Lo, more than carrion smell
On summer days of burning sky . . .
Lo, my name reeks
Lo, more than that of a sturdy child
Who is said to belong to one who rejects him . . .
To whom shall I speak today?
Brothers are mean,
One goes to strangers for affection . . .
To whom shall I speak today?
I am burdened with grief
For lack of an intimate . . .
Death is before me today
[Like] a sick man’s recovery,
Like going outdoors after confinement . . .
Like a man’s longing to see his home
When he has spent many years in captivity.
WRITTEN FOUR THOUSAND YEARS AGO in the first intermediate period of the Middle Kingdom in Egypt, these lines are part of the first recorded reference to suicide. In “The Dispute Between a Man and His Ba,” a man who is tired of life and buffeted by bad luck considers killing himself. Angered by his complaints, his soul, or ba, threatens to leave him. The man implores his ba to remain, since to be abandoned by his soul would deprive him of an afterlife. His ba urges him to enjoy life, to surrender himself to pleasure. These lines are taken from the man’s final answer, four poems in which he deplores the greed and injustice of the times, laments his isolation, and speaks longingly of death. In the end his ba agrees to stay; it is not clear whether the man goes on to kill himself.
The seven sheets of papyrus that make up “Dispute” describe an interior landscape not unlike that of almost any lonely, despairing person considering suicide today. Just as Dana Evans invented insults to reinforce her self-loathing, the anonymous Egyptian sings out his own curses: “Lo, my name reeks / Lo, more than carrion smell.” Just as Justin Spoonhour was overwhelmed by the cruelty of the world around him, the Egyptian is stung by the indifference of society: “I am burdened with grief / For lack of an intimate.” His final words to his ba, in fact, perfectly articulate the internal journey of a suicidal person: from loss of self-esteem, to despair of finding surcease from pain, to a conception of death as a refuge—“Like a man’s longing to see his home / When he has spent many years in captivity.” From these seven sheets we can trace an unbroken line of loneliness, dejection, and hopelessness that has been common to suicidal people for four thousand years.
Yet if the interior landscape of the suicidal person has changed little over four millennia, the way we view the act of suicide has varied widely. Today in the Western world we think of suicide primarily as a psychiatric problem. We study it, search for its causes, and struggle to prevent what we consider a tragic and sometimes shameful act. The ancient Egyptian would have found this attitude puzzling. In his time and place earthly existence was considered a mere prelude to blissful afterlife. Death was not an end but a beginning. There were no social or religious prohibitions against suicide, and the Egyptian would certainly not have been considered mentally ill. For him suicide was not only an acceptable escape from an intolerable life but a path to blessed immortality. “Truly, he who is yonder will stand in the sun-bark,” he tells his ba, “making its bounty flow to the temples.” During the turbulent period when “Dispute” was written, suicide seems to have been frequent. In “The Admonitions of a Sage,” a popular story of the time, a wise man observes that suicide is so common the crocodiles are glutted with despairing people who have hurled themselves into the river.
Since the beginning of man, in all times and in all places, there has been suicide, but the way a culture judges its suicides varies from place to place and time to time, largely depending on how that culture views death. Attitudes have ranged from fierce condemnation and hostility to mild disapproval and tolerance, to acceptance, encouragement, and incorporation into the sociocultural system. If our ancient Egyptian had killed himself in pre-Christian Scandinavia, for example, he would have been guaranteed a place in Viking paradise. If he had taken his life during the Roman Empire, his death would have been honored as a glorious demonstration of his wisdom. If he had cut open his stomach in feudal Japan, he would have been praised as a man of principle. If he had killed himself in fifteenth-century Metz, however, his corpse would have been crammed into a barrel and floated down the Moselle. In seventeenth-century France his corpse would have been dragged through the streets, hanged upside down, then thrown on the public garbage heap. In seventeenth-century England his estate would have been forfeited to the crown and his body buried at a crossroads with a stake through the heart.
According to Christianity suicide was a sin against God and a crime against the state, and such punishments were designed to deter despairing people from its evil. These penalties (often waived if the suicide was deemed insane) gradually disappeared during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The last recorded crossroads burial of an English suicide took place in 1823, when a man named Griffiths was interred at the intersection of Eaton Street, Grosvenor Place, and King’s Road, London. By that time the scientific study of suicide had begun, and the question became not whether suicide was a sin or a crime but why it occurred. Gradually, suicide was seen not as a moral issue but as an act of pathology. Still, the rationality of science hardly dispelled the opprobrium attached to the act: In England, confiscation of a suicide’s property was not abolished until 1870, and as late as 1955 a man was sentenced to two years in prison for trying to kill himself. Punishment for attempted suicide was finally abolished in 1961 when Parliament passed the Suicide Act. Even after that, moral outrage found legal approval. In 1969 an Isle of Man court ordered a teenager who had attempted suicide to be flogged.
