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Hello and welcome! My name is Emma and I've been a bookseller for over a decade. I also write fantasy under the name E. M. Epps. This blog features my Two-Paragraph Book Reviews. One paragraph from me. One from the book. Here's why I keep it short.

You are here: Home > Review: “The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea” by Yukio Mishima
The Sailor Who Fell From Grace with the Sea

Review: “The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea” by Yukio Mishima

Image Emma 26 July 2010

 

Thumbs up for The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea by Yukio Mishima. Literature.

I couldn’t decide whether to read slowly in order to savor Mishima’s exquisite prose, or gulp it in sheer ecstasy. This book did once more raise the question: Why do so many of the greatest writers in the world – of which I will unhesitatingly say Mishima is one – chose to write books of which we know what the finale will be from the first pages? (Flaubert dear, I’m thinking of you.) But like with Madame Bovary, I didn’t care at all that it was all going to come to a nasty end. This was a stunningly beautiful little book.

“He never cried, not even in his dreams, for hard-heartedness was a point of pride. A large iron anchor withstanding the corrosion of the sea and scornful of the barnacles and oysters that harass the hulls of ships, sinking polished and indifferent through heaps of broken glass, toothless combs, bottle caps, and prophylactics into the mud at harbor bottom – that was how he liked to imagine his heart. Someday he would have an anchor tattoed on his chest.”


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Tagged Japan, literature, thumbs up
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My bookstore is an affiliate of Bookshop.org, so we will earn a commission if you click through my links and make a purchase. I, personally, am also an affiliate of the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program and will likewise make a commission if you click through those links and make a purchase. Having to use Amazon doesn’t fill me with joy, but they’re the only good affiliate program for used books available right now. So…that’s the way it is.

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