It's always curious reading a text that I am going to, in some sense, teach. Apart from anything else, I'm aware that I'll be reading it again quite soon so the whole experience takes on a provisional air. Also I find myself on the lookout for what is 'teachable' about what I'm reading, which is not altogether healthy. I find myself trying to see the text to some degree through a teenager's eyes - in this case that certainly altered how I viewed the whole idea of 'first love' as experienced by the youngsters in the novel. What I think I would have read at some almost nostalgic distance became rather more immediate somehow. I'm certainly very interested to hear how authentic the teenagers I teach take the experience of the novel's protagonists as being. I felt it was all a touch artificial, but I'm not sure I was really able to make the jump into a different culture. At the simplest level, the happy ending came as quite a surprise.
Having said that, if I hadn't have known I was reading a modern Japanese classic I would have thought it was Hemingway in front of me, albeit a rather sentimentalised version thereof. The waves seem drenched in some fairly strident machismo.
I liked the way Mishima dealt with sexual experience, though. Refreshingly head on, but without prurience, I think, except for one odd segment dealing with the breasts of the female divers, and the linking of these with visible signs of virginity. Or perhaps that was my prurience infecting the text.
But I must say the general sense of the way of life of the inhabitants of the island in their fishing village is superbly done and the novel is worth a read for that alone.
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