The Grandfather

The Grandfather is a minor yet thematically crucial off-stage figure in Kamikaze, never speaking directly but influencing every major event through the values he embodied. He serves as the family's patriarchal elder, connected to the cultural codes of imperial Japan — honor, collective loyalty, and the expectation of self-sacrifice. His authority is felt through the silence and shame that govern the family after the Pilot's return.

The Grandfather silently shapes the Pilot's original obedience, instilling the honor code that led him to board a loaded aircraft and fly toward death. Importantly, he also imparted a sensory education — an appreciation for the natural world — that ultimately prompted the Pilot to turn back. Thus, the Grandfather represents both the force that drove the Pilot toward sacrifice and the indirect source of the impulse that spared his life.

The Daughter serves as the poem's primary narrator, and her conflicted memory of the Grandfather's values provides the lens through which the reader perceives the family's shame and silence. She internalized his honor code sufficiently to facilitate her own father's social erasure — a guilt she confesses in the poem's poignant closing lines. The Grandfather's legacy resides most painfully in her; she enacts the shame culture he represented against the parent she loved.

The Grandfather's silence highlights a critical theme: Garland uses his wordlessness to imply that deep cultural codes of honor are self-policing and can inflict harm without explicit command. His authority is architectural — the foundation of the family's moral framework. The social silence surrounding the returning Pilot serves as the punishment dictated by his worldview, enforcing itself without the need for spoken words.

The Grandfather acts as the invisible legislator behind the family's refusal to acknowledge the returned Pilot. As the household's patriarchal conscience, his presence is unnecessary at the meal where the family behaves as if the Pilot does not exist — the honor code he represented communicates for him. By the poem's conclusion, his ideology effectively erases the Pilot from his own family's living history.

No direct quotes are attributed to the Grandfather in the poem. His presence is conveyed entirely through the daughter's retrospective voice, remembered gestures, inherited silences, and the weight of cultural expectation rather than through spoken words. This intentional absence of quotation functions as a narrative device Garland employs to illustrate how patriarchal authority and cultural conditioning can operate without being explicitly stated.

The Grandfather is not presented as a straightforward villain; rather, he is depicted as a man whose strict nationalism and patriarchal demeanor contribute to the family's tragedy. Garland suggests a more complex inner life — moments of shared tenderness or quiet sorrow beneath his stern exterior — indicating he is less a willful agent of harm than a human embodiment of a damaging ideology. He is responsible not out of malice but due to unquestioning loyalty to an honor system that undermines those closest to him.

The Grandfather's patriarchal authority shapes the Wife's reaction to the returned Pilot, as she must navigate her grief within the honor codes he upholds. The Children, too distant to question the origin of the ideology, simply inherit a silence they struggle to understand. The Grandfather's values thus permeate every generation in the poem, ensuring that the Pilot is erased not only from society but also from his own family's comprehension of their history.