The Death of Mr. Tagomi
An Essay by: Joshua Voshell
Edited by: Devin Heck
Mr. Tagomi plays a pivotal role in the novel The Man in the High Castle. When the reader is first introduced to him, it is through the eyes of another character. This character sees Mr. Tagomi as a hard businessman. As the story unfolds, Mr. Tagomi’s character begins to become more fleshed out. He is a pragmatic businessman but he is also a calm, contemplative, and well-meaning individual. He is slow to judgment and has a Buddhist mentality. This calm and level headedness the character exhibits makes him easy for the reader to identify with. His ideology is brought to a breaking point during the later part of the novel, and here he is forced to reevaluate his own philosophy. He is forced to take a life and this causes him great turmoil. He believes himself to be a good man and that killing is always wrong. This belief is irreconcilable with what he has done, and his internal struggle results in a heart attack. The heart attack may lead the character to his death or it may not- Philip K. Dick has left the results uncertain. This is to allow the reader to conclude from it whether or not it is possible to change one's ideology.
The reader identifies with Mr. Tagomi because in this world where people seem so strange, his views on things seem the most rational. Philip also wrote for an American audience, and since Mr. Tagomi has a fondness for American history, it allows them to better identify with him. Tagomi does not overreact at Mr. Childan’s inability to procure the Civil War poster on time, though he knows this will cause him to have to do more work. He simply accepts Mr. Childan’s explanation and then looks elsewhere for help in solving his problem. This leads him to ask the advice of Mr. Ramsey. Mr. Ramsey is an American who works for the white puppet government that is ultimately ruled by Japan. Mr. Tagomi’s ability to ask advice from someone who, in this world, is considered inferior and with whom the majority of American readers can identify with, further strengthens his relatability by displaying rational behavior and embracing the ethnicity of most of Philip’s original readers.
Mr. Tagomi is a Japanese citizen, which places him high in the social structure of society. This is because in the world of The Man in the High Castle, America has been split between Germany and Japan. In the Japanese territories, people live under a racial caste system, and the Japanese naturally occupy the higher rungs. This gives Mr. Tagomi a default position of superiority, one that few other characters in the novel occupy. He is quite literally a part of the ruling class. To add to this, he is a well respected and verbose business man. It is because of this that Mr. Tagomi is invited to the meeting between Mr. Baynes and General Tedeki. Although he believes this to be simply an important business meeting, he is there as a cover so that the secret conference has a plausible front. Tagomi is also chosen because he is considered trustworthy. The meeting Mr. Tagomi is invited too is small. It takes place between only three individuals- Mr. Baynes, General Tedeki, and Mr. Tagomi. Mr. Baynes is a Nazi officer who is secretly a Jew and member of a resistance movement operating inside the German government. General Tedeki is a high ranking official within the Japanese government masquerading as Mr. Yatabe, a Japanese businessman. The meeting is set up to appear as a international business meeting, but its real purpose is for the resistance movement to warn the Japanese government about Nazi plans to attack Japan. Mr. Tagomi is only here to give legitimacy to their cover. However, their meeting is found out by Nazis, whose actions eventually lead to Mr. Tagomi killing them and thus his eventual crisis.
In order to better understand what happens to Mr. Tagomi during his existential crisis, we need to look at the meaning behind Ed and Frank’s jewelry. Mr. Childan had given a set of earrings made by Frank and Ed to Paul Kasoura in a vain attempt at flirting with the man's wife, but also to perhaps stir up demand for the product. Paul later has a discussion with Mr. Childan about the paradoxical value of the earrings. He starts off by explaining that he found the earrings to be ugly and devoid of meaning or any real value. Later on in the day, he realizes he is still thinking about them, going over their strange form in his mind. Their formless shape, in a way, fascinated him. He let it ruminate in his subconscious and after a long time, related it to a Rorschach test. Like a Rorschach test, its meaning is derived from the viewer and intrinsically has none. Paul concludes his thoughts by saying, "It is balanced. The forces within this piece are stabilized. At rest. So to speak, this object has made its peace with the universe. It has separated from it and hence has managed to come to homeostasis" (p.93 ). The point of the jewelry is to represent a path or way of thinking. The jewelry Ed and Frank makes has no intrinsic meaning. At first glance the object looks and is meaningless, but upon further meditation, meaning is given to the object. Frank’s jewelry is to be symbolic of this. It represents something that must be meditated on.
