![]() He also compares the sea to a woman because of its beauty and capriciousness-and because sailors constantly yearn for the sea but can never satisfy their thirst with it. As a sailor, he felt like he could see “his glory knifing toward him like a shark from some great distance in the darkly heaping sea,” and he always imagined dying in the ocean. For him, the sea represents his search for an alternative to life on land and his obsession with three things: glory, death, and women. But the sea is most significant to Ryuji. To Noboru, the sea represents the quest for power and adventure, while for Fusako, it tends to represent nostalgia and loss-specifically, the loss of her husband and her sense of loss while Ryuji is away on the Rakuyo. At the same time, the novel also shows that the sea is untamable and unknowable, which suggests that people can never fully achieve their dreams. The sea comes to mean many, often contradictory things over the course of the novel, but above all, it represents desire-and particularly Japan’s desire for power.
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