Pip: On a site that moves between poetry, fiction, and literary criticism without stopping to explain itself, today’s episode follows a story that travels from Osaka to Oslo — and asks what freedom costs when shame travels with you.
Mara: Adam Donaldson Powell gives us both the story and its analysis: a novella about two young gay Japanese men, and a close literary reading of what that novella is actually doing. Let’s start with the fiction and the framework it builds around queer identity and the death poem.
Queer Identity, Shame, and the Jisei
Pip: The novella “Death Poem” sets up a specific kind of pressure: not shouting, not violence, just the sustained weight of a father’s silence and what that silence eventually produces. The question the story keeps turning over is whether physical distance from that silence is the same as escape.
Mara: The literary analysis frames this precisely. It describes how Keiji’s depression, panic attacks, and obsessive-compulsive behaviors show that “internalized shame can function as a form of psychological imprisonment” — that’s the phrase the analysis uses, and it earns it.
Pip: Because Keiji isn’t imprisoned by law or even by direct confrontation. His father’s method is withholding: no eye contact, formal address, silence rewarmed daily. The story calls it “unbearable” and means it clinically.
Mara: The analysis draws a deliberate contrast between the two protagonists. Ichiro’s family, while not celebratory about his sexuality, doesn’t weaponize it — and that difference in household environment is what allows Ichiro to function as a stabilizing presence for Keiji rather than a fellow casualty.
Pip: Norway is where the story tests whether new geography can do what family wouldn’t. And for a while it seems to work — headaches lessen, Keiji kisses Ichiro in the Charles de Gaulle terminal, they eat shrimp sandwiches and watch American sitcoms in Oslo. Liberation, provisionally.
Mara: The analysis calls Oslo and Bergen spaces where “public displays of affection and immersion in spaces relatively tolerant of queer identity provide a temporary reprieve.” Temporary is doing a lot of work in that sentence.
Pip: Because the father’s letter is already in Keiji’s bag. The jisei — written in waka form, five-seven-five-seven-seven syllables, full of cherry blossoms and setting suns — travels on the same plane they do.
Mara: And the diary entry that closes the story makes the outcome plain. Keiji writes: “I can neither go back, nor can I stay away … for both choices would mean losing myself. The only real choice I have is to join my honourable father in quietude.”
Pip: The analysis notes that the poem “compounds the shame Keiji has endured” — the father’s suicide doesn’t release Keiji from obligation, it doubles it. The sword, as Keiji puts it on the plane, goes through his heart either way.
Mara: What the literary analysis piece adds — beyond the novella itself — is attention to the metafictional layer: Ichiro reading a homo-erotic novella set in Europe on the train to Tokyo, imagining a world where queer life is openly expressed. The analysis calls this how “queer individuals often rely on literature and cultural artifacts to envision alternative possibilities for identity and desire.”
Pip: Fiction inside fiction, each one a rehearsal for a freedom that keeps arriving slightly too late.
Mara: The analysis concludes that the jisei “reminds the reader that liberation is never absolute” — and that personal and cultural histories continue to shape lives even when people are actively trying to leave them behind. Both pieces, read together, make that argument with real weight.
Pip: A story about two men trying to outrun inherited shame, and a reading that explains exactly why the running was always going to be complicated.
Mara: The tension between autonomy and obligation doesn’t resolve — it just relocates. That’s what keeps both pieces worth returning to.
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