Popular Culture Review Vol. 12, No. 2, August 2001 | Page 15

The Works of Seicho Matsumoto

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While Matsumoto’s narrative style is 57/oesque, one of his favorite liter
ary formulas is suicide. Japan is a society that has placed suicide on a moral high
ground. An eminent French sociologist in the 19th century goes to the extreme in
contending that Japanese culture is suicidal (Durkheim). In both art and life, sui
cide is seen as an expression of love, innocence, courage, loyalty, and atonement.
Japan’s elaborated lexicon on suicide — harakiri or seppuku (disembowelment
suicide by samurais in the feudal period), kamikase (divine wind suicide by pilots
at the end of the Pacific War), inseki jisatsu (atonement suicide by businessmen in
the 1990s when the “bubble economy” crashed), and shinju (double suicide when
ever and wherever lovers become hopelessly in love) — reflect those ideals
(Yoshimoto and Berger).
As if to prove the medium is the message, some of the best novelists of
post-war Japan who wrote about the darker side of the human condition commit
ted suicide themselves. Osamu Dasai (1909-48), a Marxist writer regarded by many
as the literary voice of his generation, committed shinju with his lover. Yukio
Mishima (1925-70), a gay militant rightist literary luminary of international stat
ure, stunned the world with his public harakiri. In the theatre, works like the famed
18th century puppet play, Shinju ten no Amijima (written by Monzaemon
Chikamatsu, 1653-1724) showcased this cultural anomaly in the tale of an ordi
nary married man who ends his own life as well as that of his geisha-lover in a
shinju. (The play was made into a movie in 1969 and televised in the U.S. in 1975
under the name “Double Suicide.”)
Given the centrality of suicide in Japanese culture, it is not surprising that
many writers have employed it either as the main theme or as a plot element in
their works. Matsumoto exploits the suicide motif in two major ways, sometimes
as a cover-up for murders, and sometimes a “soft-landing” for women who have
committed murders. In Vanishing Point (Zero no Shoten), a subtle suspense of
high social drama that has been made into a classic movie, the wife of a distin
guished citizen commits a series of homicides in order to conceal her tainted by
gone days. In her yesteryears, she had worked as a prostitute around an American
military base. When the investigation closes in on her, she takes the ultimate hon
orable act for a Japanese woman under such circumstances by vanishing into the
sea in an inseki jisatsu. In The Serial, mentioned earlier, the culprit ends her own
life by taking the poison that was prepared for a couple that she planned to kill.
Rieko, the lone witness in a brutal railroad murder, is found dead in her
apartment. She left a journal in which she wrote, “Must love be a lonely thing?”
The coroner proclaims it suicide. A policeman at the scene agrees, “So, she com
mitted suicide because she was heartbroken.” But detective Imanishi is skeptical
( Vessel ofSand/Suna no Utsuwa, published in English as Inspector Imanishi In

vestigates).