Books: Terrible Tykes

THE SAILOR WHO FELL FROM GRACE WITH THE SEA by Yukio Mishima. 181 pages. Knopf. $3.95.

Six naked boys, all of them 13 years old, stand in a darkened shed. “Go ahead, number three,” says the Chief. Number three swings a kitten high above his head and slams it at a log. The Chief, wearing a pair of rubber gloves, scissors a long smooth cut in the skin, “exposes the large, red-black liver and unwinds the immaculate bow els. Steam rises. He gropes in the abdominal cavity and plucks from it the tiny ruby heart.”

Number three and his friends are leisured little gentlemen of Japan who, finding reality annulled by affluence, seek the meaning of life in the experience of crime. After practicing on the kitten, these terrible tykes go looking for a human victim, and number three knows just the man: the handsome young ship’s officer his mother is going to marry. One day he invites the officer on a picnic with his pals. “I’ll take care of the sleeping pills,” says the

Chief. “Number two, you prepare a thermos of hot tea. And you can each bring a cutting tool—knives, saws, whatever you prefer. Looks like tomorrow will be a nice day.”

Brilliantly prosed and composed by Yukio Mishima, a 40-year-old novelist and playwright (The Temple of the Golden Pavilion) who has been called “the Japanese Camus,” The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea is obviously intended as a major work of art —as an Oriental transfiguration of the novel of the absurd, and as a crypto-sociological study of the homicidal hysteria that, in Author Mishima’s opinion, lies latent in the Japanese character. Unhappily, the book turns out to be simply a diabolically skillful thriller.