REASONS FOR RITUALS: I’m reading Yukio Mishima’s Death in Midsummer. He’s a terrific observer, a distanced, cool eye that picks out the right detail at cataclysmic moments in the narrative and zooms in on it. In that way he reminds me of Hitchcock.

“Death in Midsummer” itself concerns the accidental drowning of two young children and the aunt who was looking after them. It shows the aftermath of the deaths on the children’s parents; and it highlights the way that the rituals of grief alienate the couple from themselves and those around them: “The two bodies were found the next day. The constabulary, diving all up and down the beach, finally found them under the headland. Sea bugs had nibbled at them, and there were two or three bugs up each nostril.

“Such incidents of course go far beyond the dictates of custom, and yet at no time are poeple more bound to follow custom. Tomoko and Masaru forgot none of the responses and the return gifts custom demanded.

“A death is always a problem in administration. They were frantically busy administering. One might say that Masaru in particular, as head of the family, had almost no time for sorrow. As for Katsuo [the surviving son], it seemed to him that one festival day succeeded another, with the adults all playing parts.”

This picture does not wholly override, but it does complicate, the quick-‘n’-easy Anthro 101 explanation that rituals of mourning are meant to help the survivors re-integrate into the community, reaffirm their social bonds, and thereby reaffirm their own identities. Funerals and other forms of ritualized mourning, in my experience/opinion, have also a strong potential to alienate the survivors from those around them, strain their social bonds, and make them feel like their own identities are just a series of masks donned in rituals of grief. It becomes difficult, at least for a time, to tell which emotional responses are real and which are simply called for by the occasion; and whether that distinction matters, or can be drawn at all.