Free The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea by Yukio Mishima Page A

right? Go ahead and be stubborn then; but you’d better turn those lights out and get to bed—it’s almost eleven.”
    Noboru was still leaning against the door, maintaining obstinate silence, when a key was rammed into the lock and roughly turned! He was aghast. It had never occurred to him that the housekeeper might have a key: he had assumed that his mother had taken all the keys with her when she went out.
    Furious, his brow dripping sweat, he wrenched the doorknob with all his strength; the door didn’t open. The housekeeper’s footsteps faded as she descended the groaning stairs.
    Noboru had hoped to take advantage of this one-in-a-thousand chance by sneaking over to the chief’s house and waking him with a password whispered outside his window. Now this last, fervent hope was dashed to bits. He despised all mankind. And he wrote a long entry in his diary, not forgetting to set down Ryuji’s crimes.
      C HARGES A GAINST R YUJI T SUKAZAKI
O NE :
smiling at me in a cowardly, ingratiating way when I met him this noon.
T WO :
wearing a dripping-wet shirt and explaining that he had taken a shower in the fountain at the park—just like an old bum.
T HREE :
deciding arbitrarily to spend the night out with Mother, thereby placing me in an awfully isolated position.
    But after thinking it over, Noboru erased the third count. It was obviously a contradiction of the first two, which were aesthetic, idealistic, and therefore objective value judgments. The subjective problem in the third charge was only proof of his own immaturity, not to be construed as a crime on Ryuji’s part.
    Noboru squeezed a mountain of toothpaste onto his toothbrush and belabored his mouth until the gums bled. Staring into the mirror, he watched a pistachio foam swaddle his irregular teeth until only the shiny pointed edges of the boyish cuspids showed: he was despondent. The smell of peppermint made a purity of his rage.
    Tearing off his shirt, Noboru put on his pajama tops and looked around the room. As if it were material evidence, the dresser drawer was still on exhibit in the middle of the floor. He lifted it, surprised by a heaviness he hadn’t noticed before, and was about to return it to the chest when he changed his mind and put it down again. He slipped into the space in the wall with practiced ease.
    The hole had been closed, he thought for one terrifying instant; then, groping with his fingers, he discovered that it was open as before. There simply wasn’t enough light on the other side to reveal it at a glance.
    Noboru pressed his eye to the peephole. When the door had opened before, he realized, it had been the housekeeper going in to draw all the curtains. Gradually the pupil strained open and he discerned around the brass bedsteads a glimmer of light, a wisp of brightness hardly more than a trace of mold.
    The room as a whole, feverish with a vestige of the noon heat, was as black as the inside of a large coffin, everywhere a shade of darkness, and alive with jostling particles of something Noboru had never seen, the blackest thing in all the world.

CHAPTER EIGHT
    T HEY spent the night in a small old hotel not far from the docks: Fusako was afraid she might be recognized at one of the large downtown hotels. She had often passed this drab, two-story building but had never imagined as she glanced through the glass doors at the entrance and saw the dim, outsized lobby, and the scarred front desk, and the large steamship calendar bedizening one calcimined wall, that she would be staying here one day.
    They slept for a few hours in the early morning, then separated until sailing time. Fusako went home to change clothes before going to work, Ryuji returned to the pier. He had to substitute for the First Mate, who was going ashore to do some shopping. He would have been busy in any case because the maintenance of ropes and other tackle so important in the loading operation was one of his regular duties.
    The Rakuyo was due to sail at