once, at the second impact, the kitten raised a short, gurgling cry. . . .
    The kitten