I think this is the best novel I've read for a long time. The Baron in the Trees is up there, but presents itself more so as a parable/fable. The Sailor Who etc achieves so much. It is disturbing. It is beautiful.

Of course, the great asterisk looms over Mishima - the same qualification that we find over Pound, Nabokov, Yeats, Larkin. Eliot. Bulgakov. There are varying degrees. I think this novel could not be so affecting was it not written in the shadow of this asterisk. The children (described in one review as 'nihilists') are one such case of an unsettling that enhances the reader's sense of empty chaos. In truth, they are not nihilists. They accord with a belief in a chaos-plane - a concept that I'm unsure if Mishima endorses or not.

This novel is exceptionally giving for any curious psychoanalysts. Mishima plays up to this. The poets discovered Freud both before and after he wrote, it seems.

So it's not a novel I can straightforwardly recommend - as beautifully written and intricate and perplexing as it is, The Sailor is profoundly disturbing, on a level that few novels reach. I applaud. Begrudgingly, perhaps.