Customer Reviews

Suicidal Honor: General Nogi And the Writings of Mori Ogai And Natsume Soseki

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Get ready to tread through a minefield. Any book like this that focuses on suicide in Japan, especially samurai practices of "junshi" (following one's lord in death) is fated to grapple BOTH with American stereotypes of fanatic suicidal Japanese echoing faintly but discernibly from WWII propaganda overlapping oddly with romanticized fantasies of exotic samurai AND culturally essentialist discourses on "unique" Japanese values courtesy of somewhat creepy right-wingers in Japan itself. I don't envy Doris Bargen as she attempts to navigate this mess. Given the chance, I'm not sure I'd even try. So the fact that she mostly manages to make it through this Scylla and Charybdis with perhaps only a few minor mishaps is definitely to her credit and to the credit of this interesting interdisciplinary study.

And the book is certainly interdisciplinary, primarily a work of history and literary criticism coupled together but also incorporating insights from religious studies, anthropology, and a bit of armchair psychology, among other things. Actual samurai practices from Japan's premodern history are explored in light of cross-cultural comparisons with Ancient Rome and Pre-Columbian Mexico--specifically as these influence, inform, or otherwise shed light on General Nogi's shocking suicide following Emperor Meiji's death in 1912 and THEN the effect of this jolt on two of Japan's great novelists of the time, Mori Ogai and Natsume Soseki.

The resulting discussion is lively and interesting, written in an engagingly straightforward scholarly prose style very rare in literary studies nowadays. That said, the quality is sometimes a bit uneven. The history bit taking up the first half seems pretty solid, though the author sometimes imputes thoughts into her subjects' heads that are impossible to substantiate and kind of neither here nor there anyhow, and sometimes she uses questionable sources uncritically--for instance, information about the Nogi family's native home is gleaned from an English language tourism brochure from 1975, and the reign dates it gives for legendary or semi-legendary emperors are repeated without any warning to the unsuspecting generalist that these are mythohistorical, i.e. objectively bogus. As for the literature bit, the two chapters on Mori Ogai (who knew Nogi personally) are a bit thin on substance, consisting more of plot summary and obvious exposition than analysis (and these have been translated into English anyway in Historical Fiction of Mori Ogai (Unesco Collection of Representative Works Japanese Series)), and the conclusion that Ogai was a cultural curator for his contemporaries seems a tad meager a payoff. The final chapter on Natsume Soseki and his novel "Kokoro" is a good bit more substantial and intriguing, attempting to actually analyze what everyone else merely notes in passing, that Nogi's suicide influences the suicide of Sensei at the end of the novel. While no radical surprises jump out from this, there are quite a few clever insights to be had.

Since my interest and enthusiasm are more for Soseki than Ogai, this balance of quality worked out quite well for me, but those keener on Ogai are bound to feel a bit short-changed, I imagine. Still, there's enough in this book to make the book worthwhile for either party as well as for anyone interested in Japanese literature and history overall. Eminently readable and culling together many existing sources without extensive new archival research, this is a good book rather than a great one, a modest tome that takes a difficult subject and handles it well without a lot of hyped up groundbreaking critical interventions and the like. And there's no dishonor in that.

Doris Bargen's latest book, Suicidal Honor, is an investigation of General Maresuke Nogi's suicide in 1912 Japan. On 30 July of that year, the Emperor Meiji died. On September 13, General Nogi committed an outlawed form of ritual suicide, called "junshi", during the emperor's funeral procession in order to "follow his lord into death". As usual, Bargen delivers a solid work -- deeply researched, and meticulously written and edited.

Emperor Meiji's reign had spanned many changes, most notably the end of the shogunate as well as the beginning of Japan's modernization. By investigating General Nogi's suicide, Bargen intends to analyze "the cultural significance of General Nogi's expiatory act of self-sacrifice in a time of regime change". The first part of Bargen's book compares and contrasts ritual suicide in other cultures and explains the Japanese act of junshi in particular; the second part probes the life and death of General Nogi (as well as that of his wife, who committed suicide with him); and the latter sections, hoping to shed further light on Nogi's anachronistic act, analyze the topical literary works of Mori Ogai (Nogi's friend) and Natsume Soseki.

Suicidal Honor begins by investigating the seed that is Nogi's junshi. By its conclusion, the book has explored the topic from so many angles that it blooms like the chrysanthemum crests that decorate its chapters. General Nogi's junshi is a rich subject; and you will find that you are thinking not only about Nogi himself, but about so many other things as well -- Soseki's and Ogai's characters, Nogi's wife, women in Japan, the Meiji era, the differences between seppuku (or harakiri) and junshi... the list goes on. I recommend this book highly.

For a deeper understanding of Bargen's book, consider reading the following:

* Historical Fiction of Mori Ogai (Unesco Collection of Representative Works Japanese Series)
* Kokoro (Dover Books on Literature & Drama)