When John Roscoe, an English missionary, lived among the Baganda of central Africa for several years in the late nineteenth century, he found that the lives of the Baganda, like those of most primitive tribespeople, were circumscribed by an elaborate web of myths. “The Baganda were very superstitious about suicides,” wrote the Reverend Mr. Roscoe. “They took innumerable precautions to remove the body and destroy the ghost, to prevent the latter from causing further trouble.” Some of those precautions must have seemed familiar to the Englishman. After a suicide the body was taken “to a distant place where cross-roads met” and burned, in an attempt to destroy the ghost, using as fuel the tree or hut from which he had hanged himself. (People would not live in the hut in which a suicide had taken place for fear they might be tempted to follow suit.) When women passed the spot, they threw grass or twigs on the site to prevent the suicide’s restless ghost from entering them and being reborn.
Contemporary historians suggest that Christian punishments of suicide echoed the purification rituals of primitive tribes. But the law that condemned Mr. Griffiths to burial at a London crossroads in 1823 was born of moral disgust, while the Baganda custom was born of fear that the suicide’s ghost would return to impregnate young tribeswomen. (The same precautions were taken with the corpses of twins and of children born feetfirst.) In the former instance it was the act itself that provoked horror; in the latter it was the consequence of the act.
Primitive fear of the suicide’s ghost stemmed in part from a general fear of the dead, especially of those who met a sudden or violent death. Their ghosts were considered particularly restless because of the desperate state of mind in which they left life. The soul had not made a smooth break; it was considered “unclean.” Extensive purification rituals were performed to expiate the “blood guilt,” to appease the ghost of the slain, and to dissuade it from haunting the living. Such precautions were crucial in the case of suicides, whose ghosts were notoriously malevolent. Not only had the suicide spilled blood, he had spilled family blood, which was even more “powerful.” And while the ghost of a murdered man haunted only his murderer, the ghost of a suicide might seek revenge against an entire tribe, an entire world that had troubled him. In various cultures a suicide’s ghost was believed to cause tempests, famine, hailstorms, or drought, or to make barren the earth that it touched.
Some tribes, therefore, like the Baganda, buried a suicide’s corpse at a crossroads so that the ghost might not find its way home. In other tribes the corpse was mutilated or burned so that the suicide’s spirit would be unable to “walk.” In others the body was buried far from the graves of his kinsmen so that his soul might be quarantined. The Bannaus of Cambodia buried suicides in a corner of the forest; natives of Dahomey left the bodies of suicides in the fields to be devoured by wild beasts. And Alabama Indians threw them into the river. Among the Wajagga of East Africa, after a man hanged himself a goat was sacrificed with the same noose in hopes of mollifying the dead man’s soul.
Such measures, it was hoped, would isolate the suicide’s soul and render it unable to cause mischief. The Jakuts believed that the soul of a suicide never came to rest; the Omaha Indians believed that a self-murderer was excluded from the spirit world; the Paharis of India believed that the suicide’s ghost hovered eternally between heaven and earth. Both the Iroquois and Hidatsa Indians maintained that the souls of suicides occupied a separate village in the land of the dead because their presence made other dead souls uneasy. The Dyaks of Borneo said that suicides went to a special place where those who had drowned themselves lived forever up to their waists in water and those who had poisoned themselves lived in houses built of poisonous wood, surrounded by plants that emitted noxious fumes. The Dakotas believed that a suicide’s ghost was forever doomed to drag behind him the tree on which he had hanged himself—hence women hanged themselves from the smallest trees that would bear their weight.
The belief that a suicide’s ghost might return to pester the living went hand in hand with the notion of revenge suicide. In some primitive societies suicide was committed as a direct act of vengeance, in the belief that as a ghost one was more easily able to persecute his persecutors. “Man has an enemy whom he cannot fight successfully,” observed an ancient proverb. “He can successfully disgrace his enemy by hanging himself in his enemy’s front yard.” An ancient Chinese law placed responsibility for the death on the person who had supposedly caused it, and people frequently killed themselves to entangle an adversary in legal proceedings, to embarrass him, or to ensure his harassment by the suicide’s angry ghost. The ghost was believed to haunt the place where the act had been committed, trying to persuade others to follow his example and attempting to strangle those who chose to live.
