Yukio Mishima and the Tragedy of Fatherlessness

Yukio Mishima remains one of the most fascinating figures of twentieth-century postwar literature. The Japanese novelist, playwright, poet, bodybuilder, nationalist, and eventual author of his own ritual suicide lived a life marked by an intense preoccupation with masculinity. His novels repeatedly return to young men who are searching for something greater than themselves and who, in the absence of a healthy moral order, can become captivated by destructive visions of greatness.

Mishima’s childhood was profoundly disrupted by the absence of a normal father-son relationship. His grandmother, Natsuko, effectively removed him from his parents during his earliest years and exercised an extraordinary degree of control over his upbringing. The boy’s father later responded to his son’s literary interests with severe discipline and even destroyed his manuscripts. All of these experiences would contribute to the creation of Mishima’s beautifully written masterpiece “The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea.”

Mishima’s novel is about what happens when the natural structures through which a boy learns masculinity, authority, morality, and responsibility have been disrupted. Noboru Kuroda is thirteen years old and lives with his widowed mother, Fusako. The father died when Noboru was eight, leaving him without a male authority figure at precisely the age when a boy begins to look beyond the nurturing of his mother and toward the wider world.

Into this vacuum enters Ryuji Tsukazaki, a merchant sailor whose mysterious life at sea initially makes him appear to Noboru as the embodiment of masculine greatness. Opposing him is the Chief, the thirteen-year-old leader of Noboru’s secret gang, who offers the boy a radically different model of masculinity.

Noboru does not simply lack a father. He lacks a male role model who can teach him from experience how to navigate the world. A child does not grow up by constructing his personality entirely from first principles. He observes and imitates. He absorbs the habits, attitudes, gestures, language, and moral assumptions of the adults around him. A boy, in particular, naturally looks toward his father as one of the principal models of what it means to become a man. This does not mean that mothers are unimportant. Nor does it mean that every father is necessarily a good influence. But the disappearance of the father does not make the boy’s need for male role models disappear with him. Because human beings are intrinsically mimetic, the need simply finds another model.

This is precisely what happens to Noboru. His father’s death does not eliminate his fascination with masculine authority. It leaves that fascination looking for somewhere to go. The boy finds one answer in the sailor Ryuji. At first, Ryuji is everything Noboru imagines a man ought to be. He belongs to the sea, lives an adventurous life, possesses physical courage, and appears to stand outside the dreary conventions of ordinary society. Noboru connects Ryuji to the vastness and mystery of the sea, and therefore to something that appears to transcend the mundane world of adults.

But Noboru’s other male model is far more consequential. That model is the Chief.

The Chief is only thirteen years old, yet he has established himself as the intellectual and moral authority of a group of boys. He lectures them on the meaninglessness of society, morality, family, and human existence. The boys regard themselves as intellectually superior to ordinary adults, and the Chief transforms their adolescent frustrations into a comprehensive philosophy of nihilism. He teaches them that fathers are inherently oppressive because they impose values upon others. In Noboru’s case, this doctrine conveniently transforms his father’s death from a tragedy into something of which he can be proud. The Chief explicitly tells him that he is fortunate to have escaped fatherhood.

There is something almost grotesquely ironic about this dynamic. Noboru has lost his father, and instead of finding a substitute father who can teach him how to become a responsible man, he finds another adolescent who teaches him that fathers are evil. And because the Chief is a stern disciplinarian, compared with the easygoing Ryuji, his connection to Noboru is stronger. The external mediator always exerts a greater authority than the internal mediator who is prone to mimetic rivalry.

The Chief himself appears to be a product of a damaged relationship with paternal authority. Mishima hints that the Chief’s own father is distant and abusive, and the boy’s hatred of authority emerges from this experience. The Chief therefore does not merely reject fatherhood. He takes his own distorted experience of fatherhood and universalizes it. What was personally painful becomes, in his mind, a metaphysical truth: fathers are evil, society is fraudulent, morality is an illusion, and human beings are essentially nothing.

This is one of the most disturbing observations in the novel. A damaged child can become a teacher of other damaged children.

And children are extraordinarily vulnerable to such teachers because they possess enough intelligence to understand an idea without necessarily possessing the experience necessary to judge it. Adolescence is capable of producing astonishing intellectual confidence. A thirteen-year-old can formulate a theory of the universe, pronounce judgment upon morality, and convince himself that he has discovered truths which billions of adults have somehow failed to notice. What he usually lacks is the wisdom to understand the consequences of his theories.

Mishima makes this danger terrifyingly concrete.

The Chief’s gang does not remain a debating society. Their nihilism gradually becomes a training program in cruelty. One of the most disturbing episodes involves a kitten. The boys use the animal to demonstrate their theory that nothing is sacred and that beneath the sentimental language of morality there is simply matter. The Chief instructs Noboru in killing and dissecting the animal. The episode becomes a rehearsal for what will later happen to Ryuji.

The significance of this scene is greater than its shock value. It demonstrates what happens when intelligence is detached from conscience and masculinity is detached from responsibility. The boys have become fascinated by power, but they have no moral principle by which power can be restrained. They want to transcend ordinary human limitations, but they cannot distinguish transcendence from cruelty. Their rejection of conventional morality does not make them free. It makes them manipulable.

The Chief has discovered a terrible secret about adolescent boys: if you give them a sufficiently grand theory, you can persuade them that cruelty is courage.

This is also why the novel presents such a devastating challenge to the modern assumption that fathers are dispensable. The claim that a child does not need a father is sometimes made as though fatherhood were merely an optional social arrangement, something that can be replaced without consequence by institutional care, peer relationships, or the good intentions of other adults. Mishima’s novel illustrates the opposite possibility. When the father disappears, the boy’s hunger for male authority does not necessarily disappear. Someone else may step into the vacant position, and there is no guarantee that the replacement will be good.

