In this blog post, we’ll examine how the recurring imagery of death in the novel ‘The Dead’ shapes the concept of “the dead” and creates a narrative of reincarnation, using the examples of Negeli and Amakasu.

Introduction

This novel begins with a shocking depiction of death right from the first chapter. Chapter 1 describes a Japanese officer committing seppuku, which is filmed with a movie camera and turned into a short documentary. The novel ends in the final chapter with the female protagonist, Ida, climbing up the letter “H” of the Hollywood Sign in Los Angeles and jumping to her death. It is a work that begins with suicide and ends with suicide.
Therefore, it is not surprising that the novel’s title is “Die Toten” (The Dead). Beyond this, the work is permeated with stories of the deaths of numerous characters. The death of his father haunts the protagonist, Negeli, endlessly. While Negeli is in Japan making a film, his mother dies. Masahiko Amakasu, who could be considered the secondary protagonist, appears to drown in the Pacific Ocean as the story progresses.
Furthermore, the nanny whom Masahiko loved as a child dies tragically in a car accident, and Sebastian, the rabbit Negeli loved, is handed over to a neighboring farmer and skinned. One of Negeli’s female relatives, unable to bear her loneliness, commits suicide by slitting her throat with a razor blade, and Japanese Prime Minister Tsuyoshi Inukai is assassinated by young naval officers. Masahiko also witnesses a young woman falling off a cliff at Tojinbo.
Although the protagonist, Negeli, does not meet his end directly, the shadow of death looms heavily over him. The story of Negeli—a film director facing a crisis in both his life and art as he enters middle age—strongly evokes Thomas Mann’s ‘Death in Venice’. Just as Gustav von Aschenbach decided to travel to Venice amid a sense of crisis, Emil Negeli—after a series of failures—chooses to travel to Japan with the hope of turning his life around.
The scene of Negeli getting a makeover at a barbershop in Japan to look younger is reminiscent of the scene where Aschenbach attempts to rejuvenate himself at a barbershop in Venice. However, the outcomes differ: while Negeli safely completes his trip to Japan and returns to his hometown of Bern, Aschenbach succumbs to the temptations of love, remains in Venice during a cholera outbreak, and ultimately dies without returning.
Furthermore, before leaving for Japan, Negeli visits the Norwegian author Knut Hamsun to seek permission to adapt ‘The Mystery’ into a film. Interestingly, the protagonist of that work is named Nagel. This suggests that Negeli’s name may have originated from Nagel, a stranger who appears in a small village and, as an eccentric unable to adapt to the world, ultimately ends his life by suicide.
While the omnipresence of death and allusions to death throughout the novel seem to justify the title ‘The Dead’, there is room for further reflection on whether the title literally refers only to those who have already died. In the passage describing Amakasu and Nagel’s first encounter, “The Dead” is clearly used in a different sense.
In the hallway, Amakasu and Nagel sniff at each other—as if recalling memories of their past lives in a dream—to confirm the other’s true existence. Among people of this sort, such matters are settled in a very brief moment, and from then on, it is common for them to simply ignore one another. The path of reincarnation is too arduous and horrific to share with others of their kind. Because the “dead” are endlessly lonely creatures, no bond exists between them. They are born alone, die alone, and are reborn alone.
Here, “the dead” does not simply refer to those who have already died, but to beings who repeat the cycle of life and death—that is, those who have undergone reincarnation. Ordinary people are those who have not yet died, but individuals like Amakasu and Negeli are called “the dead” because they have experienced death in the past. In other words, for them, death is not something that lies ahead, but something that is already behind them.
However, the novel does not directly unfold the past lives of Amakas or Negeli through narrative. There are almost no explicit mentions of their past lives; only descriptions that hint at their solitary reincarnation, such as the passage quoted earlier, exist. Nevertheless, if we take these clues as a starting point and closely examine what happens to the two characters, indirect evidence of reincarnation emerges throughout the story.
Reincarnation means returning to life after experiencing death. The reincarnating deceased are those who have crossed the barrier between life and death, and because of that experience, they possess a faint memory of the world between one life and another. In the novel, Kracht refers to this world as the “intermediate world,” and he illustrates this through a scene in which Negeli experiences the intermediate world.
Negeli lies on his parents’ silk sofa, spending several hours lost in the shifting shapes of the clouds outside the window, drifting in and out of sleep. He thought he had just dozed off for a moment, but in reality, several hours had passed. Within that intermediate world, he realizes he possesses a special ability: he can curse someone only once in his lifetime, and that curse will certainly come true.
In the in-between world, he also discovers a special tree that he will continue to encounter throughout his life. This tree appears repeatedly not only in Switzerland but also in various parts of the world, including the Baltic coast, Italian Somaliland, Japan, and Siberia. From the perspective of the ordinary world, trees in different regions might appear as separate entities, but in the in-between world, they are recognized as a single, identical tree.
This leads to the idea that the tree itself is a reincarnating being. In other words, the trees that appear in various parts of the world are, in fact, a single reincarnating tree, and the ability to recognize this is possible precisely because Negeli himself is a reincarnating spirit. Only those who possess a “ticket” to the intermediate world can see such a “reincarnating tree” directly.
In the novel, even much smaller objects undergo reincarnation. A light purple pencil that appears repeatedly throughout the work is one such example. This pencil first appears in the chapter where Negeli recalls a trip to Paris with his father. His father uses the light purple pencil to write a reservation letter to a Parisian restaurant.
Interestingly, that same light purple pencil reappears later when Negeli visits the office of a German film studio executive to discuss plans for a film production in Japan. While waiting in the waiting room, Negeli kicks a light purple pencil lying on the floor. The narrator explains that the pencil “appeared in that place as if passing through the ether from somewhere,” implying that it is the very same pencil Negeli’s father used in Paris many years earlier.
The repeated appearance of the light purple pencil aligns with the development of a narrative leitmotif. Recurring motifs serve to link different situations and events by evoking associations between them. Kracht transforms this structural device—the leitmotif—into an event that actually cycles through the narrative universe.
The light purple pencil possesses not only structural identity (the repetition of the motif) but also ontological identity (the same pencil appears and disappears across various worlds through the ether). In other words, the novel’s structural and rhetorical dimensions are inseparable from the event-based dimension of the narrative universe. The universe in which this reincarnation occurs is equivalent to the novel itself as the author’s artistic creation.
Therefore, the fact that Negeli recognizes the identity between the reincarnating tree and the light purple pencil suggests that he possesses the potential to transcend his limitations as a fictional character and penetrate the world of the author who created him. When Negeli rolls the pencil back and forth, the narrative in parentheses is read not merely as an explanation but as a device reflecting his unconscious perception.
Clearer evidence that Negeli noticed the pencil’s reincarnation almost unconsciously can be found in the scene where the light purple pencil appears for the third time. This time, the pencil appears on the floor of the taxi Negeli is riding in, having just arrived in Japan.