Some revenge suicides worked more directly. The Tshi-speaking peoples of Africa’s Gold Coast believed that if, before committing suicide, a person blamed his act on another, that person was required to kill himself using the same method unless the suicide’s family was financially compensated. For many years India had several accepted forms of revenge suicide. In certain areas of southern India, if a man plucked out his eye or killed himself after a quarrel, his adversary was required to do the same either to himself or to a relative. An eye for an eye, a suicide for a suicide, was the rule. A woman who had been insulted might smash her head against the door of the woman who insulted her, whereupon that woman had to do the same. If a woman poisoned herself, the woman who “drove her to her death” followed suit; if she refused, her house was burned down and her cattle stolen. Until recently a legal method of debt collection in India was to sit at the debtor’s door and refuse food or drink until the charge was paid. If “sitting dharna,” as it was called, ended in starvation, the creditor believed that public opinion would avenge him upon his enemy. When one of the Rajput rajas levied a war tax on the Brahmans, a number of the wealthiest, having argued in vain, stabbed themselves with daggers in front of the raja while cursing him with their last breaths. Thus denounced, the raja was shunned even by his friends.
The notion of revenge suicide or “killing oneself upon the head of another” may seem archaic, but the primitive tribesman who hangs himself on his enemy’s doorstep provides a literal illustration of Freud’s theory that suicide is a sort of inverted murder in which anger meant for another is turned inward on the self. Today, revenge, conscious or unconscious, remains a powerful motive in many suicides, although the punishment exacted is, of course, more psychological than physical. A particularly cruel example, pointed out by English historian Henry Romilly Fedden, is that of the nineteenth-century Frenchman whose mistress was unfaithful. Before killing himself he told his servant that after his death a candle should be made of his fat and carried, lighted, to the woman. To accompany it he composed a note telling her that as he burned for her in life, so, too, he burned for her in death.
Among most tribes, primitive fear of suicide was not based on moral judgment, although precautions taken to assuage vengeful ghosts might eventually have given birth to the idea that the act of suicide was in itself, like murder, something “wrong.” (And precautions may have evolved into punishments.) In fact, certain cultures tolerated and even encouraged suicide. The Goths believed that those who died naturally were doomed to languish eternally in caves full of venomous creatures; therefore, old men threw themselves off a precipice called the Rock of the Forefathers. The Iglulik are among several Eskimo tribes who believed that a violent death ensured a place in paradise, which they called the Land of Day; those who died by natural causes were confined to the Narrow Land. In some cultures elderly suicides were provoked by the belief that a man entered into the next world in the same condition as he left this one; consequently, it behooved him to take his own life before he grew feeble. The ancient Celts considered natural death shameful, and men who threw themselves from cliffs were celebrated with song. “They are a nation lavish of their blood and eager to face death,” wrote the Roman poet Silius Italicus of the Spanish Celts. “As soon as the Celt has passed the age of mature strength, he endures the flight of time impatiently and scorns to await old age; the term of his existence depends upon himself.” Among the Chukchee of Siberia, those who died voluntarily were said to have the best abode in the afterlife: “They dwell on the red blaze of the aurora borealis and pass their time playing ball with a walrus-skull.” In pre-Christian Scandinavia only those who died a violent death were permitted to enter Valhalla, where they fought mock battles and drank from the skulls of their enemies; Vikings unlucky enough not to die in combat often slew themselves with swords or threw themselves from cliffs. Odin, the Viking god of war, was himself said to be a suicide. As death approached, he assembled his followers and stabbed himself in nine places, declaring that he would join the gods at their immortal feast, where he would welcome all those who died with weapons in their hands.
Recommending violent death as a path to paradise was a way of promoting a properly bellicose spirit in warrior societies. Elsewhere, “economic suicide” by the elderly and infirm was encouraged during periods of hardship so that there would be sufficient rations for the tribe to survive. In some cultures sacrificial suicides were carried out to honor the gods or to ensure a good harvest. Among the Aztecs, a young man was selected each year to impersonate the god Tezcatlipoca. He received the homage of his people for one year, at the end of which he offered himself up to death at the altar, and his living heart was cut out. Each year, in the mountains of Tien-tai in China, several Buddhist monks sacrificed their lives, hoping to obtain nirvana for themselves and protection from evil spirits for their community. On the appointed day the monk, observed by a crowd of spectators, entered a furnace and sat on a wooden seat. The door was shut and the fuel lit. Afterward the ashes were collected, washed, and revered as the relics of a saint.
