How many people can you kill? It is a good question, but different thinkers have taken different approaches to the answer. However, whilst most interlocutors would focus on the ‘how many’, Dostoevsky and Nasu focus on the ‘you’. What do we mean? Let’s rewind for a second.
Fyodor Dostoevsky is a famous Russian author from the 19th century, whose exploration of the human soul in all its complexity, awfulness, compassion and contradiction may be fairly said to stand without parallel in fictional literature.
His novel Crime and Punishment follows a promising but poor university student, Rodion Romanych Raskolnikov (or Rodya to his friends). Raskolnikov plots the murder of a miserly landlord who, by all assessment, has a net negative impact on society. He reasons that if he kills her, it will give him what he needs, but also he will be able to use that money to prevent his pure sister from consenting to a terrible marriage that she was considering to stave the family away from ruin. In short, Dostoevsky sets it up as the perfect murder. Raskolnikov sees himself as a higher class of man (very much in the Nietzschean sense) that is able to make such bold and necessary steps as this to achieve the proper outcome. In short, Raskolnikov commits the murder, but what Dostoevsky labours to show is that it is Raskolnikov who doesn’t survive the murder. The old Rodion Raskolnikov is gone, murdered, forever tainted by the act of murder. His hubris and arrogance in thinking he could rise above moral norms weigh down on his shoulders like a suffocating blanket, and he remains as a mere shell of his former self, in the end so tormented by his guilt that he almost begs a police officer to accuse him of it so that he can face justice.
So, in killing another, Dostoevsky says that the murderer themself dies inside to such a degree that the person remaining is someone else altogether.
Kinoko Nasu is a Japanese author, best known for the light novel The Garden of Sinners and for his visual novels Tsukihime and Fate/Stay Night. Nasu’s familiarity with various philosophies, primarily Taoism and some elements of Catholicism, are abundantly clear in his work. The heroine of The Garden of Sinners is Shiki Ryougi, and her acquaintance with her friend Mikiya Kokutou, make this very apparent. In some sense, Shiki serves as a canvas for painting the image of a woman who is the manifestation of Ying/Yang, and in this respect showcases Taoist philosophy. She has two distinct personalities that wish to be in control, one which is feminine (式 ‘Shiki’, associated with yin), and one which is masculine (織 ‘SHIKI’, associated with yang). Shiki often makes morally ambiguous judgements, shows a nihilistic or cynical attitude to life, and in general doesn’t care for societal norms. In contrast, Mikiya (though not Catholic himself) is a young man who has clear and objective moral rules that he hates to see broken, whether by himself or any of the other characters. He is pleasant and polite, and in this sense the total opposite of Shiki. In this way, Shiki and Mikiya are almost the personifications of Taoism and Catholicism, though we would need to make so many caveats to that statement that the reader should consider it a stretch.
But what has all this to do with murder? Well, Shiki is a rather unusual lady. Events of the story lead to the death of her masculine personality, SHIKI. As a result, she has some immediate familiarity with the feeling of death, and so she doesn’t take murder lightly. In an internal monologue, Mikiya says (of Shiki), that she kills no one, because “you’re a victim and a perpetrator at the same time, so you know better than anyone that it is full of sorrow” (Kinoko Nasu, Ufotable, 2014, The Garden Of Sinners 2:And Nothing Heart.)
Mikiya knows the moral damage done to a human soul by murder, so at the end of the seventh installment (The Garden of Sinners: A Study in Murder (Part 2)), Mikiya tells Shiki that even though she has committed murder, he will “carry [her] sin in [her] place”, and again that he’d “bear the burden of [her] crime in [her] place” (Kinoko Nasu, Ufotable, 2014, The Garden of Sinners: A Study in Murder (Part 2)).
What Nasu presents through his characters is very similar to Dostoevsky. Nasu’s Mikiya is the stabilising and cautionary force trying to hold back the murderously impulsive Shiki from committing the sin and crime of murder that he knows would so unalterably mark her soul that she would truly die, and that whatever personality of hers remained would be once again fractured and torn apart. Shiki herself, though driven by a constant impulse for murder, insists on the murder being meaningful, and turns down several opportunities for murder on the basis that they didn’t seem meaningful enough. As if this plot point wasn’t clear enough, Shiki’s final nemesis, Lio Shirazumi, has as his primary goal to corrupt Shiki by tricking her into thinking of herself as a murderer and leading her to commit murder, because even he knows that this would corrupt her, and that is an end unto itself for him.
This author’s explanation of the characters and themes of The Garden of Sinners here is very brief and surface level, but a more in depth analysis (though worthwhile, and a well-earned credit to Nasu’s excellent writing) will not be undertaken here. Buy and watch the series for yourself if your interest is piqued.
At the end of the day, neither Dostoevsky or Nasu are truly correct in their fictional explorations of murder. Though it should seem obvious that committing murder would cause significant damage to a person, it is not true that they stop being who they truly were, because the true and living God holds all men and women accountable for their actions, and any sins committed after murder are still sins that the individual is responsible before God for. Additionally, the detriment of murder on the soul of the murder is not truly irreversible. The Spirit of God has saved murderers many times before, and in His work of renewing them day by day, and conforming them to the image of the Son of God, he is powerful even to cleanse the soul from the guilt and stench of murder. This is truly good news, because for all of the artistic and literary beauty in Crime and Punishment and The Garden of Sinners, neither of those worlds offer true redemption to the one who has killed their own soul in the act of murder.
This author invites the reader to hold whatever ideology or philosophy they prize at an arm’s length, and to hold the gospel of true peace close to their hearts. If you have not yet found true peace through Christ, there is no better time than now.
Distilled Orthopraxy 