The Protagonist and the Author: A Breach of Dimensions

Negeli feels something under his shoe, looks down at the floor of the taxi, and reaches down to pick it up. It is a pencil—a light purple pencil that someone has dropped. He rolls the eight-sided, clicking pencil barrel in his hand and tucks it into his shirt pocket. The scene in which he decides to keep the pencil—as if anticipating some mnemonic context—until he realizes its meaning goes beyond the simple discovery of a prop.
As Negeli picks up the pencil, he ponders its significance and senses its nature as a leitmotif. He does not dismiss the repetition and recurrence of the light purple pencil as a mere sign of coincidence, but rather contemplates it as a narrative device that generates fictional meaning. The scene in which Negeli—a character in the novel—appears to be trying to understand the leitmotif technique used by Kracht, the author who created him, suggests a moment when the protagonist, by becoming vaguely aware of the author’s creative dimension, transcends the barrier between the author’s world and the fictional world.
If Negeli, as a deceased person, can traverse the realms of the living and the dead, his character as an inhabitant of these dual worlds is similarly revealed in his relationship with the author. In other words, he possesses the ability to move between the dimension of the fictional world and that of the author who created it. Therefore, the fact that the title of the film Negeli released upon his return from Japan is identical to the title of Kracht’s novel is by no means a coincidence.
The text includes the sentence: “He gives the film the same title as this book and premieres a rough cut—not yet fully edited—at a modest theater in Zeffelt, very close to the Opera House.” This phrasing allows for multiple interpretations. The most straightforward interpretation is that Kracht wrote a novel about the protagonist making a film titled ‘The Dead’, and thus the novel itself ended up sharing the same title. Conversely, a noteworthy interpretation is that Negeli himself was aware of the title of Kracht’s novel and intentionally gave his film the same title. In particular, the fact that the sentence is written in a way that implies the similarity to the novel—as in “He gave the film the same title as this book”—without directly mentioning the film’s title lends further credibility to this interpretation.
Negeli’s special ability, acquired after briefly falling into the intermediate world, can also be understood in this context. Through his visit to the intermediate world, he comes to believe that he can curse someone only once in his lifetime, and that the curse will come true one hundred percent. Later, upon arriving in Japan, he hurls curses at his fiancée Ida—whom he believes has betrayed him—and her lover, Masahiko Amakasu, before kicking the stand in a fit of rage and leaving the villa.
That curse becomes entangled with Chaplin and is cruelly fulfilled. After Negeli’s affair is exposed, Masahiko and Ida board a ship bound for the United States with Chaplin, and in the middle of the night on the deck, Masahiko gets into a quarrel with Chaplin. Ultimately, driven by the threats of a drunken Chaplin, Masahiko throws himself into the open sea. Having lost her lover, Ida arrives in Los Angeles and tries to lean on Chaplin, but he completely rejects her, leading to her downfall. She ends her life by climbing onto the “H” of the giant Hollywood sign and jumping off. This episode is based on the suicide of actor Pack Entwistle.
The “certainty about the future” that the intermediate world instilled in Negeli is thus tragically revealed in reality. If one can attain a mystical certainty in the intermediate world, the protagonist’s experience there becomes akin to peering directly into the author’s creative realm. Having ascended to the author’s plot level, the protagonist can survey the future predestined for him—perhaps even his fate, which has already been sealed. As a result, he breaks free from the shackles of everyday time and comes to view the past, present, and future simultaneously.
Masahiko’s case illustrates this well. The moment he first encounters Negeli, he realizes that he, too, is a deceased soul, and senses his impending misfortune—his fate to die at sea—through the hallucination of the scent of the ocean. However, this foresight is not always complete. Negeli is certain only that the curse he has once cast will someday come to pass; he does not know when, how, or upon whom it will befall. Furthermore, even after the curse is fulfilled, he himself may remain unaware of the fact.
Ultimately, even as Negeli and Masahiko travel between the two dimensions, the intermediate world reveals itself to them only as a dream, the unconscious, or an enigmatic illusion. They struggle to return to their daily lives, trying to turn away from or forget that experience. For example, Masahiko goes to Dojinbo and meets an abandoned woman eking out a miserable existence in a cave beneath a cliff; he begs her not to leave and promises to return, but once he leaves that world, he completely forgets that promise. The moment he sets foot on level ground again, that place is perceived as an unchanging, safe haven.