Like the jewelry, Tagomi’s heart attack also has metaphorical significance. It’s a culmination of the clash between the reality of his actions and his deep-seated philosophical and ideological beliefs. Mr. Tagomi did not decide to join an anti-Nazi campaign; his path leads him there- a path forged by forces beyond his control placing him in a situation where he has to kill. However, killing is so fundamentally incompatible with his beliefs that he is forced to find a new Tao. This causes him to feverishly search for something to cling to. In this vain hope, he purchases something that he hopes will aid him in this. Mr. Childan pitched to him the philosophical depth of Frank and Ed’s jewelry, and in Mr. Tagomi’s frenzy, he buys a piece. This was a misunderstanding, for intrinsically they hold no depth. His feverish attempts to extract a new Tao from the objects is fruitless. He then looks back to his own internal logic, but that understanding of the world it is grounded in something that his very act of killing has banished him from. It’s part of a path he can no longer follow. He becomes completely lost and begins to behave erratically, acting totally different than the character did before this point. He is attempting to find some mode of behavior that will allow him to go on. He goes in a whites’ cafe and attempts to boss some of the lower class whites around, but is met with defiance; with no one to back him up, he has no power. This event shakes him to his foundations, and the shock forces him to change his modus operandi and thus begins the process of rebuilding his personal identity. Later, we see him defy the Nazis by not signing the papers to give over Frank. This is the apex of his transformation. It seems he may be able to forge a new path, but then why the heart attack? The heart attack creates ambiguity and that is important as it serves two functions. It is the symbolic death of Mr. Tagomi. It shows a clear end to the old Mr. Tagomi. The ambiguity of its outcome helps to outline the symbolic representation of death, but it also gives the reader a choice: can Mr. Tagomi change his Tao? The author doesn't want to interject his own opinion, but rather allows the reader to come to their own conclusion. Thus, if the reader decides that he does survive his heart attack, it shows that he is capable of changing and is then reborn.
There is one last thing the reader should understand before they can fully appreciate Tagomi’s arc. This novel portrays the Nazi regime as being undefeatable by force. They are the most technologically advanced, rule half the planets as well as having colonies on other planets, and have probably the most powerful army on the planet. So can they be defeated? We see in this novel how the Nazis are powerful but also unchangeable. They do not adapt to new ideas and this is they key to their defeat. We see the Japanese government in this book have very little problem with reading The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, whereas the Nazi government outlaws anything that contradicts its own doctrine This is where Mr. Tagomi fits in. His arc is all about ideological change and adaptation. If Mr. Tagomi can change his ideology, what about individuals who make up the Nazi regime? We see Freiherr Hugo Reiss reading The Grasshopper Lies Heavy and having some feelings of dissatisfaction with the way things have turned out. If the Nazi order does not adapt, it would stand to reason that it fail when all of its individuals slowly change.
Mr. Tagomi, despite being a powerful man, cannot overcome his fate. His struggle to find a new path represents the struggle to adapt. Phillip gives Mr. Tagomi the jewelry to highlight this problem. He is grasping for something concrete, but one can't just jump to a new ideology overnight. A new path can only be developed by oneself over a long period of meditation and contemplation. We are meant to empathize with Tagomi and see this dilemma as a message to us: we cannot chose the events that fall before us, but we do decide our actions. Change certainly can't happen fast, but can it happen at all? Mr. Tagomi the cultural Buddhist died, but is Mr. Tagomi born anew? The reader is left with these questions, and the question of whether such a profound change is ever possible. If so we can see that Mr. Tagomi lives and that an ideology that is resistant to change will eventually fail.
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