Kamikaze

Beatrice Garland's Kamikaze (from her 2013 collection The Invention of Fireworks) tells the story of a Japanese kamikaze pilot during the Second World War. A kamikaze was a pilot who deliberately crashed an explosive-laden plane into an enemy target, a suicide attack regarded in wartime Japan as a supreme act of honour.

This pilot sets off on his mission but, flying over the sea, he is moved by the beauty of the water and by memories of his childhood spent fishing with his brothers. These memories of life and family pull at him, and he turns back rather than dying.

The tragedy is not the mission but its aftermath. When the pilot returns alive, his family and neighbours treat him as a coward. He is shunned for the rest of his life, and his wife and children come to act as if he had not returned at all.

The poem asks a searching question: was choosing life really failure? Garland invites the reader to see the pilot's decision as human and brave, even as his society condemns it.

Garland uses an embedded narrative (a story told within another story), which shapes how we receive the pilot's choice.

• The poem is told partly by an outside narrator and partly through the voice of the pilot's daughter, recalling what her mother told her years later.
• This layering distances the reader from the pilot himself. We never hear his own voice; he becomes a figure spoken about, mirroring how his community stopped speaking to him.
• The daughter's italicised words break into the narrator's account, so the poem's very structure reflects a family fractured by shame.

The poem runs across seven stanzas of six lines each, with frequent enjambment that lets the pilot's memories flow freely, as if the sea and childhood are one continuous, unstoppable pull. The regular stanza shape gives the tragic story a calm, controlled surface, under which the emotional damage runs deep.

The shift in voice matters. The story reaches us second-hand, through the family that rejected him, which is exactly the point: the pilot has been reduced to a story other people tell.

The poem is rich in natural imagery, and this semantic field of the living world is what draws the pilot back to life.

Quotation	Technique	Effect
"a shaven head full of powerful incantations"	image of duty	Suggests the ritual and pressure of the mission; his mind has been filled with the expectation to die.
"the little fishing boats strung out like bunting"	simile	The boats look festive and celebratory, making the sea seem full of life and joy rather than war.
"green-blue translucent sea... a huge flag"	vivid colour imagery	The beauty and scale of the sea overwhelm him, offering life in place of death.

The image of "shoals of fishes" flashing silver in the water captures the vitality and beauty that make the pilot choose to live. Nature stands for everything worth living for, set against the death his mission demands.

Garland also contrasts the warm past (the remembered day of fishing, the father, the brothers) with the cold present (the silent house, the family who look through him). The natural imagery belongs to the life he chose; the coldness belongs to the punishment he receives for choosing it.

Kamikaze develops several themes at the heart of Power and Conflict.

• Duty versus family and life. The pilot is torn between the state's demand that he die and the human pull of memory, family and the living world.
• Honour and shame. His society's code values an honourable death so highly that surviving is treated as disgrace, and the shame destroys his family life.
• The human cost of conflict. The poem shows that war's damage is not only physical; a culture of honour can wound people far from any battlefield.

For context (AO3), kamikaze pilots were used by Japan late in the Second World War, and the code of bushido (a warrior code emphasising honour, loyalty and self-sacrifice) meant that dying for the emperor was seen as glorious, while surrendering or surviving brought deep shame. Beatrice Garland, writing decades later and from outside that culture, is interested in the human being caught inside such a code.

Garland has said she is fascinated by what makes people choose duty over their own survival, and the poem gently questions a system that could turn a father's decision to live into a lifelong disgrace.

For this in-copyright poem, learn short embedded phrases and the analysis behind them.

Quotation	What to say about it
"her father embarked at sunrise"	The daughter's distanced telling frames the pilot as a figure from the past, seen through others' eyes.
"the little fishing boats strung out like bunting"	The simile makes the sea festive and full of life, part of what pulls him back from death.
"and remembered how he and his brothers... would count the fish"	The warm childhood memory embodies the family and life he chooses over duty.
"he must have wondered which had been the better way to die"	The chilling final idea suggests that, shunned and unloved, his survival became a kind of living death.
"we too learned to be silent"	Shows how the shame spread through the whole family, punishing them all for his choice.

The strongest answers weigh the poem's central tension: the pilot chose life, yet his society made that choice a tragedy. Show you can hold both readings at once.

1. Thinking the poem celebrates the mission

Garland is sympathetic to the pilot's choice to live, and critical of the code that punishes him. Do not read the poem as praising the kamikaze ideal; its focus is the human cost.

2. Ignoring the embedded narrative

The story reaches us through the daughter, second-hand. Explain that this distancing mirrors how the pilot became someone spoken about rather than spoken to, which is central to the poem's meaning.

3. Overlooking the natural imagery

The sea, boats and fish are not scenery; they symbolise the life that draws the pilot back. Link the natural imagery to his decision to turn around.

4. Copying long stretches of the poem

The poem is in copyright, and long quotation earns no analysis marks. Embed short phrases and analyse the technique and effect instead.

5. Forgetting to compare in Section B

The anthology question is comparative. Kamikaze pairs well with The Émigrée (memory, family, belonging) or Poppies (a family separated by a culture of duty). Structure the answer around shared and contrasting ideas.