Salvation Through Art: The Metaphysical Camera

Looking back at Kracht’s depiction of the dead, he states that they are endlessly lonely and tormented beings due to the “cycle of reincarnation.” There are no bonds among the dead; they are born alone, die alone, and are reborn alone. If life is suffering for humans, death may be liberation; but for those bound by the cycle of reincarnation, even death does not put an end to that suffering. The reason they suffer is not simply the repetition of life itself, but their awareness that they are reincarnating.
If all memories of past lives were erased and there were no premonition of being reborn after death, such a person would not be called a “deceased.”
The “dead” are beings who are aware of their own reincarnation. They are those who possess a sense of eternity—those who are not confined to finite earthly lives and can, to some extent, intuit the entire process of reincarnation. Because of this, the “dead” perceive their earthly lives as a cursed fate, endlessly repeating like Sisyphus, and yearn to break free from the shackles of reincarnation and return to their “eternal homeland.”
The misfortune of the deceased lies in their dual nature. They are both a wretched being cast into the world’s suffering and cruelty, and a being who still retains their prior, eternal identity. While one usually calls the place of birth “home,” for the deceased, birth itself is a casting into a foreign land. Birth begins with a sense of lack, and that sense of lack is intertwined with a longing for salvation. In this way, artistic narratives and experiences of the intermediate world lead to complex reflections on salvation, foresight, and the relationship between the Creator and the created.

Negeli and Sebastian: The Sense of Dual Existence

Depicted as beings of a dual world, the deceased tend to view the world and objects surrounding them from a dual perspective. It is a way of simultaneously confronting reality and the dimension beyond it, much like recognizing another tree reincarnating behind a single, individual tree.
Sebastian, a rabbit brutally killed by a neighbor farmer in his childhood, returns in Japan through the hands of a taxi driver wearing white gloves. As he experiences the rabbit’s symbolic reincarnation through memory, Negeli contemplates the possibility of salvation through art.
When the cheerful sound of the engine intertwines with the chirping of birds from the bushes, triggering a lively chain of memories, he often finds himself deeply immersed in the world of his childhood, long since submerged. What he sees are the driver’s two white-gloved hands—resting quietly on either side of the steering wheel, as if biding their time. That image reminds him of the harrowing memory of Sebastian, that small white rabbit.
Recalling Sebastian’s visceral suffering—his skinned form—Negeli feels as though he could borrow the world’s pain and cruelty, even if only for a moment, turn it upside down, and transform it into something different, something good. He believes he can bring about such salvation through his art.

