On suicide

In our culture, suicide is the result of insanity; nothing else. It is often described as a ‘cowardly’ refusal to face the problems of life. The idea that living might be a cowardly refusal to face the problems of death is not considered. People who kill themselves are thought to be motivated by some sort of disguised desire for life; witness the popular belief that Muslim suicide bombers are motivated by sex. During World War II, Japanese kamikaze pilots were thought to be motivated by Shinto superstition; there were rumors about their having been given drink and drugs in order to key them up for the mission; some said they were chained into their cockpits. All misguided attempts at understanding them. (In fact, most of the kamikaze pilots were not religious, and before their flights they indulged in nothing stronger than a flask of sake, a frugal meal, and some farewell poetry.)

A kamikaze pilot wrote, “May our death be as sudden and clean as the shattering of crystal!” (Compare the modern ideal of death: dying in bed, asleep, without a struggle.)

A Japanese military instructor told his student: “Never shirk facing death. If in doubt whether to live or die, it is always better to die.”

The kamikaze pilots sung a song with the lines,

Never think of winning!
Thoughts of victory will only bring defeat.
When we lose, let us press forward, ever forward!

When I was younger, I studied Japanese history for a while. One book I came across was “The Nobility of Failure: Tragic Heroes in the History of Japan”, by the Orientalist and translator Ivan Morris. I read about 20 pages and liked it so much I put it aside and didn’t read it for ten years.

Anyway, recently I finally finished the book. It is an attempt to examine the ‘failed hero’ in Japanese tradition. As Morris says, the failed hero is not a man who fights, achieves his objective, and then dies. It’s a hero who, despite superhuman strength, courage and spiritual purity, never achieves what he set out to do. He may even help produce exactly the outcome he opposed: did the kamikaze pilots convince the U.S. to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki? In the classic case, the hero’s failure is obvious and inevitable from the beginning (like Mishima’s 1970 attempt to restore the power of the emperor). Morris says, “he is the man whose single-minded sincerity will not allow him to make the manoeuvres and compromises that are so often needed for mundane success...His death is no temporary setback which will be redeemed by his followers, but represents an irrevocable collapse of the cause he has championed.”

Yet somehow the failed hero has more purchase in the Japanese imagination than the successful hero;. In a Western context, it is as if Napoleon’s military successes were a mere footnote to Waterloo, Elba and death.

[One gets the impression that Ivan Morris wrote this book partially as an attempt to cope with the suicide of his friend, the nihilist nationalist novelist Mishima Yukio, who wrote one of the first memoirs to be open about the author’s homosexuality (“Confessions of a Mask”). Morris doesn’t devote a chapter to Mishima, but he seems to bring his name up at every opportunity.]

If it isn’t obvious, I myself feel a great deal of sympathy with this sort of attitude to suicide. I remember reading Shakespeare’s long poem, “The Rape of Lucrece”, when I was rather young, and deciding that if I were ever raped I would definitely slit my throat and ask to be buried under the lilac bush in the back yard. A naïve, morbid child; but I still basically think the same way. If you are the type of person who believes, like too many modern Americans, that there is nothing in life worth dying for, I am not talking to you. Those of us who can understand dying for a cause might be able to take the extra step towards understanding the desire to die for a cause while knowing your death will do no practical good.

The recent biographical film about Hunter S. Thompson insisted that his suicide was ‘inexplicable’--that it must have been a result of mental illness or drugs. On the contrary, it seems to have been a considered, rational choice. But the makers of the film couldn’t accept that. I wish someone had told them this: a good biographer studies his subject’s interaction with his culture. A bad biographer imposes his culture’s standards upon his subject.