Jason

Toda’s Seven Deadly Sins

The world presented in that of Sea and Poison is one of corruption and abuse, where humans can hide behind a mask of professionalism as they commit barbaric acts and slip back into the role of a “human” as they see fit. The book poses many different questions and follows through just as many different points of view, begging the questions of whether there is a higher power, the right to judge, and who possesses such a right. These are the same questions that Toda asks of Suguro, prompting him, and the reader, to consider the human condition: what does it mean to be human, and where does God come into the equation?

Toda is presented as a godless man, not just in his beliefs but in his interaction with the world. He seems constantly uncertain as to what is normal for humans and what is his experience alone, though through his memoirs he seems to come to the assumption more and more than his thoughts are somehow separate from the traditional human experience, and that he seems to be missing something inside that those around him have. No matter what he does, he seems to lack any form of guilt, which also seems to have kept him from any form of relationship with God. This guilt we feel is, as taught in Christian teachings, what connects us, and we feel guilt because God disapproves of what we are doing. Through living his life, Toda has lived by no moral code, and has left a life of sin, yet despite this he never is sanctioned by man or God, other than a distinct separation keeping him from being near either.

The major difference between Suguro and Toda is in how they cope and deal with guilt. It’s noted that Toda doesn’t seem to feel any such emotion, but instead fears the sanctions of man that come along with bad acts. The former, however, has a very acute sense of guilt, finding his conscience in the old woman, as Toda remarks that “But for you maybe the old lady was a kind of God.”(79) This is another instance where the author directly relates the sense of guilt (conscience) with having a relationship with God.

It seems possible to say that Toda is, then, the author’s representation of man living without the influence of God, and his constant search to try to get that attention back. As he ages, his search for guilt becomes more extreme and his hunt for that missing humanity takes on a greater importance not necessarily in his thoughts, but in his actions. He’s always lived a high standard in the world of men, from being a high-ranking child in a small city to the doctor in a war-time hospital, and as such he only feels obligated to men, not seeming to feel that there’s some sort of higher law that he needs to abide by. As Toda explains to Suguro, “…a man has all sorts of things pushing him. He tries by all means to get away from fate. Now, the one who gives him the freedom to do that, you can call God.”(79) Toda is depicted as calm and knowledgeable, always able to control his outer appearance. However, in scenes where the subject of God comes up between him and Suguro, he loses his composure and becomes flustered. This annoyance seems to stem from his lack of having any success in finding his conscience.

This search has been, according to his memoirs, going on since he was a young boy, starting with relatively minor offenses. He didn’t yet seem to grasp what he was missing or the significance of it, instead living relatively confidently with his abilities to control the world around him. As a young child, he would lie with no regard, anything to maintain a good outward appearance and to get praise from the adults. When a new boy, Wakabayashi, suddenly arrives, we see Toda start to fixate and relate to him. While they never speak to each other, Toda sees himself in Wakabayashi, and in this external representation of himself, he finds some form of accountability for his actions. No more can he easily and proudly read his compositions written with blatant lies, and he has a hard time associating with others and controlling his outward appearance. Wakabayashi, for this short period of time, becomes a sort of conscience for Toda and keeps him in check, though indirectly and through Toda’s own extreme sense of guilt. Wakabayashi and Toda “…perceived in the other the image of himself.”(108), and yet he hates everything about Wakabayashi, giving an interesting look into Toda’s view of himself.

This momentary reprieve from his emptiness opens Toda up to a more personal look at his character, looking at himself through the mirror of Wakabayashi. When he later finds the boy in trouble, he stands by idly and watches, hoping for the bullies to hurt him even more. Toda seems to feel a sort of hatred towards himself from his emptiness and his lack of morality, identifying the other boy both as the guiding conscience in him that he doesn’t have and hating him for being there, having both a regret for not having this guilt but also wishing to not be weighed down by it, being more bothersome than anything else. Wakabayashi “…was one person able to see to the bottom of [Toda’s] heart.”(110) and through this reflection showed Toda what he would rather avoid—the darkness within him—while making him reflect on it.