The Metaphysical Transformation of the Silent Black-and-White Camera

When Negeli conceives of turning the world’s suffering upside down, he dreams of a transformation of existence through the camera. For him, the camera is a device that takes him beyond the finite objects perceived by everyday consciousness, allowing him to see the objects themselves—that is, a higher dimension of existence that may lie beyond the cycle of reincarnation.
Masahiko Amakasu interpreted Negeli’s masterpiece, ‘The Windmill’, as an attempt to reveal the transcendent and the spiritual. Negeli’s camera has been praised for succeeding in revealing, amid the absence of events, something indescribable—something akin to the sacred.
Negeli’s camera sometimes lingers for a long time, without reason, on a coal stove, a pile of firewood, or the nape of a maid’s neck, before gliding through an open window toward a fir forest and up to a snow-capped mountaintop. In such scenes, the camera feels like an immaterial, pure gaze, behaving as if it were a floating spirit.
The immaterial and pure gaze of this spirit-like camera resonates with the immateriality and purity of its subjects. While a camera was originally a machine that merely reproduced images of physical reality through a lens, Negeli’s camera, as the gaze of a spirit or the gaze of the deceased, reveals the sacredness and metaphysical dimension of existence.
Negeli’s movie camera is clearly distinct from the aesthetics of conventional camera representation, which mechanically replicates physical reality. The “pure gaze of the camera” mentioned by Amakasu is not merely a transparent mirror that faithfully reflects reality. It is a gaze that purely transforms the diverse material reality and, through that transformation, captures a dimension beyond reality.
Negeli’s recognition of this potential in the movie camera is linked not only to his artistic prowess but also to the characteristics of early film technology, which served as the historical backdrop for the novel. At that time, cameras could not reproduce natural colors, and films had no sound. While the introduction of sound films and color was a natural progression of technological development, Negeli and the directors who influenced him instead insisted on the medium of silent, black-and-white film.
Paradoxically, this attitude demonstrates that technical limitations transformed film from a mere replication of reality into an art form that transforms and recreates subjects through the medium’s own language. Black-and-white imagery reproduces images of the real world while simultaneously cloaking them in the surreal garb of black and white, thereby imbuing them with the medium’s own character. Pure visual imagery, stripped of sound and other sensory stimuli, creates a cinematic world distinctly separate from the perception of natural reality.
Negelli viewed the movie camera’s ability to transform subjects by stripping away the colors of reality as metaphysical. While he did wonder whether the eventual advent of color film might have a greater aesthetic impact than sound film, he fundamentally believed that the medium of black-and-white, silent film was the very means of simulating reality while realizing the medium’s own metaphysics.
From this perspective, what cinema produces is not an image of reality as it is, but an image processed according to the medium’s characteristics—that is, a cinematic image. What the silent black-and-white camera produces is not a faithful reproduction of reality, but a reality shaped by the medium, segmented and distorted in the cinematic manner.
Several scenes in the novel reveal this point. Scenes such as the restaurant’s dazzling lights reflected in a puddle in a pothole on the asphalt—appearing as fragmented, artificial light; the woman who quickly covers her face with both hands as she sneezes, revealing the expressions of the people in the room reflected in her hands; and the descriptions where a magnifying glass is reflected in the eye peering through a hole, making the gaze seem like a projector creating the scene—are repeated throughout the novel.
In particular, the metaphor of the eye and the projector effectively reveals the duality of the movie camera. While in some scenes the view of the room can be read as a “reflection of reality” in a person’s iris, it also appears as though the image within that iris is projected back to create the scene in the room. The question of whether the movie camera captures reality or whether the images captured by the camera produce something that appears to be reality may ultimately be true in both cases.
That gap—the gap between the reality given to the film and the reality produced by the film—is created not only by the technical characteristics of the medium, such as black-and-white imagery, but also by the way the narrative is constructed, as seen in the camera’s gaze lingering for a long time on the back of the maid’s neck. Negeli sought to draw out the hidden, fundamental, and metaphysical dimension of existence from precisely that gap.
For him, the possibility of salvation—capable of overturning the suffering and cruelty of life—lies precisely in that metaphysical dimension. By transforming and reconstructing reality through the camera, Negeli sought to reveal the salvation that art can bring and the other facets of existence.

Novelistic Form and Repetitive Techniques

Negeli’s approach to the art of film also deeply influences the novel’s structure. As we have seen, Kracht uses repetitive techniques, such as leitmotifs, to create mutual references between specific images, sounds, and objects and the characters and events. For example, the light purple pencil reappears in the hands of the doctor at the camp where Hanfstangl is imprisoned, and returns in a transformed form—as a round, light purple scrap of paper spat out by Punch—at young Masahiko’s house. The word “Veritas,” engraved on the Harvard badge, is revealed in a glass as ice melts, and also appears inside a golf ball hit by Chaplin.
The repetition of camera shots and filming scenes is also striking. Just as the Japanese officer’s suicide is filmed with a movie camera installed in a hole in the wall, Negeli inserts a camera lens through a hole in the bedroom wall to film Masahiko and Ida’s love scene. These two situations share the same detail—the gap between the camera and the edge of the hole being plugged with cloth—and by placing these scenes at different points in the novel, the author establishes a precise correspondence between the film presented at the beginning and the film that concludes the story.
Another repetitive device is the sound used as a sign of death. The note “H,” whispered by Negeli’s father just before his death, recurs like a sign haunting various death scenes, reaching its climax when Ida throws herself down from the Hollywood-style sign. The nanny’s tragic death in a traffic accident reads like a foreshadowing of the downfall and death that Ida will later experience.
These strikingly prominent repetitions imbue the entire novel with an unreal and fantastical atmosphere. Rather than simply reenacting real-world events, the work feels like a poetic and musical composition in which certain themes and images shift and recur, forming distinct patterns. These patterns clearly reveal that the world within the novel is not a representation of an external, given reality, but rather a construct produced by the author’s artistic devices. The novel functions as a representational and anti-representational medium that, like a black-and-white movie camera, both reproduces reality and generates a world that diverges from it.

