What happens in Chapter 1 of Kamikaze?
Beatrice Garland's "Kamikaze" begins with a Japanese pilot who is fully equipped and sent on a suicide mission but instead turns his plane around and flies home. The poem tells this story of defection from his daughter's perspective, as she pieces together a tale she never heard directly. On his journey back, the pilot flies over the sea he remembers from his childhood — the silver flashes of mackerel, the small fishing boats, the familiar shape of the harbour — and something in that landscape pulls him back from death. He lands and returns to his family, only to be met not with relief but with silence: his wife and children, weighed down by the community's shame, refuse to acknowledge his presence. The daughter describes how she and her siblings learned to look through their father as if he weren’t there, reflecting the erasure imposed by the larger village. The poem concludes with a heartbreaking turn: the daughter wonders if her father — dishonoured, invisible, and outliving his purpose — ever thought that he had made the wrong choice by turning back.
Analysis
Garland structures the poem as a layered storytelling experience—where the daughter shares what her mother "must have" told her. This conditional phrasing does subtle yet important work. It indicates inherited memory, the missing pieces of family history left by shame, and how trauma is passed down in indirect ways. The transition from the third-person perspective of the pilot's flight to the first-person reflection on his return home serves as the poem's key tonal shift: the lyric moves from a sense of expansive, sensory freedom (the sea, the fish, the open sky) to a stifling domestic silence.
The natural imagery during the flight is intentionally rich and leisurely—"a huge flag," "the dark shoals," "the little fishing boats"—creating a contrasting world to the violence the pilot is escaping. Garland allows the sea to convey the moral weight without commentary; the beauty of the world itself becomes the case for survival.
Irony builds in the poem's latter half. The pilot survives physically but faces social obliteration; the family perpetuates the very erasure that the state would have accomplished through his death. The daughter’s final question—whether he wished he had died—draws the reader into the same cultural reasoning that led to his destruction. Garland refrains from moralizing; she simply presents the contradiction and allows it to resonate.
Key quotes from Chapter 1
“he must have looked far down at the little fishing boats strung out like bunting”
The pilot surveys the coastline on his return flight, and Garland's simile — bunting, festive and domestic — quietly insists on the civilian world as something worth choosing.
“we children learned to be silent, to live as though he had never returned”
The daughter describes the family's complicity in the social erasure of the father, revealing how shame is enforced from within as much as from without.
“whether he was right to turn back, or whether it would have been better to have died”
The poem's closing question, voiced by the daughter in retrospect, refuses resolution and implicates the reader in the cultural logic that made survival a form of punishment.