THE SOUND OF WAVES BY YUKIO MISHIMA

Upon completing THE SOUND OF WAVES by Yukio Mishima, I was left with a very good feeling as if the final happy ending and the folk tale/ fable like construction of the story had imbued my soul with positive energy….A deceptively simple love story set on a Japanese island where fishing and abalone diving are the two primary industries, this book is painstakingly detailed while at the same time poetic and lyrical which is a great balancing act.

This relatively short book while spare and not covering that much time or distance still feels like an epic once it is considered in full….The final scene at the top of the lighthouse (which prior to that had only been shown and described from the outside) is like the final scene of any literary journey….What it symbolizes I think is that the palace of wisdom has been attained after much struggle by the protagonists who can now go on and live their lives together.

I’ve never cared much for Yukio Mishima who always seemed to me to be more famous for being Yukio Mishima and the ridiculous way in which he died rather than for the quality of his literary output….That being said, THE SOUND OF WAVES is one of his earlier books and my past experiences with his writing (which I didn’t much care for) was his later work so maybe I need to check out more of his earlier work???