Love on a Japanese Isle

THE SOUND OF WAVES (183 pp.)--Yuklo Mishima--Knopf ($3).

A Japanese novel is rather like a Japanese flower arrangement. It is subtle, delicate and personal, and it invariably fades a little in the vase of translation. The Sound of Waves does not wholly escape this fate, but its 31-year-old author, Yukio Mishima, is a spare-time weight lifter, and he has infused his tale of troubled young love among hard-working fisherfolk with a peasant robustness notably lacking in recent, more aristocratically attuned Japanese novels, e.g., Lady of Beauty, Some Prefer Nettles.

The men on tiny Uta-jima (Song Island) fish for octopus. The women dive in the numbing offshore waters for abalone. The islanders' lives are far from a song. But when they rise from the earthen floors of the dark, dank-smelling huts, they see the morning sun dancing on the sea, and stately clouds crossing the horizon "like ancient gods." Teen-age Shinji is content to follow this age-old pattern of a life both dangerously and harmoniously close to nature. When he prays in the garden of the Yashiro shrine, he asks, "God, let the seas be calm, the fish plentiful, and ... in time let me become a fisherman among fishermen."

A girl takes his mind off his prayers. Hatsue is lithe and lovely, the winner among the women divers of an unofficial "best-shaped breasts" contest. A fleeting kiss on the beach is about all Shinji can hope for from Hatsue, since her father is a wealthy shipowner with small use for penniless apprentice fishermen. Author Mishima, who seems to have learned some of his flower-arranging from Hollywood, maroons the couple in an abandoned tower during a storm.

Drenched to the skin, they dry out their clothes before a roaring fire and very nearly burn the last social bridge between them. Village gossip assumes the worst, and Hatsue's father plays the ogre. In the popular Japanese tradition, true love of this kind is expected to end badly, preferably with a double suicide jump off the face of a cliff or into a volcano. Novelist Mishima resolutely avoids the bucket-of-tears finale for an imitation Western happy ending, which will startle readers by its incongruity. But love in Japan is not so much the book's real subject as love of Japan. The desire to evoke the spare, printlike beauty of their native land which animates Author Mishima and other leading Japanese novelists sets them apart as a special and welcome breed in contemporary writing--that of unabashed patriot esthetes who somehow manage not to sound like jingoes.

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