Suicide in Twentieth-Century Japan by Francesca Di Marco (review)

Suicide in Twentieth-Century Japan comes across as a comprehensive review of a deeply flawed literature. Author Francesca Di Marco herself notes early on that “the work produced on suicide in Japan is essentially simplistic and profoundly biased. The vast majority of research on the subject in both English and Japanese was produced in the 1970s in a flurry after Mishima Yukio’s spectacular suicide” (p. 2). In Japan, the forces of cultural nationalism have shaped notions of suicide, romanticizing it throughout the twentieth century as agentic and culturally, socially, or politically motivated. Di Marco’s ambition, which she achieves, is to trouble the notion of suicide as specifically associated with Japanese culture and to trouble the idea that voluntary death is somehow special, romantic, or ideological in Japan, as opposed to merely “ordinary.”

The book offers a fast-paced tour of the substantial twentieth-century Japanese literature on suicide, bringing a large body of psychiatric and other medical literature as well as popular writing to the attention of English-language readers—a significant accomplishment. The texts Di Marco brings to light are intriguing and vividly rendered, though one wonders whether she may have gone a little too far in her effort to impose a single narrative on a more complex landscape of multiple narratives.

Di Marco pays a great deal of attention to lay (nonclinical) writings on suicide coming out of journalism, history, social science, and writings by psychiatrists for a popular audience, all of which vary significantly in the quality of their research. As Di Marco tells us, “The press was the country’s loudest arena for the discussion of the suicide phenomenon: it both popularized and sensationalized suicide, and catalyzed the attention of scholars and men of culture” (p. 29). She treats a number of mass media accounts of dramatic suicides and double suicides (shinjū), which predictably traffic in gender stereotypes of hysterical or passionate women.

But many of these accounts strain credulity and promote specific social agendas, and for that reason Di Marco’s ambition to trouble the notion of Japan as a “suicide nation” feels a little too easy at times. Meanwhile, some of the thornier questions concerning the literature remain up for grabs: How were the more sensational and political treatments of suicide related to medical thought and the everyday clinical care of the mentally ill? How representative was the suicidology of social thought more broadly? And at what moments were thinkers able to resist national ideology and consider suicide in more sober-minded and responsible ways? Suicidology as presented by Di Marco seems to be its own genre, at times relating only loosely to mental health care and more strongly aligned with cultural commentary or even political ideology. The observations of psychiatrists working as clinicians, who presumably saw suicide as tragic, and the more staid analysts who declined to aestheticize this destructive act feel less well-represented in her account. Suicide gets all the attention in this analysis; depression, very little.

Di Marco breaks down her story into four chapters. The first traces the “biologization” of suicide in the late nineteenth century: the embrace of Western medicine and science, the establishment of a professional medical community, and the government’s concern with the spiritual and physical health of its citizens in the context of imperial ambitions. The second focuses on cultural-nationalist narratives of suicide as rational, honorable, and noble in the context of 1930s militarism and the valorization of sacrifice for the nation. The third deals with the Occupation-era ascendance of foreign-trained psychoanalytic psychiatrists such as Doi Takeo and Okonogi Keigo, which moved Japanese psychiatry away from biology and toward a humanism that searched for social and inner, personal causes of suicide. Finally, we see the triumph of the notion of Japan as “suicide nation” during the years of rapid economic growth in the 1960s and 1970s—a conception that, Di Marco claims, prevailed over the return to biology...