The Narrative Structure and Pace of “Jo-Ha-Gyoo”

In addition to leitmotifs, Kracht draws on other stylistic patterns to create the novel’s rhythm and reveal its gaps. A prime example is the dramatic pattern of Jo (Prologue)—Ha (Development)—Gyū (Climax), borrowed from the tradition of Noh theater. Within the work, there is a scene where the characters directly watch a Noh performance and explain the Jo-Ha-Gyū structure; in short, Kono’s explanation describes a structure in which the tempo begins slowly in the prologue to heighten anticipation, accelerates in the middle, and then rushes toward the climax as swiftly as possible at the end.
Kracht applies this three-stage structure to the novel as a whole. Part 1 (Jo) begins at the starting points of the two characters—one at the moment he sends a letter proposing a film collaboration and a video of the officer’s suicide, and the other at the moment he heads to Berlin after receiving an offer from a right-wing film studio to be stationed in Japan—but a significant portion of Part 1 is filled with recollections of the recent past or childhood.
In other words, in this introductory section—which accounts for more than 40 percent of the total volume—memories and recollections take center stage rather than the progression of time.
It is not until Part 2 (Lower) that the story truly unfolds. Through the ceremonial events following the sending of the letter, the arrival in Berlin, and the characters’ encounters, the parallel timelines converge, and events unfold in rapid succession. However, toward the end of Part 2, Negeli discovers the relationship between Amakasu and Ida, causing the storylines and timelines of the two characters to diverge once again. Part 2 is slightly longer than Part 1, and because events are presented sequentially, the reader progresses through the story at a faster pace.
The final Part 3 (Kyū) is the shortest in terms of length but moves toward the conclusion at the fastest pace. The process by which Negeli returns to his hometown with a new film, Masahiko is drowned at sea, and Ida falls from grace is resolved in a single breath. Even though it covers the longest period of time, the story’s conclusion is abrupt and swift, in keeping with the nature of “Kyū.”
This adoption of the Noh structure creates an intentional divergence when compared to the Western three-act or five-act tradition. While Western dramatic structure is firmly established as introduction–development–climax–resolution–denouement, Kracht makes it difficult for readers to follow the natural progression of events according to Western expectations by devoting a significant portion of the novel to the prologue. Consequently, the novel’s narrative is perceived as far more stylized and unrealistic than a narrative following traditional patterns.

Self-Reflexivity and Play-within-a-Play

Self-reflexivity is another key structural feature of this novel. Self-reflexivity is, so to speak, the phenomenon of a mirror reflecting a mirror; when a mirror is placed where a mirror that originally reflected an object used to be, the object becomes indirect and sometimes disappears. Negeli’s experience standing between two mirrors in the barbershop vividly illustrates this situation: when the two mirrors are hung facing each other, the mirror images multiply into hundreds and seem to vanish into infinity.
In the self-reflection of mirror upon mirror, the object gradually drifts away from its original form through repeated reflections. This phenomenon can also be expressed by the formula: “a mirror image is the image of a mirror image.” This technique of self-reflection symbolically illustrates a characteristic of Kracht’s novels: the creation of a unique world that transcends reality. The relationship between the author and the protagonist—between Kracht and Negeli—is also hinted at in a dream sequence, specifically the scene where Negeli simultaneously recognizes himself standing in front of the camera and himself standing behind it, experiencing a sense of schismatic thrill.
If the novel itself is a Noh play, then the characters are both the audience and the actors of that Noh play, as well as figures who discuss its structure. In other words, the work adopts a play-within-a-play structure. Negeli watches a specific performance, followed by a scene in which the characters within the story discuss filmmaking and horror films. At the same time, this novel takes on the characteristics of a horror story: the woman in the cave is portrayed as a vampire-like being, and the dead, who traverse the intermediate realm, appear like ghosts throughout the novel.
Masahiko, Negeli, and others are already acting or perceived as ghost-like beings, and Ida, too, becomes a dead soul after coming into contact with the intermediate realm through her sexual experience. These elements make it clear that the novel is a fantastical and surreal story that transcends a mere depiction of reality. Above all, the most decisive example of self-reflexivity is the fact that Kracht’s ‘The Dead’ is a novel that narrates how Negeli’s film ‘The Dead’ was made. In other words, this novel is a novel about a film, and the story unfolds within a relationship where the film and the novel illuminate one another.

