Das verratene Meer

Noboru has become involved with a gang of delinquent youths which is a great worry to his mother Fusako. She has been a widow for eight years, but has fallen in love with the ship’s officer Ryuji Tsukazaki and wishes to remarry. When the seaman shows Fusako and Noboru his ship, the boy is proud of his future stepfather and announces the good news to his friends. They however view Ryuji merely as an adult standing in the way of their freedom. Ryuji confesses to Noboru that his life has often been less than heroic. This strengthens Noboru’s wishes that Ryuji will remain faithful to the sea – the symbol of space and freedom for the youths. 
Ryuji makes Fusako an offer of marriage and intends to end his maritime career. When Noboru reports this to his gang, the youths resolve to make a “hero” out of the officer once and for all: the adolescents sentence him to death. Noboru, whose admiration for Ryuji has transformed itself into hate and contempt, lures the former seaman to the gang’s meeting place. The unsuspecting Ryuji admits his “betrayal” of the sea and is consequently murdered in cold blood by the gang. 

"I think it is necessary to bear in mind that the piece has no moral in the western sense. Things happen because they are fated to happen, i.e. as though by chance and in nature. We should not judge, should not apply any western or Christian criteria. The piece shows how people meet and what the consequences of those meetings are. Every woman can identify with Fusako, every man with Ryuji, and each and every one of us with the novice who happens to fall in with a ringleader at college and to be taken up into his gang of boyisch, almost infantile, but precocious classmates. It is important that these lads behave like normal or, rather, abnormally gifted college boys, we must be able to like them, in particular we must be able to sympathize with Noboru, who is the main character in the opera. […] They are no perverts or skinheads or rockers, but sensitive, wounded creatures. As the result, as it were, of the unfortunate accident of cerebral dysfunction, their games suddenly become horribly real. But they are no criminals. Something happens to them. An intellectual adventure that goes too far and gets out of hand. They overstep the mark."