[The theme of] The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea [Gogo no Eikō] is at once special in character and an outgrowth of motifs developed in earlier books….

Inherent in this story are two artistic difficulties which the author does not entirely overcome: the credibility of the love affair between two characters with such widely differing back-grounds, and the credibility of the boys' inhuman sophistication and actions. Mishima seeks to transcend these problems by his emphasis on the symbolic. While the adults represent irrational ardor succumbing to practical reality, the boys represent "absolute dispassion" grounded in naïveté. What relates the two is death: in literature death is often the accompaniment of passion or the result of sterile abstraction.

The novel is profoundly, even beautifully macabre, especially in its reversal of the usual images of child and adult. In its portrayal of adult passion and its...