Kamikaze — Beatrice Garland
Kamikaze — Beatrice Garland
‘Kamikaze’ tells the story of a Japanese fighter pilot sent on a suicide mission during the Second World War — and what happens when he changes his mind halfway there. The poem is narrated by his daughter, who is recounting it later to her children, so the reader hears the story second-hand, filtered through memory and family silence. It is less a war poem about combat than a poem about shame, duty, and what a family does with a man who chooses survival over honour.
The Poet and Historical Context
Beatrice Garland writes from outside the culture she describes, imagining the internal life of a kamikaze pilot preparing for a one-way mission. The poem’s opening details — “a flask of water”, a samurai sword, and “a shaven head” — establish the ritual, almost ceremonial preparation demanded by the mission. In wartime Japan, dying for the emperor was considered the highest honour a man could achieve, rooted in a strict code of military honour; turning back was viewed as a betrayal of that code, bringing shame not just on the man himself but on his entire family for generations.
The story passes through three generations: the father lived it, the daughter is “recounting it later to her children”, and we, the readers, receive it second-hand from her. This distance means we never hear the father’s own voice or justification — only the family’s guesses about what he “must have” thought and felt.
Themes: Duty, Shame and the Beauty of the World
The central tragedy is silence. When the pilot returns alive, “my mother never spoke again” in his presence, and the wider community treats him as though he simply were not there any longer. Survival, which most cultures would celebrate, becomes a source of permanent shame. Even his own children eventually withdraw from him, showing how social pressure spreads through a whole family rather than staying with the individual who broke the code.
Garland contrasts this harsh judgement with the overwhelming beauty of the natural world that causes the pilot’s change of heart. Looking down at the ocean, he sees fishing boats lined up along the shore like decorations and shoals of fish “arcing in swathes” below him, moving “like a huge flag waved first one way” and then the other, their bellies gleaming as they “swivelled towards the sun”. This natural imagery is vivid, joyful and full of movement — the opposite of the violent, static mission he is meant to complete. It is this pull of ordinary, living beauty that makes him turn the plane around.
The pilot’s memory of childhood — building “cairns of pearl-grey pebbles” with his brothers and waiting for his father’s boat to return with its catch — culminates in the pride of landing an especially prized, muscular fish. This image of strength and danger foreshadows the pilot’s own conflicted sense of masculinity: is real strength found in dying for honour, or in surviving to return home, as his own father’s boat — ‘yes, grandfather’s boat’ to the daughter telling the story — always did?
The poem’s structure enacts this same conflict between past and present. The long middle section, describing the sea and the childhood memory of waiting for boats, is written as one continuous, flowing sentence. But at “And though he came back”, the poem pivots sharply into the family’s cold reaction. Even the pilot’s own children, who at first “still chattered and laughed” around him, eventually learn “to be silent”, treating him as though he were no longer “the father we loved”. This shows shame spreading down through a second generation who never even witnessed the mission themselves.
Colour and light imagery run through the whole poem, linking memory to meaning. The sea is “green-blue translucent”, the fish are silver and the tuna is described as “muscular, dangerous” — language usually reserved for warriors, not fish. By giving nature the heroic qualities that the mission was supposed to have, Garland suggests that the pilot found a truer, more honest kind of courage in choosing life over a ritual death.
The poem is written in free verse, with almost no punctuation across its long opening stanzas. Garland relies heavily on enjambment, letting sentences run on and on across stanza breaks — this mirrors the flow of the sea and the uninterrupted rush of memory. The structure shifts sharply at “And though he came back”, where the poem moves from the pilot’s perspective to the family’s reaction, and the flowing lines give way to shorter, harder statements about silence and rejection. The poem keeps a rigidly regular shape — seven six-line stanzas throughout — and this uniform, controlled form sits in tension with the free, unpunctuated flow of the sentences, mirroring the rigid code the pilot is caught inside.
Disabled (Owen) pairs well with ‘Kamikaze’ because both poems show a man rejected by his community after returning from war changed — Owen’s soldier loses his legs and his youth, while Garland’s pilot loses his family’s respect. Both explore how society treats damaged or dishonoured men as though they are no longer fully human.
Remains (Armitage) also connects strongly: both poems show a man haunted by a single wartime decision that will not leave him, whether that is shooting a looter or turning back from a mission. War Photographer (Duffy) offers a further link, since both poems question where true duty lies — completing a violent task, or responding to a more human instinct such as compassion or love of life.
The poem ends on deliberate ambiguity: the family imagines the pilot wondering “which had been the better way to die”. This suggests that surviving in disgrace may feel like a slower, crueller death than the one he avoided — the poem never resolves whether his choice was right.