Such suicides were ostensibly voluntary, but social custom rendered them all but compulsory. In India, when sacrificial suicides were, on occasion, rescued by the military, the victims escaped whenever possible and returned to embrace death. Similarly, according to an old custom in Malabar, people who were taken ill prayed to their idol for recovery. Once healthy they fattened themselves up for a year or more and then on a festival day gratefully cut off their heads before the idol who had saved their life.
Some contemporary suicides kill themselves in the fantasy that their death may reunite them with a lost loved one. In primitive societies such suicides were common, but the act was compelled less by grief than by cultural tradition. “There is another world, and they who kill themselves to accompany their friends thither will live with them there.” This Druid maxim expresses the motivation behind a custom dating back to ancient Egypt, where wives and servants took poison and were buried with their pharaohs, along with weapons, furniture, perfumes, combs, tools for grinding corn, and anything else that would make life in the next world comfortable. As Egyptian civilization progressed, the corpses of wives and servants were replaced by symbolic figurines; in other societies, however, the practice persisted. In Siam, after the king’s corpse was laid in his grave, his wives, concubines, and ministers of state drank poison and were placed next to him along with six horses, twelve camels or elephants, and twenty hunting dogs, thus providing the king with means of diversion in the afterlife. In Scythia, Herodotus tells us, a king was buried with his cook, butler, groom, steward, chamberlain, and one of his concubines—all of them strangled—who were expected to wait on their master in the next world as they had in this. A year after the king’s death fifty of his servants and fifty of his horses were strangled, stuffed with chaff, and mounted on scaffolds around his tomb, each dead servant riding a dead horse, ever prepared to fight for his dead master. At the interment of the king of Benin in western Africa, the ruler’s favorite lords and servants leaped into his tomb, vying for the honor of being buried alive with their master’s corpse. According to Herodotus, the death of a Thracian man triggered a “keen competition” among his wives to determine which among them he had most loved. The winner was slain over the grave and buried with her husband.
The custom of a widow or concubine taking her life on the death of her husband has been practiced in nearly every part of the world. (The gender reverse of this has seldom been observed, although in one tribe on the Gold Coast a man of low rank who married a sister of the king was expected to kill himself on the death of his wife. “Should he outrage native custom and neglect to do so,” noted one anthropologist, “a hint is conveyed to him that he will be put to death, which usually produces the desired effect.”) The best-known example of wifely suicide is suttee, named for a heroine of Hindu mythology who threw herself onto her husband’s funeral pyre to prove her devotion. Historically, the act has been a blend of choice and coercion. A Hindu wife is expected to dedicate herself to her husband—no matter how miserably he may treat her—even after his death. The Padmapurana, an eleventh-century religious text, outlined a virtuous woman’s duties to her husband—“whatever his defects may be, a wife should always look upon him as her god”—and instructed her that when her husband dies, she should “allow herself to be burnt alive on the same funeral pyre; then everyone will praise her virtue.” Hindu widows are bypassed by inheritance laws; they are forbidden to attend wedding or birthday celebrations or to wear jewelry, makeup, or bright clothing. The alternative is suttee, for which a widow is honored above all other women, bringing respect to her memory and to her family.
Suttee was already in vogue when Alexander the Great invaded India in 327 BC, and when the English arrived two millennia later, they were horrified to find it still practiced widely; in 1821 there were 2,366 reported cases. Outraged by this “primitive act,” the British declared it illegal in 1829—only six years after they abolished stake-and-crossroads burial in their own country. But the custom persisted in remote areas well into the twentieth century. In 1987, in the village of Deorala, several days after her husband’s death from a ruptured appendix, eighteen-year-old Roop Kanwar climbed onto his funeral pyre and cradled his head in her lap. The pyre of sandalwood and coconuts soaked with clarified butter was set ablaze and she burned to death. Twelve days later, more than one hundred thousand Rajputs gathered in Deorala to glorify her act. The village took on a carnival atmosphere; booths were set up to sell pictures of the dead couple, vendors sold refreshments, and a loudspeaker system was installed to help locate lost children. Kanwar’s suicide also inspired international outrage, protests by Indian feminists, and the enactment of federal legislation providing the death penalty for anyone convicted of abetting suttee. Fifteen years later, when a sixty-five-year-old woman burned to death on her husband’s funeral pyre in the village of Tamoli, her sons were accused of forcing her into suttee because they wanted her property and were arrested for murder. “The government of Madhya Pradesh will not tolerate a few demented people dragging the entire state into prehistoric times,” said the minister for rural development in the central Indian state.
