THE INSTITUTIONS OF SUICIDE
AND REDRESS,

of which (the former known as _hara-kiri_ and the latter as
_kataki-uchi_ )many foreign writers have treated more or less fully.

To begin with suicide, let me state that I confine my observations only
to _seppuku_ or _kappuku_, popularly known as _hara-kiri_--which means
self-immolation by disembowelment. "Ripping the abdomen? How
absurd!"--so cry those to whom the name is new. Absurdly odd as it may
sound at first to foreign ears, it can not be so very foreign to
students of Shakespeare, who puts these words in Brutus' mouth--"Thy
(Caesar's) spirit walks abroad and turns our swords into our proper
entrails." Listen to a modern English poet, who in his _Light of Asia_,
speaks of a sword piercing the bowels of a queen:--none blames him for
bad English or breach of modesty. Or, to take still another example,
look at Guercino's painting of Cato's death, in the Palazzo Rossa in
Genoa. Whoever has read the swan-song which Addison makes Cato sing,
will not jeer at the sword half-buried in his abdomen. In our minds this
mode of death is associated with instances of noblest deeds and of most
touching pathos, so that nothing repugnant, much less ludicrous, mars
our conception of it. So wonderful is the transforming power of virtue,
of greatness, of tenderness, that the vilest form of death assumes a
sublimity and becomes a symbol of new life, or else--the sign which
Constantine beheld would not conquer the world!

Not for extraneous associations only does _seppuku_ lose in our mind any
taint of absurdity; for the choice of this particular part of the body
to operate upon, was based on an old anatomical belief as to the seat of