The broader social evidence gives this literary insight an uncomfortable resonance. A U.S. Department of Justice publication has cited the finding that approximately seventy percent of youths in state institutions came from fatherless homes. The Heritage Foundation has likewise cited figures reporting that seventy percent of juvenile delinquents were fatherless and has emphasized the importance of fathers as models of healthy masculinity. These figures sufficiently undermine the casual assumption that the presence or absence of a father is irrelevant to a child’s development.

Noboru’s father has been dead for five years, but the psychological consequences of his absence remain alive. His father’s death creates a vacancy, and Noboru fills that vacancy first with an idealized sailor and then with the Chief. The problem is that neither man gives him what a father ought to give him. Ryuji gives him an image of masculine glory without discipline and authority. The Chief gives him intellectual authority without wisdom and compassion. The result is catastrophic.

Another consequence of fatherlessness that Mishima explores is Noboru’s relationship with his mother. Fusako is not merely Noboru’s parent. She becomes, in the absence of his father, the center of his psychological universe. His relationship with her becomes deeply unhealthy. Noboru secretly watches her through a peephole, observing her private and sexual life. He has no concept of a son’s respect towards his mother. The boundary between mother and son, between the child’s world and the adult world, has become grotesquely distorted.

This helps explain why Ryuji’s arrival produces such contradictory emotions in Noboru. At first, Noboru is fascinated by Ryuji because the sailor appears to connect his mother to the sea and therefore connects Noboru himself to the heroic world he longs to inhabit. But when Fusako announces that she intends to marry Ryuji, everything changes. Ryuji is no longer simply the magnificent sailor who visits his mother. He is becoming his father – a rival for mother’s attention – and Noboru cannot tolerate it.

Fusako tells him that Ryuji will become his “new father,” but Noboru does not hear this as an act of love or restoration. He hears it as the introduction of an unwanted authority into his life. Ryuji’s attempt to become a father therefore becomes, in Noboru’s mind, an attempt to impose an alien order upon him.

This is where Mishima’s treatment of the mother becomes particularly significant. Fusako is loving and concerned for her son, but she cannot occupy the role that Noboru desperately needs someone to occupy. Her value in his eyes consequently declines as he becomes more immersed in the Chief’s philosophy. The maternal world comes to represent domesticity, sentiment, sexuality, and ordinary life, while the masculine world of the sea represents danger, glory, independence, and death.

Noboru’s contempt for his mother’s marriage to Ryuji is therefore not merely childish jealousy. It is bound up with his distorted understanding of masculinity. He does not want his mother to have another husband because the presence of another man threatens the imaginary structure through which he has organized his world. At the same time, he does not want Ryuji to become an ordinary father. He wants him to remain a distant heroic figure, untouched by domestic responsibility.

Ryuji’s fatal mistake is to become human. As long as he remains a sailor, Noboru can project his fantasies onto him. But once Ryuji decides to marry Fusako, settle down, and become a father, Noboru sees him as having fallen from grace. The sailor has abandoned the heroic abstraction that Noboru worshipped for the mundane reality of family life. The boys consequently decide that Ryuji must be restored to his heroic status through death; the sailor must be sacrificed. Their plan is a grotesque repetition of the earlier cruelty inflicted upon the kitten.

The irony is almost unbearable. Noboru has lost his father. A man arrives who might become his father. Instead of accepting him, Noboru rejects him because he has been taught to regard fatherhood itself as a form of corruption. The very institution that might have rescued him has become, through the Chief’s teaching, the object of his hatred.

This is what makes “The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea” more than a story about an unusually disturbed adolescent. It is a meditation on what happens when a child’s hunger for authority is left without a healthy authority to guide it.

If the father is absent, the peer group becomes the family. If the father is despised, the nihilist can become the teacher. If responsible masculinity is not demonstrated, violent masculinity becomes attractive. And if a boy is told repeatedly that fathers are oppressive, he may eventually become incapable of recognizing fatherhood as anything other than oppression. There is an acute lesson in all of this for those of us who claim to despise “patriarchy.”

Mishima’s own life makes the subject compelling. His childhood involved a combination of paternal harshness, maternal affection, and the overwhelming influence of his grandmother. The distance from a caring father created a warped ideal of the masculine in his life – something that would ultimately cause his own destruction.

In the end, the deepest horror of “The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea” is not that Noboru simply becomes antisocial. It is that his cruelty, like any other behavior, is highly mimetic; he receives it and will likely pass it on. His mimetic role model, the Chief, teaches him to interpret his loneliness as superiority, his lack of authority as freedom, his rejection of family as enlightenment, and his capacity for violence as evidence that he has transcended ordinary morality.

That is the shocking consequence of fatherlessness as Mishima presents it. It is not merely that a boy grows up without a man in the house. It is that the boy can remain hungry for the authority, example, and masculine identity that a father should ordinarily provide, while leaving him vulnerable to whoever is willing to provide a substitute. Noboru finds his substitute in the Chief. And the Chief teaches him how to kill.

Mimesis, like religion, is a hard fact of society; it cannot be wished away. Mishima’s novel offers an unconscious warning that remains relevant long after the peculiar world of postwar Japan has disappeared. Children do not cease needing parents because adults declare that they do. Boys do not cease looking for male models because society tells them that all models are oppressive. The question is not whether young men will imitate. They will. The real question is whom they will imitate.

A father cannot guarantee that his son will become a good man. But the absence of a father can leave a profound vacuum, and nature abhors a vacuum. Someone will eventually attempt to fill it. In Mishima’s darkest vision, that someone is the Chief.

Read more of Surit’s essays here.