Scholars of self-destruction classify such acts as “institutional” or “ritual” suicides—deaths that are all but demanded by cultural tradition—as if they were embarrassing anachronisms that had nothing in common with suicides in the “civilized” world. They are thus dismissed as the acts of primitives. Yet in Japan for thousands of years suicide has been an acceptable, often honorable, way out of intolerable situations. “The Japanese calendar of saints,” wrote one nineteenth-century Western historian, “is not filled with reformers, alms-givers and founders of hospitals or orphanages, but is overcrowded with canonized suicides and committers of hara-kiri. Even today, no man more . . . surely draws homage to his tomb, securing even apotheosis, than the suicide, though he may have committed a crime.”
The Japanese attitude toward suicide is, in large part, based on a Buddhist tradition that places less value on life in this world than on life in the next. Existence on earth is ephemeral, the body is merely a temporary lodging of the soul, and biological life is not only meaningless but filled with suffering. Death is the point at which a person makes contact with the eternal world. If a person acquits himself well at the moment of death, offenses committed during his earthly life are forgiven. In some cases suicide can be the most exquisite death of all.
Historically, suicide in Japan has enjoyed not only religious tolerance but state approval. The romantic aura that surrounds suicide grew out of the development of seppuku, a traditional form of suicide better known outside Japan as hara-kiri, or “belly-cutting.” It was practiced by the samurai, or military class, who followed an ethical code known as Bushido—“the way of the knights.” At the heart of Bushido was the creed of loyalty to one’s lord or to any matter of principle. When a bushi, or knight, was forced to choose between two courses of action, one of which involved the sacrifice of principle and the other the sacrifice of life, he unhesitatingly chose the latter. At the same time a man raised in the samurai tradition was taught from an early age that a samurai’s most important trait was to suppress outward displays of emotion, be it pleasure or pain. The supreme test of a samurai’s self-discipline and devotion to principle was the act of seppuku.
Seppuku originated about a thousand years ago during the beginning of Japanese feudalism as an honorable way for a soldier to avoid the humiliation of capture. By the seventeenth century it was widely used as a death penalty for the samurai. While common criminals were hung in the town square, a member of the military class condemned to death might be allowed to expiate his crime by his own hand. Thus, obligatory seppuku was a privilege granted by the feudal lord, saving the samurai the shame of being handed over to the public executioner. Members of the military class were trained to prepare for the possibility of voluntary death by self-disembowelment, and warriors frequently rehearsed the seppuku ceremony, in which every step was prescribed by custom.
A noble suspected of misconduct or of disloyalty would receive a letter from the emperor politely hinting that he must die. The letter was often accompanied by a jeweled dagger. On the appointed day, clothed in ceremonial dress, the doomed man knelt on a red mat on a small platform built for the occasion in his baronial hall or in the temple. Friends and officials formed a silent semicircle around him. After prayer the emperor’s envoy handed the dagger to the noble, who publicly confessed his wrongs. The noble stripped down to the traditional loincloth, plunged the dagger into the left side of his abdomen, drew it across to the right, then turned the blade and cut upward. As he fell forward, the kaishaku, a friend of the noble, severed the noble’s head with a long sword. The bloodstained dagger was taken back to the lord as proof of his noble’s fealty.
Often, a disloyal noble anticipated the wishes of his lord and committed seppuku without prompting. There was incentive for this: if death had been demanded by the lord, only half the samurai’s property was forfeited to the state; if voluntary, his dishonor was erased and his family inherited his full fortune. Over the years voluntary seppuku became common in a variety of circumstances: to follow one’s dead lord into the next world; to avoid beheading by the enemy in a lost battle; to restore injured honor in a situation where revenge was impossible; to protest the conduct of a superior; to admit an error; to keep a secret; to turn one’s lord from a course of action that might injure his reputation. Whatever the motive, seppuku ensured the samurai a traditional burial and a respected memory.
