Composed as a prose poem and narrated from an omniscient point of view, this piece by Sakutarō gives an account of the sad life of an octopus neglected for a long time in “a certain aquarium” (281). The poet delicately describes the “dim rock shadows” and “pale crystal ceiling rays of light” that drift across the forgotten octopus, left for dead in stagnant brine behind the dirty glass of his tank. The reader shares in the narrator’s omniscience and perceives a process that must be understood, finally, as symbolic of the physical and metaphysical effects of isolation and confinement.

The octopus ate everything he could in the tank, slept for a while, then woke, but only to starve day after day. Finally, desperate, he “tore off his legs and ate them. First, one leg. Then, another”—until they were all consumed. Then he “turned his body inside out” and finally after a time “finished eating all of his body.” The octopus had cannibalized itself methodically: “Epidermis, brains, stomach. Every part, leaving nothing at all. Completely.” The octopus vanished but “did not die” and “was eternally alive there… Eternally—most likely through many centuries—an animal with a certain horrible deficiency and dissatisfaction was alive, invisible to the human eye.” So ends the piece.

Some of the narrator’s earlier bizarre declarations, unintrusive on the first go-around, remain for the reader to conjure on second thought. Somehow, “willowy seaweed” eventually grows back in the tank and is ignored by the invisible octopus. The poet may be implying that once the octopus is utterly involuted, real foodstuffs are no longer of any interest to this sort of creature, a living thing that has turned on itself and consumed every part of itself except for its “horrible” vitality.

Furthermore, the speaker of this report turns out to be not a logical or reliable storyteller (even if we do swallow the tall tale he tells). While a reader can certainly entertain the notion of spiritual immortality (even the undying effects of such “deficiency and dissatisfaction” as the poem evokes), how is one to interpret an eternity that lasts only “centuries”? One response might be to take this sort of expression in the language of the poem as colloquial, representative of the way ordinary people exaggerate, mix metaphors, and sound sometimes entirely irrational when they attempt to verbalize essentially ineffable emotional states or disturbing thoughts.

In sum, The Octopus That Does Not Die presents a multilayered conundrum to anyone who attempts a close reading. What remains clear, however, is that prolonged solitary confinement must be “terrible” indeed.

Bibliography
Hagiwara, Sakutarō. Howling at the Moon: Poems and Prose of Hagiwara Sakutarō. Translated and introduced by Hiroaki Sato. Copenhagen and Los Angeles: Green Integer (#57), 2002.

Categories: Japanese Literature, Literature, World Literature

Tags: Hiroaki Sato translation, invisible characters in literature, Japanese modernist poetry, metaphor of isolation in poetry, psychological confinement in literature, Sakutarō Hagiwara criticism, Sakutarō Hagiwara poetry, Sakutarō Hagiwara prose poems, Sakutarō Hagiwara themes, self-cannibalism symbolism, surrealist Japanese literature, The Octopus That Does Not Die analysis, The Octopus That Does Not Die character study, The Octopus That Does Not Die criticism, The Octopus That Does Not Die literary analysis, The Octopus That Does Not Die plot, The Octopus That Does Not Die summary, The Octopus That Does Not Die symbolism, The Octopus That Does Not Die themes