Negeli’s Vision for the Film and His Creative Drive

If so, it would be fair to view Negeli’s vision for the film he plans to make in Japan as his own vision for the novel he is currently writing.
Even if he were to create a transparent veil through the film, allowing perhaps even just one person among a thousand viewers to discern the dark, mysterious, magical light behind things, that would not be enough. He must create something—something that is highly artificial yet also connected to himself. That intoxicating vision that appeared to him several weeks ago in Berlin, when he was with Krakauer and Eisner—the vision that led him to choose to go to Japan—merely demonstrated the existence of the possibility of taking a new path. He must now actually create something tragic. He must make a film that is strikingly artificial, one that the audience will perceive as excessively contrived and, above all, inappropriate.

Montage of History

Although Kracht’s novel has been criticized by some German critics for its overly stylized mode of expression and its use of unnecessarily obscure or archaic vocabulary, the most serious problem—when viewed against general literary standards—is the fact that the entire plot is based on a major temporal anachronism. One of the novel’s structural features is that it features two nearly equal protagonists, Negeli and Amakas, presenting their stories alternately. Consequently, the reader follows the two narrative strands simultaneously. The problem is that there is a time lag between the starting point of Negeli’s story and that of Amakas’s.
The novel begins around the time Amakas produces a film about suicide and sends it to Berlin. If so, how does the starting point of Negeli’s story—that is, the moment Negeli boards the flight to Berlin—relate to the starting point of Amakas’s story? The letter Amakas sent to Berlin was not immediately delivered to Hugenberg, the head of the right-wing film studio, because he was on a skiing trip in Switzerland. Even after the letter arrived in Germany from Japan, it would have taken Hugenberg at least a few days to learn of Amakasu’s proposal and to consider who would be the best person to send. When Hugenberg met Negeli in Berlin, he revealed that he had already contacted director Arnold Fank and, after being turned down by him, had reached out to Negeli as an alternative.
When Hugenberg sent Negeli an invitation to visit Berlin, Negeli was in Norway to meet Hamshun, and his secretary forwarded the invitation to the Oslo post office. Upon receiving the letter, Negeli returned from Norway to his home in Switzerland and then flew from Zurich to Berlin. Therefore, a considerable amount of time must have elapsed between Amakasu’s letter to Hugenberg and Negeli boarding the flight to Berlin. Consequently, the Amakasu and Negeli storylines—which begin to run in parallel in Part 2—should be understood as unfolding with this time lag.
All of these events—Amakas’s meeting with Chaplin at the U.S. Embassy, his encounter with Ida at the restaurant, his attendance at the Noh performance with Chaplin, Kono, Ida, and others under the guidance of the Prime Minister’s son, and the assassination of Japanese Prime Minister Tsuyoshi Inukai that same night—must have taken place well before Negeli arrived at the Berlin airport. Furthermore, after Negeli accepted Hugenberg’s proposal in Berlin, it would have taken at least another month for him to enter Japan via the Port of Kobe and arrive at the villa prepared for him in Tokyo. At that time, a voyage by ship from Germany to Japan took about six weeks.
Therefore, based on realistic calculations, the time that elapsed from the day Amakasu sent the letter and the suicide film to Germany and first met Chaplin at the reception to the day Negeli entered the villa in Tokyo must have been at least three months, even by the most conservative estimate. However, Amakasu and Ida—who had already shared a secret sexual connection when they first met over dinner with Chaplin—are portrayed as having been together for only about a week by the time Negeli arrived at the villa. The memory of the assassination attempt that Chaplin narrowly escaped is still vivid, and Amakasu reads the latest news about the assassins to Ida and Negeli. This creates the impression that Amakasu’s story and Negeli’s story—which had been proceeding almost simultaneously up to this point—have naturally converged into a single narrative thread. It appears as though Amakasu’s time flows slowly and Negeli’s time flows quickly, causing them to meet at a single point in time.
It would be impossible to claim that the author—who designed the overall situation and established the temporal relationships himself—erased such a massive time gap by accident. By doing so, he creates an unrealistic fictional space-time where characters living in different time zones can meet and intersect. It is highly significant that the dramatic clash between Amakasu and Negeli—which drives the entire situation toward a rapid catastrophe, that is, a crisis—occurs precisely within this unrealistic temporal discrepancy. It is as if the novel’s artificial structure requires an equally artificial temporal structure.
The absurd impression created by this unrealistic temporal structure is a telling sign that the novel is pieced together from various fragments of reality. Although ‘The Dead’ draws on actual historical figures and events, it falls outside the category of a typical historical novel in that it largely recombines, transforms, and transposes these elements at will, and in that it seeks to derive meaning by creating a divergence from actual history.
Among the fragments of historical reality that Kracht draws upon, the most central are Charlie Chaplin’s actual trip to Japan and the Japan-Germany film co-production project initiated by the Japanese government’s invitation of a German film director. Chaplin’s visit to Japan, the assassination of the prime minister, and the subsequent invitation of the German director were, in reality, events that occurred several years apart and within different contexts. Kracht weaves these events into a single narrative, replacing the real-life figure Arnold Fank with the fictional Swiss director Emil Negelli and linking him to the Chaplin incident.
The significant discrepancy between Amakas’s timeline and Negelli’s, and the resulting plot inconsistencies, serve to highlight the seam where the two historical events are stitched together. In this sense, ‘The Dead’ can be described as a montage novel that uses history as its subject matter. Within this artificial world constructed through montage, characters and events exist and unfold not in real-world time but in a temporal dimension unique to the novel. It is a montage created for Noh’s unique artistic composition—a montage of fabricated time.