Seppuku eventually extended beyond the military class and became the national form of honorable suicide. It is believed that during the feudal ages some fifteen hundred cases of seppuku occurred each year, more than half of them voluntary. “The Japanese are an obstinate, capricious, resolute and whimsical people,” observed Montesquieu. “They have a natural contempt of death, and rip open their bellies for the least fancy.” In 1868, twenty samurai involved in the murder of a French officer were condemned to commit seppuku before the French ambassador. The latter found it difficult to appreciate this gesture, and after eleven of the soldiers had proved their remorse, he reprieved the remaining knights. While the practice appalled foreigners, it remained sacred to the Japanese; the following year a member of the Japanese parliament proclaimed seppuku “the very shrine of the Japanese national spirit and the embodiment in practice of devotion to principle.”
Although obligatory suicide was prohibited by law in 1873 and the frequency of voluntary seppuku declined, it continued to be practiced—and acclaimed—as a noble death. In 1891, protesting the failure of the government to take action against Russian encroachments on Japan’s northern border, Lieutenant Ohara Takeyoshi became a national hero by disemboweling himself in front of the graves of his ancestors in Tokyo. After the Japanese-Chinese War, when Japan allowed Port Arthur to be occupied by the Russians, more than forty Japanese army officers committed seppuku in protest. But seppuku has often been chosen under less ostensibly heroic circumstances. In 1929, for instance, the almost 250 recorded cases of seppuku included rebels making political protests, railway watchmen atoning for accidents resulting from their negligence, and teenagers reprimanding their drunken fathers. That same year a Japanese naval captain at the Moscow embassy, taunted by his Russian teacher about his unflinching loyalty to the emperor, lost his temper and threw a chair at the woman, striking her on the hand. The mortified captain saw only one way to redeem his honor. He gave three thousand rubles to the teacher, wrote his will, and, kneeling in front of a photograph of the emperor, committed seppuku.
Seppuku is, of course, only one of many methods of suicide used in Japan. It is not the method that distinguishes Japanese suicide, however, so much as its central role in the national tradition. There exists, in fact, a special vocabulary to describe various social genres of suicide. The naval captain who killed himself following the quarrel with his teacher was committing kashitsushi—suicide to admit failure or to atone for a mistake. Such suicides are a frequent occurrence in a country that places a premium on competition. In one recent year, for example, 275 company directors killed themselves after business disappointments or corruption scandals. Studies have attributed the high rate of Japanese adolescent suicide to fierce competition in schools. Failure to pass the exam for entrance to a university—or failure to be admitted to a prestigious university—brings shame to both student and family and is often an occasion for kashitsu-shi. The boys who committed seppuku to protest their father’s drunkenness were committing kangen-shi—a way of criticizing a superior in a society where few modes of criticism are available. A well-known example of gisei-shi—sacrificial suicide—was practiced by the kamikaze pilots of World War II, about twenty-two hundred of whom plunged to their deaths shouting, “Tenno heika banzai”—“Long live the emperor!” And though the compulsory suicide of wife, retainers, and slaves following a lord’s death was outlawed in AD 59, junshi—suicide following a master’s death—persisted. In 1912, all of Japan was inspired when sixty-three-year-old General Kiten Nogi, beloved hero of the 1904–5 war with Russia, and his wife committed seppuku following the death of Emperor Mutsuhito. “He mingles with the gods on high, my mighty sovereign lord,” wrote Nogi, “and, with intensely yearning heart, I follow heavenward.”
Suicide committed by more than one person is called shinju (literally “inside the heart”). Jyoshi shinju—love-pact suicide—became widespread toward the end of the seventeenth century, when increasingly rigid class stratification and strict codes of behavior forbade love between unmarried people. Kabuki and Bunraku (puppet) drama is full of love-pact suicide, usually involving a commoner and a geisha. Their union forbidden in this world, they kill themselves, often by tying themselves together with a rope and drowning, to ensure their union in the next. With arranged marriages the rule until recently, jyoshi shinju continued to flourish. In 1954 there were almost one thousand cases, and a few years later, in a poll asking teenagers what to do about a love that parents opposed, 45 percent answered that the “most beautiful” solution was double suicide. In 1985, when their marriage plans were forbidden by their families because they were said to be too old, a seventy-year-old man and a sixty-nine-year-old woman, both widowed more than twenty-five years, committed jyoshi shinju by hanging themselves in a hotel room.
