This paper appears to be the work of a student from quite a few years ago.

Seppuku and Jisatsu in Modern Japanese Literature
By Daniel Brown
November 13, 1997

from

http://www.utexas.edu/depts/grg/ustudent/gcraft/fall97/brown/essays/seppuku.html

Suicides in the texts of modern Japanese literature, according to Alan Wolfe in his essay "From Seppuku to Jisatsu: Suicide as a National Allegory," take on two distinctive forms. The first of these forms is the traditional ritual suicide called seppuku. Yukio Mishima, who not only wrote about seppuku but also performed it, recently glamorized this type of suicide. Seppuku is a ritual death rite with an ancient history in Japanese culture. The opposing type of suicide is the modern, intellectual suicide referred to as jisatsu. In Japanese literature, the best known of this type of suicide is committed by the sensei in Natsume Soseki's Kokoro. Jisatsu is a result of alienation and the fragmentation of society caused by modernization. Both seppuku and jisatsu are two differing suicide forms separated by motive and process, yet the distinction between the two is unclear due to anachronistic persuasions caused by conflict between modernization and the legacy of the Emperor.

The act of seppuku involves the insertion of a blade into one's own stomach. The person performing the suicide then continues by cutting across the length of the abdomen. The act is finished after an assistant finishes the suicide by cutting off the dying person's head. Seppuku has been a sacred ceremony since ancient Japan that has been reserved for the privileged samurai class. It was used to follow one's lord in death as an act of loyalty and dignity and also as a means of redeeming failure through an honorable death. In modern Japan, the act of killing oneself has taken on different forms and meanings. Seppuku in modern times has taken an anti-modern stance as evidenced by Yukio Mishima's literary characters and his own theatrical suicide.

Seppuku in Japanese society climaxed at the end of the Meiji period as General Nogi Maresuke and his wife took their lives after the death of the Meiji Emperor in 1912. For General Nogi, seppuku was not only meant as a following of one's lord in death, but also as a way to regain his honor, which he felt had been taken from him after losing the Seinan War. While this instance of seppuku perhaps presents the act in its purest sense, the modernization of Japan has muddled the interpretations and meanings of many of these ritual acts. For instance, Ogai in his 1914 text "The Incident at Sakai" describes a group seppuku performed in 1868 before a French consul as reparations for an ambiguous incidence involving the death of sixteen French soldiers. The undaunting performance of seppuku as described by Ogai disturbed the French witnesses so much that they ran for the harbor after its completion. In this event, seppuku is more than just an honorable death, but is also a means to assert Japanese authority over the newly encountered West.

In 1970, the dramatic seppuku of Yukio Mishima mimicked this ancient ritual. Like the protagonist of his novel Patriotism, Mishima uses seppuku to display his unfaltering nationalism and loyalty to the emperial system. Mishima's seppuku exhibited an overwhelming desire for control over life and death that resembled his political beliefs of fascism and military superiority. Mishima's regimented lifestyle is evidenced by his timely delivery of the last part of his novel The Sea of Fertility on the day that he performed seppuku. His seppuku was filled with his affection for fascism and the resurrection of a romanticized samurai ideal. What Mishima hoped for in his demonstration is that Japan would recognize the romanticism of his ordeal and return to the Emperor system. However, while Japanese society largely dismissed his seppuku as an embarrassment, the West was more than willing to accept Mishima as embodying the true spirit of Japanese society. This seems to be due to a condescending attitude by the West that posits Japan as reminiscent of an idyllic past lifestyle instead of welcoming modernization. As a highly modernized nation itself, it would make more sense to value Japanese critics of Mishima rather than just his Western critics.

Unlike Mishima's scripted lifestyle, his main character in The Mask suffers from a lack of the ability to control the events in his life. Although sharing Mishima's passion for blood and masculinity, the protagonist doesn't bear resemblance to Mishima's devotion of systematic order. Even concerning death, the main character states that "there's no need for me to take such decisive action myself, not when I'm surrounded by such a bountiful harvest of so many types of death - death in an air raid, death at one's post of duty, death in the military service, death on the battlefield…a criminal who has been sentenced to death does not commit suicide." All the death scenarios that the protagonist in The Mask envisions are scenes in which the character has no control over his death, though he anxiously awaits whatever ill will should come his way. The character's desire for his death is not guided by any sense of modern alienation, but rather by the lust for blood and violence and the belief that it is romantic.

In Natsume Soseki's Kokoro, the killing of oneself is presented in an entirely different manner, termed jisatsu. In Kokoro, the first jisatsu is that of the Sensei's friend K. The process of his death involves him killing himself alone in a room by cutting open an artery. One way this contrasts with seppuku is that his death is instantaneous, unlike seppuku, which is extremely painful and unceasing. The reason for K's act of jisatsu is vastly different than that of either Nogi's or Mishima's seppuku. K's note gives as his reason for killing himself simply the explanation that it was because he would never become the sort of man he wanted to be. His death thus relates to the notion that he has no control over his life. The sensei's suicide in Kokoro is somewhat different because it is done in succession to the Meiji Emperor's death and General Nogi's seppuku. The sensei feels that he belongs to the same era as the Emperor and General Nogi, but his death is not in junshi, but rather is due to the sense of hopelessness that he feels after their deaths. The sensei feels no obligation to his nation, nor does he feel that he will redeem honor through death. The sensei's motivation comes from the sense of loss associated with the end of his era, the Meiji Era. Near the end of his letter the sensei addresses to the student "Perhaps you will not understand clearly why I am about to die, no more than I can fully understand why General Nogi killed himself. You and I belong to different eras…" The sensei is speaking here of the sense of loss that only those who went through the demystification of the Emperor could feel.

Seppuku and jisatsu are two different means of achieving the same end. In modern society, seppuku stands for an anti-modern desire to return to a more paternalistic past. Jisatsu is the trans-cultural alienated suicide that results from alienation in modern society. In Japanese society, this alienation may also stem from the death of the Emperor and the subsequent loss of a cultural center.