The Artist and the Faustian Pact

When Negeli arrived in Japan and sent a telegram from aboard the ship to Ida—who was in a romantic relationship with Masahiko—Masahiko’s time intersected with Negeli’s for the first time. This foreshadows the fateful confrontation between the rivals in the novel. Negeli and Masahiko are both “the dead,” belonging to the same species, and they share a longing for the eternal and the transcendent. However, they are also contrasting in many ways.
If they are like alter egos to one another, their relationship might be similar to that of Jekyll and Hyde. It is Masahiko who blatantly reveals a monstrous, demonic nature combined with genius. The cruel and mysterious revenge he carried out at boarding school, as well as the arson that burned the school building to the ground, clearly demonstrate this. In comparison, Negeli is rather shy and docile. His relationship with his father is of utmost importance to him. Negeli both feared his father and craved his love. Masahiko, on the other hand, is almost indifferent to his father; in fact, it is the father who fears his genius yet aloof son.
We easily conjure up the image of a diabolical genius artist when thinking of Masahiko, but in reality, he is not an artist. He is merely a high-ranking government official involved in the film industry. Although ‘The Dead’ takes on the character of an artist novel because of the character Negeli, unlike typical artist novels, it says almost nothing about the formative process of Negeli, the artist protagonist. There is no continuous narrative about his school life or how he became a film director; only fragmentary memories of his childhood pop up sporadically.
In contrast, the novel describes Masahiko’s upbringing in a relatively continuous manner. Thus, the reader can form a general picture of how Masahiko graduated from school and became a government official. For example, Kracht’s own inner feelings—stemming from his own horrific experiences at a boarding school during his boyhood—are projected onto Masahiko’s intense aversion to boarding schools as depicted in the novel. A relationship of self-reflection is established not only between Kracht and Negeli but also between Kracht and Masahiko. Could Masahiko, then, be considered Negeli’s alter ego?

Negeli and Masahiko: A Contrast of Temperaments and Curses

In a 2018 lecture at the University of Frankfurt, Kracht confessed for the first time that he had been sexually abused while attending Lakefield College School in Canada.
Negeli’s attitude—in which he finds deep fulfillment amid the simple, intimate atmosphere of a Japanese farmhouse and contemplates the possibility of reconciliation with the world—stands in stark contrast to Masahiko’s disposition, which reveals a diabolical genius and is constantly drawn into a destructive world of death.
Negeli, passive in every respect, ultimately hurls only curses at the couple even after witnessing his lover’s shocking betrayal, then packs his bags and sets off on a aimless journey. At first, he even considered borrowing a pistol from Chaplin to turn the scene into a bloodbath, but his actual course of action does not involve revenge or aggression; instead, it culminates in his departure.
Furthermore, his renunciation of revenge and aggression does not turn into an attack on himself. It is significant that when the Japanese writer who invited the devastated Negeli to his home preached that sexual desire and suicide are a topos where transcendence and the mundane overlap, Negeli stormed out and set off on the road once more. He rejects suicide and wanders the roads, making films. This demonstrates that the path of art lies on the opposite side of death.
Of course, it cannot be denied that Negeli himself possesses a dark and destructive side. As examined earlier, the curse he unleashed upon Masahiko and Ida destroys their fates with immense force. Yet he himself has absolutely no inkling that the mysterious opportunity inherent in the curse—which he had realized long ago—has now come to fruition. This suggests that destructive and dark impulses linger like shadows behind Negeli’s consciousness.
Masahiko—or the “Masahiko-like”—is Negeli’s own shadow self, yet Negeli turns away from and denies this. He rejects Masahiko’s death drive and erotic impulses, and in exchange for this renunciation, he gains a masterpiece of art cinema—an avant-garde work at the cutting edge of its time. Although traces of dark jealousy and a desire for revenge remain in this film—as shown in the love scene between Masahiko and Ida—they undergo a process of transformation within the silent black-and-white frames and are obscured behind the faint impressions left by old European objects.
Those objects may well be symbolic representations of the dead who have attained eternity. In his later years, Negeli counted himself among the five geniuses in the history of cinema, alongside Bresson, Vigo, Dovzhenko, and Yasujirō Ozu.