Oyako shinju—parent-child suicide—is still common. Plagued by poverty, unable to pay back loans, or humiliated by spouses, some parents kill their children and then kill themselves. In Japan, being an orphan has traditionally been considered a fate worse than death, and oyako shinju is often portrayed as an act of devotion. The majority of cases involve the mother, often under threat of impending divorce. In Japan, where women are trained to show obedience, divorcées often have difficulty finding respectable jobs, and in some instances, even their own families will not take them in. Some four hundred examples of oyako shinju are believed to occur each year. In several recent cases a mother, despondent because her sixteen-year-old son was depressed about his forthcoming school entrance exams, murdered her son and attempted to gas herself; an unemployed man and a woman who suffered from heart disease strangled their eighteen-year-old daughter and then gassed themselves; a woman suffering from stomach trouble strangled her two daughters, aged eight and ten, who had light cases of asthma, then attempted to gas herself. “My daughters and myself are so weak physically that we have caused you so much trouble,” she wrote her husband. “Please allow us to go ahead of you.”
Although it still occupies a central role in the Japanese cultural imagination, since World War II, suicide, like many other Japanese institutions, has become “westernized.” In retrospect, the turning point may have occurred in 1970 with the suicide of Yukio Mishima.
One of Japan’s most celebrated twentieth-century writers, Mishima was born into an aristocratic samurai family. Mishima deplored what he saw as the materialistic decadence and moral decay of Japan’s postwar westernization, and in both his writing and his life he urged a return to the purer values of imperial Japan and the samurai tradition. Mishima took up bodybuilding at thirty and became an expert in karate and kendo, the ancient sword-fighting art practiced by samurai warriors. He organized the Shield Society, a private, eighty-five-man army dedicated to restoring the samurai spirit. All his life he was infatuated with suicide. “If you want your beauty to endure,” he wrote at age thirty-four, “you must commit suicide at the height of your beauty.” In one of his most famous short stories, a young army officer and his wife commit seppuku after a night of passionate lovemaking. Mishima subsequently made the story into a film in which he played the lieutenant.
On November 25, 1970, at the age of forty-five, after sending his publisher the final portion of The Sea of Fertility, a quartet of novels he had been working on for many years, Mishima and four members of the Shield Society raided the Tokyo headquarters of Japan’s Self-Defense Forces. From a balcony overlooking the courtyard, Mishima harangued a crowd of twelve hundred servicemen, accusing the Self-Defense Forces of impotence, denouncing Japan’s United States–imposed constitution, and urging them to restore the prewar Japanese state based on rule by the emperor. The soldiers hooted and called Mishima a fool. Realizing the futility of continuing, Mishima walked inside, shouting, “Tenno heika banzai,” then performed the ancient ritual of seppuku. His chief lieutenant served as kaishaku, severing Mishima’s head with a sword before committing seppuku himself and being beheaded in turn.
Although a few right-wing groups called Mishima a hero, for the most part, both in Japan and abroad, his death was seen as an example more of histrionic posturing than of protest, a pathetic gesture rather than a noble act. (The Japanese prime minister suggested Mishima was mad.) The three young disciples who survived the raid were sentenced to four years in prison on charges that included “murder by request”—the first time in Japanese history that the venerable custom of beheading a friend as he committed seppuku was made the basis for criminal charges. In articles appraising Mishima’s life and death, Japanese and Western writers alike focused on his domineering grandmother, his homosexuality, his narcissism, his obsession with death. A book reviewer for the New York Times described Mishima as “a sadomasochistic homosexual for whom death was the ultimate act of exhibitionism and self-gratification. It would not be too much to see Mr. Mishima’s suicide as a fatal form of masturbation.”
Mishima’s suicide may have stemmed as much from his sexual psychoses as from his loyalty to the samurai principle; more accurately, the two were inextricably linked. But in the rush to psychoanalyze Mishima, we may have lost sight of his death as being his own, as having meaning beyond the aberrant motives others assigned to it. As after any suicide, Mishima’s entire life was reinterpreted in light of his death. Even his literary output was reevaluated; reviewers found weaknesses they had apparently not noticed before, the psychosexual elements were highlighted with knowing remarks, and his stock as a writer dipped. The postmortem seemed an ironic illustration of what Mishima’s suicide was ostensibly protesting. The suicide of a man who had killed himself to protest Japan’s westernization was viewed from a distinctly Western perspective. Today, most Japanese regard Mishima with embarrassment.
Because of suicide’s honored place in Japanese culture, it has often been assumed that the Japanese suicide rate dwarfs that of Western countries. Yet despite Durkheim’s contention that “the readiness of the Japanese to disembowel themselves for the slightest reason is well known,” for many years suicide in Japan was no more prevalent than in the West, its rate of about 19 per 100,000 higher than that of the United States but lower than that of many northern or eastern European countries. In the last decade, however, the rate has risen precipitously. In 1998, Japan’s rate of 26.1, more than twice that of the United States, was among the highest in the world. The rising rate has been blamed primarily on Japan’s decade-long recession, which has spawned widespread layoffs, bankruptcy, and homelessness. A great many of the suicides are those of middle-aged businessmen who have been let go by the companies for which they’ve worked for decades.