It was after Wakabayashi left that Toda again attempted to find some sort of conscience, to make amends to previous acts. It wasn’t that he felt guilty, but more that he seemed to want to feel guilty and thought that performing the acts of a guilty soul would bring the emotion about, reaffirming to himself that there was some sort of soul in him. As the summer break after Wakabayashi came, Toda remembered the story he had written the previous year about how he had brought a brilliant and important gift to a sick boy in town, Kimura, filling the composition with flowery prose and thoughts of uncertainty, until he finally chose to do the right thing. He took up on this opportunity to go visit the boy that he had lied about and to offer up his best fountain pen, seeming to hope not that it would ease his guilty conscience, but instead make him realize that he had done wrong. However, even after giving Kimura this expensive pen from his father, Toda felt no outward trace of relief or guilt, simply that the world continued to move on.

Yet again, he failed to attract the attention of guilt, seemingly overlooked by the force that guides the rest of us. “My heart was blank and empty. There was not the least trace of exultancy.”(113). Despite his best efforts, it didn’t matter. Because no one knew of his kind act, it was as if it didn’t occur, so there was no social admonishment or reward, the only things that had thus far had any control on his behavior. This was the first of several occasions where he would do this, not seeming to understand that performing the effect (the acts of contrition) does not make the cause true (the feeling of guilt itself).

As Toda moved on into middle school, he continued to make calculating, practical choices through life. The world always needs doctors, so he chose that as a profession so he would always be employable. His love for natural science was fitting for his personality, as nature is not weighed down by moral issues or any sort of code, just one life competing against the next, the winner surviving another day and the loser being food. To kill an animal for the sake of learning carried no significant issue for him, and it seems that later that view would hold true for humans as well, that to lose one (or many) humans for the sake of learning is no significant hurdle for him to cross.

From these days forward, Toda seems to equate some sort of sexuality with the acts he is to commit, the deadly sin of lust overshadowing most of what he does. This works to add a slightly darker tone to some of the things he will come to do as his story progresses, all of which can be traced back to his middle school days, where he first gives in to this drive that he seems to not quite understand, but just credits it to a part of the human condition.

When Toda first is shown the rare specimen (a mutated butterfly) that is his natural science teacher’s prized possession, he develops a sort of sexualized feeling towards it, an extreme desire to possess it, to make it his. As the day progressed, he continued to obsess over and fantasize about this butterfly, desiring it more and more. As Toda says, he had “left [his] lunch box in the classroom, and this was no conscious duplicity.”(115), no longer even planning or thinking about it, instinct was taking over and starting to control him, being directed by his base desires. Led by this greed and lust, Toda steals the butterfly before sneaking out of the school again. He knows that what he’s doing is wrong but, rather than feeling any form of guilt over it, he acts in such a way so as to not get caught, so he doesn’t cause problems for himself.

When it’s learned that the butterfly is missing, Toda’s instincts betray him again through his face stiffening, but still no feelings of guilt or moral compunction. Once he learns that another boy from a lower class, Yamaguchi, was already being blamed for it, Toda feels a sense of relief. In his “survival of the fittest” mentality, he manages to form a theory to free himself from any blame or false sense of guilt. Because Yamaguchi is of a lower class—and therefore less apt—he is clearly inferior to Toda and is less able to survive in such a harsh world. If he were anywhere near as smart or skilled as Toda, he too would have found a way to shirk the blame and onto another party. In this way, Toda manages to convince himself that since Yamaguchi wasn’t able to do this, he then deserves to be blamed for what Toda had done. No matter what you do in life, it seems that there’s always a scapegoat to be found.

Upon arriving home, Toda decides that to burn the butterfly, to remove the evidence and further ensure that he doesn’t take the blame for what he had done. Once again, he does this not due to any actual acknowledgement of fault, but instead due to what he fears society would think of what he had done. While it seems like finally some feeling of guilt has come over him in the form of an ache in his jaw after he does this, the pain quickly goes away once he finds out that Yamaguchi is taking all the blame for the incident, even making up reasons for why he did it. Toda had done wrong once more and, yet again, was neglected by both God and man in any form of punishment.

