Voluntary Death in Japan.

This essay on suicide in Japan, originally published in French, is a highly idiosyncratic personal meditation, not a disciplined work of social history. We learn from the dust jacket that its author, Maurice Pinguet (1929-1991) taught at universities in France and Japan, served for four years in the 1960s as director of the Franco-Japanese Institute in Tokyo, and was regarded as "a leading authority on Japanese culture and civilization." Pinguet's scholarly discipline, if any, is not revealed, either there or in the text itself, which is a rambling disquisition that encompasses mythical and literary Greco-Roman and Christian commentary on suicide, more recent European views, bits of sociological thought and statistics, odds and ends of information from elsewhere in the world, and a historical survey of suicide and related phenomena in Japan that extends from the age of the gods to the death of Mishima Yukio. Pinguet's main point seems to be that in his view Christian (Western?) disapproval notwithstanding, the suicide or "voluntary death" of Japanese samurai and others constitutes an honorable expression of autonomous self worth and mature control of one's own destiny.

Pinguet has a rich appreciation of the complexity of suicide and of the ambiguities of motive that underlie it. Early in the book he tells us that modern Japan is not atypical in terms of who and how many commit suicide, how suicide rates fluctuate over time, where and how people kill themselves, or, insofar as anyone can determine motive, why they do it. Comparable information on suicide in premodern times does not exist, so one cannot credibly pronounce in that regard on degree of typicalness.

The problem with this situation is that it suggests the presence of a non-story whereas Pinguet wishes to tell a story. The story he wants to tell is that of exotic Japan, land of willing suicide and associated forms of violence. It proves to be a meandering, roughly chronological story in which myth, folk tale, fiction, doctrinal exegesis, and documented event mingle cheerfully (together with external oddments) in an undifferentiated world of fact, metaphor, and meta-history. The doings of the gods, seppuku of samurai, and love suicides of kabuki drama receive due attention before Pinguet moves into the bloody history of modern times, culminating with the kamikaze pilots of World War II and ending with Mishima's unhappy dispatch in 1970. Pinguet appears to have been touched by Mishima's death, not unlike Ivan Morris, the distinguished English scholar of Japanese literature who was moved by it to write his Nobility of Failure (Meridian, 1975), a series of vignettes on defeated heroes that juxtaposed an allegedly special Japanese admiration for "the courageous loser" (xi) against "our" (Western?) admiration for winners.

From Pinguet's endnotes it appears that his history is largely based on works in French and English, and in overall terms his sense of Japanese history reflects the outlook of the 1950s. His interpretive framework, like that of Morris, is dyadic, "us and them" "Western man" and "homo japonicus." Readers seeking a comparable work could look at Morris's book, but perhaps a more apt comparison is with Lafcadio Hearn's Japan, An Interpretation (MacMillan, 1904). Writing around 1900 and deeply influenced by Herbert Spencer, Hearn juxtaposed the Aryan race, with its powerfully progressive civilization, against brave but quaint little Japan, which had only a few decades earlier been more than two millenia behind the Aryans in terms of civilized progress.

Pinguet has scuttled both the racial labels and diachronic contrasts that Hearn found instructive, but he has retained the basic dyadic framework, keeping the social categories intact but identifying them in cultural rather than racial terms. From a European perspective this construction of self and other may well have political value, both domestic and international, but from an American perspective it creates more problems than it solves. It complicates the American quest for a usable self identity and misidentifies this society's place in the global community of today and tomorrow. Because of this difference in social locations, Pinguet's "Western man" (better identified perhaps as a French Catholic?) becomes, from an American perspective, the other, the alien, the "them" that stands juxtaposed to an as-yet unidentified "us." Inadvertently, then, this translation may help Americans in their struggle to break out of an anachronistic self image and to construct a new and viable one.

Conrad Totman Yale University