Facing up suicide: is the concept of death the main difference between Western and Japanese artists?

I think we always have to take care not to base our understanding of others and their actions (such as suicide) via books or other people's stories/claims about them.

Why should we superimpose cultural conceptions that make us separated from nature, humanity, authenticity?

It is not necessarily connected to wars. You can feel stressed for whatever reason in our Western cities. I wanted to point out that while in Japanese arts the death is accepted, in the Western is seen as pure dramatic and it looks like you are forced to live

as the Nipponese folks did.

I see the Japanese concept of death more authentic

The subtle contradiction between self-awareness and existence began to trouble me.

I reasoned that if one wants to identify seeing and existing, the nature of the self-awareness should be made as centripetal as possible. If only one can direct the eye of self-awareness so intently towards the interior and the self that self-awareness forgets the outer forms of existence, then one can “exist” as surely as the “I” in Amiel’s Diary. But this existence is of an odd kind, like a transparent apple whose core is fully visible from the outside; and the only endorsement of such existence lies in words. It is the classical type of existence experienced by the solitary, humanistic man of letters. . . .

But one also comes across a type of self-awareness that concerns itself exclusively with the form of things. For this type of self-awareness, the antinomy between seeing and existing is decisive, since it involves the question of how the core of the apple can be seen through the ordinary, red, opaque skin, and also how the eye that looks at that glossy red apple from the outside can penetrate into the apple and itself become the core. The apple in this case, moreover, must have a perfectly ordinary existence, its color a healthy red.

To continue the metaphor, let us picture a single, healthy apple. This apple was not called into existence by words, nor is it possible that the core should be completely visible from the outside like Amiel’s peculiar fruit. The inside of the apple is naturally quite invisible. Thus at the heart of that apple, shut up within the flesh of the fruit, the core lurks in its wan darkness, tremblingly anxious to find some way to reassure itself that it is a perfect apple. The apple certainly exists, but to the core this existence as yet seems inadequate; if words cannot endorse it, then the only way to endorse it is with the eyes. Indeed, for the core the only sure mode of existence is to exist and to see at the same time. There is only one method of solving this contradiction. It is for a knife to be plunged deep into the apple so that it is split open and the core is exposed to the light—to the same light, that is, as the surface skin. Yet then the existence of the cut apple falls into fragments; the core of the apple sacrifices existence for the sake of seeing.

When I realized that the perfect sense of existence that disintegrated the very next moment could only be endorsed by muscle, and not by words, I was already personally enduring the fate that befell the apple. Admittedly, I could see my own muscles in the mirror. Yet seeing alone was not enough to bring me into contact with the basic roots of my sense of existence, and an immeasurable distance remained between me and the euphoric sense of pure being. Unless I rapidly closed that distance, there was little hope of bringing that sense of existence to life again. In other words, the self-awareness that I staked on muscles could not be satisfied with the darkness of the pallid flesh pressing about it as an endorsement of its existence, but, like the blind core of the apple, was driven to crave certain proof of its existence so fiercely that it was bound, sooner or later, to destroy that existence. Oh, the fierce longing simply to see, without words!

The eye of self-awareness, used as it is to keeping a watch on the invisible self in an essentially centripetal fashion and via the good offices of words, does not place sufficient trust in visible things such as muscles. Inevitably, it addresses the muscles as follows:

“I admit you do not seem to be a illusion. But if so, I would like you to show how you function in order to live and move; show me your proper functions and how you fulfill your proper aims.”

Thus the muscles start working in accordance with the demands of self-awareness; but in order to make the action exist unequivocally, a hypothetical enemy outside the muscles is necessary, and for the hypothetical enemy to make certain of its existence it must deal a blow to the realm of the senses fierce enough to silence the querulous complaints of self-awareness. That, precisely, is when the knife of the foe must come cutting into the flesh of the apple—or rather, the body. Blood flows, existence is destroyed, and the shattered senses give existence as a whole its first endorsement, closing the logical gap between seeing and existing... And this is death.

In this way I learned that the momentary, happy sense of existence that I had experienced that summer sunset during my life with the army could be finally endorsed only by death.

And what I envied most about him was that he managed to reach the end of his life without the slightest conscience of being burdened with a special individuality or sense of individual mission like mine. This sense of individuality robbed my life of its symbolism, that is to say, or its power to serve, like Tsurukawa’s, as a metaphor for something outside itself; accordingly it deprived me of the feelings of life’s extensity and solidarity, and it became the source of that sense of solitude which pursued me indefinitely. It was strange. I did not even have any feeling of solidarity with nothingness. – page 122

It is true that we should not follow the same steps of our idols because they had a very different way of life from ours.

Completely. I would sound as a crazy boy but for me that specific act was so pure and authentic. At least the Nipponese died defending their thousand years old values and history… beautiful doesn’t it?

Western folks fear death

Instead of being a perpetual sadness they try to understand it and connect some characters related to the same topic

Yeah, the point of personifying (Thanatos, Algos, Praxidice, Nemesis, and so on)

how worthy is the human existence itself