The rising rate, perhaps not coincidentally, comes at a time when the traditional Japanese conception of suicide has been changing. Seppuku, of course, has all but disappeared; Japanese suicides now choose pills, gas, or hanging. Press accounts of suicides are followed by familiar-sounding discussions of economic strain, psychological crisis, and the breakdown of the nuclear family. The Japanese, it is said, now kill themselves for the same reasons people kill themselves in the West. The military official who takes his life in shame over a security leak and the man who takes his life to protest a political action are now likely to be discussed as psychological misfits. Although the National Police Agency continues to sort suicides by traditional causes (health, financial worries, and so forth), Japanese psychiatrists invariably cite depression as the underlying culprit.
The rising rate has met with an increasingly Western response. The country’s first suicide prevention hotline, formed a year after Mishima’s death, now has fifty branch offices. A Japanese Association for the Prevention of Parent-Child Suicide has been formed. In 2001, the Japanese government allocated money to suicide prevention for the first time, funding suicide awareness programs, publishing a booklet listing the warning signs of suicide, and advising companies to offer counseling to troubled employees. Three years later, the Japanese Medical Association distributed a “Suicide Prevention Manual” to physicians and medical students, instructing them how to detect and treat depression and urging them to get troubled patients into psychiatric care, where they are more and more likely to be treated with antidepressant medication.
These developments reflect a conceptual change in how depression is viewed. Acceptance of suffering is at the center of traditional Buddhist thought; for centuries, Japanese saw sadness as an inevitable human condition, not a medical problem. Only in the most extreme cases was depression considered to be abnormal, and treatable in institutions; the notion of mild depression was unknown. Then, in 1999, in a rather dramatic illustration of the chicken-or-the-egg conundrum, a Japanese pharmaceutical company decided to introduce SSRIs to Japan and came up with the phrase kokoro no kaze—a soul that has caught a cold—to describe mild depression and suggest the need for its alleviation. The American pharmaceutical giants quickly followed. “People didn’t know they were suffering from a disease,” a Japanese product manager for Paxil said. “We felt it was important to reach out to them.” Between 1998 and 2003, sales of antidepressants in Japan quintupled. Whether the Japanese are happier is not yet clear. Perhaps not surprisingly, an increasing number of Japanese are found to suffer from kokoro no kaze. In 2004, in a public admission that would have been unthinkable a decade ago, the imperial family acknowledged that Crown Princess Masako was on antidepressants and in counseling for depression and an “adjustment disorder.”
Despite these symptoms of westernization, suicide in Japan remains in transition—a blend of traditional and contemporary attitudes that have tragically been entwined over the past few years in a rash of “Internet suicides,” in which strangers browse the Web in search of a date not for love but for death. In Japan, the Internet is chockablock with suicide-related Web sites, chat rooms, and bulletin boards on which lonely young people can read about suicide in history, debate the pros and cons of various methods, and advertise for suicide partners. One such site offers a slide show of “proper” places to kill oneself—forested spots with views of Mount Fuji are particularly popular—and rates ten suicide methods for such considerations as “pain,” “chance of success,” and “annoyance to other people.” In 2003, thirty-four Internet suicides were reported. The following year, a thirty-four-year-old mother of two advertised for suicide partners on the Net and within days recruited six young volunteers: four men and two women, all strangers to each other, who traveled from as many as six hundred miles away. When they met for the first time, they drove a rented van to a mountainside parking lot west of Tokyo, sealed the van from the inside with tape, took sleeping pills, lit charcoal stoves, and tied themselves to each other. Next to the mother of two, who was sitting in the driver’s seat, the police found a note: “Mother is going to die, but I was happy to give birth to you.” Japanese clinicians suggest that these Internet suicides are carried out by aimless, despairing, emotionally crippled people who seek in death something they are unable to find in life. And yet these suicides represent a sort of hightech gloss on the venerable tradition of jyoshi shinju—love-pact suicide. “One single suicide seems quite awful and wrong,” Yukio Saito, a Methodist minister who founded the country’s first suicide prevention hotline, told a reporter. “But a double suicide has, in a sense, affection and peace, solace.”