Top photo of a traditional Japanese village from While writing this review I happened to come across this article about Japanese Nobel Prize winners (Yasunari Kawabata 1968 Kenzaburo Oe 1968) and how Mishima basically ‘campaigned’ for the prize and the hope of fans that Haruki Murakami might eventually win one. (Like the Greek sponge divers in Tarpon Springs, Florida) The story has been made into a movie in Japan several times. Even the women divers are only there for tourists now. The novel, published in 1954, is rich in local color and in descriptive detail of a way of life - housing, cooking, dress - that is now gone. It could be a YA novel if the three pages describing women’s breasts were omitted, (lol, the women dive wearing only loin cloths). In the end, love finds a way through hard work, courage, honestly and doing the right thing. The plot is elaborated with ‘rivals,’ a young man and young woman who are interested in each of the two main characters a scene between the boy’s mother and the wealthy man, and village gossipers who seem to do all they can to complicate the path of true love. The boy graduates from the small fishing boat to work on a freighter where he proves himself by an act of valor while at sea where he risks his life in a storm.

The father prohibits her from seeing the lower-class boy. Of course it’s understood that the daughter will marry one of the few other upper-class boys on the island. He falls in love with the newly arrived beautiful daughter of the wealthiest man on the island who owns a large freighter. The main character’s father died in WW II, so his work as a fisherman is the main support of his mother and young brother, although his mother is a diver. The island women are famous for their endurance diving to collect buckets of abalones, hopefully with an occasional pearl inside. Most of the men are fishermen going out daily in small 2-3-man boats. It’s a coming-of-age story of a young man on a small Japanese island. So imagine my surprise to find I’m reading a book about first love with a happy ending! (We know this from the blurbs on the cover, so I’m not really giving away plot.) The author himself headed up a ritualistic right-wing group and ended up committing ritual suicide. All have been dark, focused on planning secret rebellions, a planned murder, ritual suicide, death and reincarnation. I’ve read a half-dozen novels by this Japanese author.

潮騒 [Shiosai] by Yukio Mishima