The Sound of Waves (潮騒, Shiosai) was published by Shinchosha in 1954. It is the anomaly in Mishima’s body of work — a straightforward, sunny romance without irony, darkness, or psychological complexity. Shinji, an eighteen-year-old fisherman on the island of Uta-jima (based on Kami-shima in Mie Prefecture), falls in love with Hatsue, the beautiful daughter of the island’s wealthiest man, recently returned from working as a pearl diver.
Their courtship faces obstacles: class difference (her father opposes the match), gossip (the islanders spread rumors about their chastity), and a rival suitor. Shinji proves himself through physical courage — saving a ship during a typhoon — and wins Hatsue’s father’s approval.
Mishima explicitly modeled the novel on Longus’s Daphnis and Chloe (2nd century AD), transposing the ancient Greek pastoral into a Japanese fishing village. He wrote it during a trip to Greece in 1952, and the novel celebrates the same values the classical romance celebrates: physical beauty, natural virtue, the integration of human life with landscape and sea.
Critics have debated whether the novel is a genuine expression of Mishima’s classicist ideals or a deliberate exercise in a mode that was foreign to his temperament. The commercial success was enormous — it became the most popular of his novels in Japan and has been filmed five times.
Collecting The Sound of Waves
First edition (Shinchosha, Tokyo, 1954): Japanese text.
First English edition (Knopf, New York, 1956): Translated by Meredith Weatherby.
Market values:
- Knopf first English edition, fine in jacket: $100–$300
- Japanese first edition: $200–$600
Projected values (2026–2036): Strong appreciation.
Mishima’s Pastoral
The Sound of Waves (潮騒, 1954) is Mishima’s most atypical novel — a pastoral romance modeled on the ancient Greek story of Daphnis and Chloe. Set on a small fishing island, it tells the simple love story of a young fisherman, Shinji, and a beautiful pearl diver, Hatsue, whose romance is opposed by the girl’s wealthy father. The novel is sunny, optimistic, and chaste — qualities found nowhere else in Mishima’s work. It was a bestseller in Japan and became his most widely read novel domestically. Western collectors prize it as a curiosity: evidence that Mishima could write happiness as well as darkness.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why is this so different from his other novels? Mishima deliberately wrote it as a classical exercise — an attempt to create something Apollonian and serene in contrast to his normally Dionysian sensibility. He later dismissed it as too popular and too simple.