The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea

At twenty he had been passionately certain: in the depths of the world’s darkness was a point of light which had been provided for him alone and would draw near someday to irradiate him and no other.

A vision of death now eternally beyond his reach, majestic, acclaimed, heroic death unfurled its rapture across his brain. And if the world had been provided for just this radiant death, then why shouldn’t the world also perish for it!

Still immersed in his dream, he drank down the tepid tea. It tasted bitter. Glory, as anyone knows, is bitter stuff.

The things he had rejected were now rejecting him.

I could have been a man sailing away forever. He had been fed up with all of it, glutted, and yet now, slowly, he was awakening again to the immensity of what he had abandoned.

Once, at sunset on a summer day, this marvelous cap had receded over a dazzling sea, becoming a glittering emblem of farewell and the unknown

Trailing black smoke, a small ship was teetering on the horizon. He could have been aboard that ship himself.

The sea made Ryuji feel that he had been away from it a long, long time. Fusako’s bedroom overlooked the harbor but he never went near the window any more. The water, with spring still far away, was Prussian blue except where the shadow of one pearly cloud turned it pale, chilly white. The rest of the midafternoon sky was cloudless, a bleached, monotone blue fading where it neared the horizon.

There was something about the boy Ryuji didn’t like. The flicker of light in his eye when he asked the question suggested that he knew the answer perfectly well. Ryuji forced himself to explain politely.

a balloon he had abandoned to the sky.