The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea Summary

The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea begins in the sweltering Yokohama summer. Fusako starts locking her 13-year-old son Noboru in his room at night because he has been sneaking out to meet with his gang of friends. Like the gang’s leader, a boy called simply “the chief,” Noboru believes that the universe is empty and that most people’s lives are meaningless. However, he thinks that a select few heroic geniuses—like him and his friends—are destined to save the world from collapse through their special insight.

While locked in his room one night, Noboru angrily pulls the drawers out of his wall-mounted dresser and discovers a peephole that leads into his mother Fusako’s bedroom. He starts looking through it at night before bed and watching his mother undress. One evening, he sees her with Ryuji, the strapping sailor they met a few days before onboard the freighter Rakuyo. A ship blasts its horn while they have sex, and Noboru feels like everything in the universe has suddenly come together into a beautiful whole.

The next morning, Ryuji reflects on his life as a sailor. After losing his home and entire family in the closing days of World War II, Ryuji shipped out on the Rakuyo in order to escape the brutality of life on land. While he gets to spend his days visiting exotic lands and pursuing his dreams of glory, he has little to show for it besides the money he has saved in his bank account. He sometimes wonders if an ordinary life onshore might be more fulfilling. Fusako briefly returns to her room, and she and Ryuji embrace before she leaves for work.

Fusako arrives at her shop, which sells imported European luxury clothing to wealthy foreigners, businesspeople, and celebrities. She briefly meets with one of her clients, the popular but naïve actress Yoriko Kasuga, but she spends most of the day reminiscing about meeting Ryuji. Noboru is obsessed with ships and sailing, so Fusako took him to tour the Rakuyo two days ago. Ryuji showed Noboru around, and Fusako felt an immediate, otherworldly connection to him. She realizes that she hasn’t gotten so close to a man since her husband died five years ago.

Meanwhile, Ryuji is also lost in his memories of Fusako. He goes to the park and relives the conversation they had there on the previous night. He scolds himself for getting tongue-tied: instead of explaining his complex, heroic ideas about love, death, and glory, he just talked about banal things like vegetables and his favorite song. On the one hand, he feels like Fusako is the ideal woman from his dreams, who is supposed to bring him death and glory. But on the other, he feels like settling down with a woman like Fusako would be impossible or even unreal. And he worries that by forcing him to give up sailing, it would actually ruin his chances of achieving glory. On his way out of the park, he runs into Noboru, who is playing with his friends.

But Noboru and his five friends aren’t as innocent as they look. They spent the morning at the pier, discussing “the uselessness of Mankind [and] the insignificance of Life.” Noboru told them about Ryuji, whom he sees as a kind of hero—but the boys’ leader, the chief, insisted that the six of them are the only real heroes in the universe. After lunch, they went to the chief’s house, where they caught a stray kitten. Noboru killed it by throwing it against a log, and then the chief cut it up with a pair of scissors, pulled out its organs one by one, and told his friends that this is the true nature of reality. Proud Noboru believes that the kitten has achieved “wholeness and perfection” by dying, and he finally feels like a “real man.”

Back in the present, after running into each other, Noboru and Ryuji go back to Noboru and Fusako’s house, where they cool off in the air conditioning. Noboru resents Ryuji’s kindness but excitedly asks him more questions about sailing. Meanwhile, Ryuji marvels at how different his life has become in just a few days. His relationship with Fusako still doesn’t feel real, and he is supposed to ship back out on the Rakuyo tomorrow. He leaves to meet Fusako for their second and final date.

On their date, Fusako is devastated to know that Ryuji will be leaving, but she doesn’t want to turn into the stereotypical sailor’s wife, waiting for her man to return from sea. In contrast, Ryuji knows that he loves her, but feels that he has to leave her behind in order to fulfill his destiny. They decide to spend the night in a hotel. When the housekeeper informs Noboru that his mother won’t be back until morning, he’s furious. He writes a list of charges against Ryuji in his journal, and then he spitefully stares through the peephole into his mother’s pitch-black room. The next afternoon, Fusako and Noboru go to the docks to see Ryuji off. After a brief conversation, they watch him sail off into the sunset like a true Japanese hero.

For the next several months, Noboru, Fusako, and Ryuji exchange letters, and Fusako and Ryuji’s love deepens. The novel picks up in the freezing winter, when Ryuji returns to Yokohama. Fusako picks him up from the piers and takes him to her house. He gifts Noboru a taxidermized baby crocodile from Brazil, but Noboru isn’t satisfied: he feels like Ryuji is somehow fake and corrupt, a shadow of his former heroic self. They all celebrate New Year’s Eve together, and at dawn, Fusako and Ryuji sneak off to the park to watch the New Year’s sunrise over the sea. When the blood-red sun peeks out over the horizon, Ryuji asks Fusako to marry him. She says yes. And when the Rakuyo leaves five days later, Ryuji stays in Yokohama.

Fusako goes out to lunch with Yoriko Kasuga, the actress, and tells her all about her engagement to Ryuji. Yoriko suggests hiring a private detective to make sure that Ryuji is who he says he is—and isn’t just courting Fusako for her money. Offended by Yoriko’s distrust, Fusako hires the detective just to spite her and confirms that everything that Ryuji has told her is true.

Meanwhile, Noboru meets with his gang and reports that Ryuji is no longer the masculine hero he used to be. He has given up sailing and—worse still—tried to become Noboru’s father figure. The chief goes on a long monologue about the inherent evil of fatherhood and says that Noboru is lucky that his own father is dead.

When Fusako and Ryuji tell Noboru that they’re getting married, he’s secretly furious. He hides in his dresser to watch them have sex through the peephole but falls asleep with his flashlight on. Ryuji and Fusako discover the peephole. Devastated, Fusako asks Ryuji to punish Noboru. But Ryuji decides to be a kind father and forgive Noboru. Ironically, this devastates Noboru: it shows that Ryuji has given up his old, swaggering, heroic style. Noboru vows to enact revenge and calls his gang together for a meeting.

At their meeting, Noboru shows the chief his list of accusations against Ryuji, and the chief proposes they “make that sailor a hero again.” They hatch an unthinkable plan: they’ll do to Ryuji what they practiced on the kitten. The chief pulls out a law book and explains that since they’re only 13, the boys can’t be convicted of a crime.

About 10 days later, the gang asks Ryuji to spend an afternoon telling them sailing stories. He enthusiastically agrees, and they lead him to a remote mountaintop far on the outskirts of Yokohama. As he looks out over the city and ocean, Ryuji realizes that he has made a terrible mistake by giving up his glorious sailor’s life in order to marry Fusako. In just a few days, he threw away his lifelong dream of finding glory, death, and love all together on the open sea. Now, he has given up glory and death for the sake of love. At least, that’s what he thinks—but Noboru and his friends have other plans. In the book’s closing lines, the chief prepares his medical equipment while Noboru passes Ryuji a cup of poisoned tea. Ryuji drinks it, and the novel ends, “Glory, as anyone knows, is bitter stuff.”