Jason
The Significance of Death in Growing
Setsuko Oizumi ends her tale in Requiem as she lets go of her hold on life and her battered body slides back down to the earth. At this point, her body was a broken husk: wracked by illnesses, weakened by malnourishment, and being robbed of what little was left to her by parasites. Her heart and mind were even worse off, having already lost anything and everything that had once been important to her, learning that all her hardships and struggles were ultimately for nothing, and devoid of any hope for the future. Lying in a ditch, she reflects on her life, seeming to have lost any touch with reality and no longer being able to separate the past from the present, dreaming from the waking world. The only thing she is certain of at this point is that regardless of what’s happened before, or what’s happening now, she knows what is to come. She has not resigned nor accepted death, but instead is waiting for it, wanting it to come and take her away. She clutches her dearest possessions, in a notebook given to her by Naomi, close to her chest, knowing she could die at any moment and wanting to have it close to her when this moment comes.
What is it, then, that brings Setsuko to this place and situation in life where the story begins and ends? Even though she remembers each of these instances, she doesn’t attach much significance to them other than events that have happened to her and generally carried some strong emotion. What I wanted to do was trace back through these scattered memories and try to put back together the series of events that took Setsuko up from a child doing what the world asks of her to an adult who makes her own decisions and chooses to dedicate her life to the country, and ultimately to death. Age is not a factor here between these two different Setsukos; rather it’s a variety of life experiences that slowly robbed her of her childhood and innocence, forever altering the way she perceived and could let herself live in the harsh world of war-time Japan.
Setsuko seems to have always been, as a matter of temperament, idealistic and willing to devote herself to those things that she felt strongly about. This comes to the forefront in her actions surrounding Naomi’s fight with Yoshiko. Upon the fight breaking up and getting the girl’s injuries treated, she filed a report to state that nothing of note had happened on her shift as hall monitor. When questioned about it and the incident, Setsuko stood up to her teacher and told him that she felt the staff had been in the wrong for letting the abuse and insults towards Naomi go on as long as they had (p.25). Be it the school headmaster or the Japanese government, Setsuko felt that people should listen obediently to the rules that come down from the top and fulfill them to the best of your ability rather than question them.
For these reasons, I don’t think she was a product of the times, a girl misguided only by propaganda, but that she legitimately believed in the tasks that she threw herself to. At first she personally requests a factory-floor position so she can work more personally for the war effort, and through to the end she continues to go to work without fail, even when given the chance to go back to school or when she could simply disappear. Instead, she holds onto her beliefs to the end, regardless of what the cost may be. Though her goals may have changed over time, through the transition she never seems to lose this idealism.
Her journey from child to adult can
be traced back to a single incident that I think started the process of opening
her eyes and loosened her grip of her childlike hold on the world. This
occurred as she listened to her brother, Hajime, and his friend, Shuzo, discuss
their plans to join the military (p.8). She revisits this moment several times
throughout the novel, and this is the point where she’s first introduced to the
idea of futility, and that no matter how much “will” one may have, dreams don’t
win wars. To think that
The next factor that brought about a fundamental change in her was when the war finally took on a personal bent. When her brother finally enlisted in the military to serve as a pilot, losses and gains were no longer numbers, but people. Listening with a heavy heart, she now had to wonder about the safety of her brother instead of thinking of war as a distant, shapeless concept that only existed far away from her. Before, Setsuko was able to send distant, emotionless letters off to anonymous soldiers somewhere on the front and ask them to give their all for the war effort, asking them to sacrifice themselves for the homeland. She could no longer make such innocent remarks like she had before, and instead told her brother to “take care of [himself]” (p.51), preferring for him to come home safely over losing his life for the country.
When the bombs started to rain down
on
Of all the people she lost and all those that she knew, I think that Naomi had the greatest impact in marshalling in the changes that Setsuko underwent. Their friendship, as described by Naomi, seems one-way, but it seems that they both learn a lot from it. Naomi learns from Setsuko how to be “correct” and how to do all the right things, while Setsuko learns from her that maybe there’s more to the world than what you’re told. Through books and Naomi’s home life, she learns that there’s a much broader world out there than the one she had been introduced to.
Even more significant than that, I think Naomi winds up being so important to the changes within Setsuko because they’re both losing their innocence at the same time. This gives Setsuko a way to reflect on the importance of the loss of her childhood that she otherwise seems to miss when she looks through the experiences in her own life, which she seems to have a rather apathetic feeling towards, almost distant from the things that happen to her. The difference in age turned out to be unimportant for deciding how people aged in wartime, an important lesson Setsuko applies to her and Naomi through the story.
When the doctor comes to tell Naomi of her father’s death, he asks whether she’s still a child or an adult, something Naomi can’t give a concrete answer for (p.52). Unlike Setsuko, who has tried to let go of childhood joys by this point to be a good soldier for the Empire, Naomi feels like she still is a child at heart while the world asks her to act like an adult. As Setsuko points out, people age much faster during times of war, having already started “talking like old folk” despite being only 15 and 17 (p.66). With Naomi’s death, this seems to be the beginning of when Setsuko decides to give up on her own life. If dreamers like Naomi could die, what chance do people who don’t even have hopes have?
By the time the bombing finally struck her home and killed her father, she thought of these things as casualties of war, her heart already numb to the loss. Even through the long march on her way home, the sight of corpses had lost any real significance to her and the other girls, becoming obstacles more than anything of real significance (p.63). The loss of her mother ultimately compounded her feeling of isolation, taking away the one last thing she seemed to have in the world. After that happened, it seems that Setsuko’s blind devotion to her job and persistence in ignoring her sickness almost took on a suicidal bent, like she was going to keep at it to help her country to the last minute, knowing that it’d eventually take her life. Figuring death was inevitable, she settled her affairs (and guilt over betraying Naomi) by handing over the notebooks and translations to Shoichi to take care of.
The last piece to the total loss of
innocence or hope Setsuko possessed was lost with the death of Sawabe, and compounded with the ultimate surrender of
These were the events that led us to the end of the story, with Setsuko having given up on any hope for life, lying in a ditch and waiting for death to escort her to her friends and family that were no longer with her. The effects of war had left the body of a child alone to die the death of an adult.