The Sailor who Fell from Grace with the Sea

A band of savage thirteen-year-old boys reject the adult world as illusory, hypocritical, and sentimental, and train themselves in a brutal callousness they call 'objectivity'.
When the mother of one of them begins an affair with a ship's officer, he and his friends idealise the man at first; but it is not long before they conclude that he is in fact soft and romantic. They regard this disallusionment as an act of betrayal on his part - and the retribution is deliberate and horrifying.

• “Explores the viciousness that lies beneath what we imagine to be innocence” - Independent
  
• “Told with Mishima's fierce attention to naturalistic detail, the grisly tale becomes painfully convincing and yields a richness of psychological and mythic truth”
  Sunday Times
  
• “Coolly exact with his characters and their honourable motives. His aim is to make the destruction of the sailor by his love seem as inevitable as the ocean” - Guardian
  
• “Mishima's imagery is as artful as a Japanese flower arrangement” - New York Times
  
• “Mishima's greatest novel, and one of the greatest of the past century” - The Times