Grappling with Yukio Mishima’s Murderous Children

Prison gave me a chance to read Mishima and of the three novels I read (and the notes on which lay somewhere in your future) the last was The Sailor Who Fell From Grace with the Sea which I knew only from the film version seen decades and decades ago. The novel shocked us who read it, most of the Education Building reading group. The followings came via LitHub and are excerpts from a podcast. I agree with all the comments. Mishima did something in his novel that I do not think has yet been done in a Western novel and perhaps cannot.

Catherine: I think it’s pretty amazing to actually have a book about murderous children that’s this nonjudgmental and open to the possibility that maybe they have a point, maybe not.

Sandra: And it’s certainly brave about depicting children as kind of pre-moral creatures and not us, which I don’t think is exactly true. There’s another fascist writer, a contemporary writer who I’m fascinated by, called Zakhar Prilepin, who’s this Russian writer who’s super important in Russia but not much translated because he’s a fascist, I believe. But he has an entire book which is about murderous children, and it has the same kinds of murderous children, like this really obsessive need to believe that children are not susceptible to adult feelings of pity or compassion.

Catherine: I think if there’s any kind of fantasy, it’s definitely that the kids could be that competent and organized and also have no human feeling, or to have their feelings just be little flickers in the distance. Which, if that is actually the experience that these writers had of childhood, then that suggests—I mean, maybe they’re just psychopaths.

Sandra: There’s probably more in this that we would need to almost study for a month to understand about childhood in a fascist society. Mishima is growing up in the early days of World War II, and the rise of fascism is an extremely violent culture, even in the everyday world. So there might be something about that that makes the entire concept of childhood really different. I don’t know.