Kamikaze Flashcards
free verse, but regular stanza lengths of 6 lines each
free verse allows for a ‘story-telling’ voice, as if this is a well-worn story, told possibly many times over, showing its significance to the family, but also suggesting that it is a story told in other families too – especially as the characters are all anonymous; the regular 6 line length stanzas also perhaps suggests how this is an experience repeated across many families
mixture between 3rd person narration (with the focaliser being the daughter of the failed Kamikaze pilot, or possibly his wife) – with this being made clear from ‘she thought’ and – last 2 lines – ‘she said’, and 1st person narrative (in italics) of the daughter
It is significant that this narrative is focused on the daughter and her children – firstly to show how significant this ‘failure’ was to the whole family – including down the generations; secondly, as it distances the reader from the Kamikaze pilot, ensuring he has not only been sentenced to silence by his family but has also been silenced by the poem itself – we never hear his voice – his daughter can only speculate about what her father ‘must have’ done (l.9) or ‘must have wondered’ at the end of the poem – she does not know
past tense narrative
the use of past tense rather than present again gives a sense of distance to the experience of the pilot – perhaps heightening the sense that this is an experience that will be alien to anyone today reading this poem
opens with her father setting off on his mission which should have led him to his death, and ends with the word ‘die’
by opening and closing with ideas of death, there is a sense of how futile the pilot’s attempt to hang onto life was; even though he survived, all he achieved was a living death in a society where he was ostracised - not just by neighbours who ‘treated him as though he no longer existed’, but also by his wife and, eventually his children too – who ‘learned […] to live as though he had never returned’.
‘Kamikaze’ means ‘Divine Wind’
seems, therefore, a non-human identity/ fantastical – emphasising how these pilots were mythologised perhaps by their society, but also emphasising how dehumanised these pilots were, and how they were being asked to do something beyond usual expectations of humans
stanza 1 is rather list-like, listing the few things that a kamikaze pilot needed: ‘a flask of water, a samurai sword’, ‘a shaven head full of powerful incantations’ and ‘fuel for a one-way journey’
Makes the mission seem a simple and easy one to accomplish – can be done with very little, it seems from the short list; the description of the ‘shaven head full of powerful incantations’ makes it seem as if he is merely an empty vessel to be filled, not a human being allowed his own thoughts (an indication of the ways in which conflicts often dehumanise combatants)
contrast between the almost dehumanised image of the pilot’s ‘shaven head full of powerful incantations’ and ‘she thought’ in the first line of the next stanza
indicates the difference between the way her father was not expected to ‘think’, but the fact that she can now ‘think’
shift from very minimal list at start to more ‘poetic’ language in stanzas 2-5
makes us sympathise with the fact that the pilot was a human being – able to appreciate aspects of nature, and tied to his place of birth/ childhood
similes: ‘the little fishing boats/ strung out like bunting’; the ‘dark shoals of fishes’ ‘arcing in swathes/ like a huge flag waved first one way/ then the other’
close attention to details of place – shows how closely he was attached to these; imagery here of ‘bunting’ and a ‘flag’ has connotations of celebration (ironically what might have been waved had he completed his mission successfully)
language of colours: ‘green-blue translucent sea’, ‘flashing silver’, ‘pearl-grey’, ‘cloud-marked’, ‘black’, ‘silver’, ‘dark’
conveys a clear sense of beauty of the scene and makes us more sympathetic to the motivation of someone who was drawn back home to this
‘he remembered’ – memory of childhood and family (with ‘his brothers’)
makes his childhood seem almost idyllic and provides a stark contrast to the hostility and silence within his own family later
multi-sensory description in stanza 5 – can feel the ‘salt-sodden’ boat, the ‘feathery’ prawns, the tuna described metaphorically as a ‘dark prince, muscular, dangerous’, as well as see the ‘cloud-marked mackerel’, the ‘black crabs’, ‘the loose silver of whitebait’
Again, helps convey the beauty of the scene he remembers from his childhood and makes us sympathetic towards someone who did not want to die and leave this all behind. This is also a ‘safe’ return journey – an image of what he chooses instead of fulfilling his suicide mission