As he moved on through the years, Toda seemed to search even harder for a semblance of a conscience, saying that “[his] pangs of conscience, no matter how well [he] nurtured them, never lasted more than a month at most.” This seems to have been the catalyst to inspire him to “up the ante”, so to speak, in his decision to go visit his cousin, which ultimately led to him committing adultery.

When he first meets his cousin at her home, he finds a woman worn down from neglect. No longer beautiful nor in her prime, he finds himself disgusted with her. Nevertheless, he still goes through with the act, finding it lackluster but moving through it all the same, almost for the experience, for the sin itself rather than for any sort of drive he might feel. Once the act is done, he’s yet again left empty from another “bad act” that has not come to anything, there are no feelings of guilt or of loss, just another experience.

By the time that we find that Toda has become an intern at the hospital, we find that things haven’t gotten any better, other than that he now seems possibly more distant, able to hide behind the cold professionalism of a doctor’s mask and doesn’t feel accountable to his patients nor to their families. He refers to the emotions and feelings of loss amongst the families as a “spectacle” (122), an event that is quickly forgotten.

The lack of care for another’s suffering, caused even directly by his own hands, is especially acute in his treatment of his maid, Mitsu, whom he had an affair with and unintentionally impregnated. As he performed an impromptu abortion on her, not even his medical specialty, he never once felt concern over the pain he was putting her through, only the inconvenience it’d cause if she had a child. After the abortion, he promptly got rid of her by sending her home and moving into a new boarding house, only briefly considering that he had done something wrong, though this thought was technical in nature, not anything actually emotional.

All of these things seemed to have built up until the present, when Toda was offered the chance to take a part in the secret operations that were to take place in his medical division. He was the type of man needed for such an operation, and for his end, he would be able to finally put himself to the test, to try to push himself into the most heinous of acts—murder—to see if he had any hope of ever finding that sense of guilt within him.

Throughout the entire act, however, nothing special seems to rouse within him. In fact, his primary concern is not about being a party to murder, but rather that he’s being caught on video tape, “The actions of a murderer.”(144). Never once, though, does he seem to consider his acts as wrong nor that they are even something he has control over. His worry here is over what people who watch the film will think of him. Will karma finally catch up to him, and is his string of lucky coincidences up? As the surgery continues, he feels “…an unaccountable disillusionment and fatigue.”(144), this murder that he’s taking a part in—the worst possible crime in both man’s and God’s laws—still doesn’t manage to evoke any feelings of guilt or conscience within him.

Afterwards, he again tries to evoke feelings of guilt by walking through the empty halls, standing in the room where he had murdered a man mere hours before. All that comes to him, though, is that “Nothing is changed. [His] heart is tranquil. The pangs of conscience, the stabs of guilt…” (154) are not to come, and he is still denied that humanity that he had fought to find.

As the story comes to a close, Toda and Suguro are left to their own devices, each thinking over their acts through the day. Suguro seems to come from this situation learning that he can no longer sit by idly and let blood be spilled on his hands. Toda, however, smokes one of his cigarettes nonstop, seeming to finally accept that god, fate, whatever is not out there, or not willing to listen to his calls. He had committed every single one of the seven deadly sins, and not once had guilt stricken him. Lust for his cousin, smoking to excess, becoming a doctor out of greed, lazy and never wishing to over work, experienced wrath and anger towards Wakabayashi, envious of his teacher’s butterfly, and proud of his superiority through his heritage.

His search for humanity had ultimately taken him even further from it. With each willful act, he seemed to have been trying to inspire some higher power to strike him down, to sanction him, almost getting over-confident in his luck. After committing this ultimate act, it was impossible for him to turn back, and unlikely that things would ever change. With something akin to frustration, futility, Toda finally accepts that he’s found nothing, and he will forever live a “strange” and “distant” life from those around him.