Diabolical Deals and the Ethics of Art: The Journey to Japan, Fascism, and the Avant-Garde

So, did Negeli escape the cursed fate of the dead by becoming a star that shines eternally? Does the novel tell the story of an artist’s triumph over his own diabolical impulses, or is it a projection of Kracht’s own hopes? The relationship between Negeli and Masahiko is far too complex to be interpreted so simply.
Negeli decides to go to Japan by agreeing to Hugenberg’s suspicious proposal. Although Negeli is unaware of this, behind Hugenberg’s proposal lie Masahiko and his diabolical suicide film. If so, one could say that Negeli’s trip to Japan and his film project itself began as a pact with the devil.
Hugenberg, too, is a kind of demonic figure. While promising massive financial support, he seeks to incorporate Negeli into his strategic plan and exploit him. As a historical figure, Hugenberg was a patron closely linked to the right-wing politics of the time, and this is implied in several passages throughout the novel.
Negeli is well aware of Hugenberg’s dubious reputation in Berlin, and there is a scene where he personally experiences the severity of anti-Semitism amid the atmosphere on the eve of the Nazi rise to power. Nevertheless, driven by a premonition that the trip to Japan could mark a turning point in his artistic career, Negeli accepts this inappropriate Faustian bargain despite his Swiss conscience. Can such a bargain for the sake of art be justified?
When he arrived in Japan, the country, too, was entering a politically dangerous phase. The assassination of the prime minister by young officers served as the signal for Japan’s full-scale shift toward militarism. It goes without saying what horrific consequences the parallel development and mutual rapprochement between Germany and Japan would bring to human history.
The attempt at a German-Japanese film collaboration took place within this political and diplomatic context. Director Arnold Pank was in financial straits because he had refused to cooperate with Hitler, and this was one of the reasons he accepted the Japanese government’s invitation. He made a film promoting Japan’s colonization of Manchukuo, and upon returning to Germany, he began to cooperate fully with the Nazis.
The novel sufficiently hints at this political context through a passage in Masahiko’s letter to Germany, in which he argues for the necessity of a “Celluloid Axis.” Yet, while Negeli’s actions cut right through the heart of these political intrigues and historical upheavals, he seems, strangely enough, to evade their influence.
Although he came to Japan with the support of pro-Nazi figures, the Japan-Germany joint venture collapsed due to unforeseen circumstances, freeing him from any political pressure or obligation to fulfill his commitments. While Masahiko abandoned the project he had spearheaded because of his relationship with his lover, it is clear that shifts in the political landscape—such as the assassination of the prime minister—also served as catalysts for his departure from Japan.
Ultimately, Negeli wandered around Japan alone with his camera, without partnering with anyone, and returned to his hometown of Bern with only the footage he had shot somewhat by chance. Since he had spent his time in Japan mainly traveling through remote rural areas and backwaters, meeting farmers and fishermen, he remained largely detached from the country’s political situation. In this respect, he stands in contrast to Chaplin, who faced the threat of assassination alongside the prime minister.
One could say it was a situation akin to making a pact with the devil, only for the devil to vanish after leaving behind a gift. But does that mean Negeli’s art can completely erase the connection it formed with the devil? To what extent is Negeli, compared to Arnold Fank, free from ties to the Nazis? What if a great artistic masterpiece that transcends reality actually has its origins in a suspicious connection to that very reality?
By the time Negeli returned from Japan, the head of the German right-wing film studio had already changed from Hugenberg to Goebbels. This meant that there was no longer anyone to hold Negeli accountable for breaching his contract. Goebbels says nothing, even though he knows Negeli will never deliver the one film he owes to the right-wing film studio.
Negeli’s thoughts on Goebbels’s takeover of the German film industry end there. While the devil had vanished from his contract with Universum Film, in reality, the devil’s power was actually growing stronger. The image of Negeli returning to his quiet homeland of Switzerland and enjoying artistic success amid a world hurtling toward the madness of fascism and war leaves a bittersweet aftertaste.
The issue of alluding to the relationship between fascism and art, presenting art as the product of a pact with the devil, and writing a work modeled on an artist who collaborated with fascism and bore the stigma of that collaboration is by no means a trivial matter for a writer like Kracht. He had previously been accused of spreading fascist ideas following the publication of an earlier work, and that experience lends added weight to his subsequent work.
Kracht once again tackles a work heavily imbued with the artistic decadence and atmosphere of death that Thomas Mann viewed as harbingers of fascism. By distributing the impulses of death and decadence, as well as diabolical genius, toward Masahiko, Kracht spares Negeli from the tragic fate suffered by Mann’s protagonists. He also spares Negeli from the fate of making overtly fascist propaganda films like Arnold Fank’s, though whether this exonerates Negeli’s art is another matter.
The depiction of Negeli’s film ‘The Windmill’ is not far removed from the body of work by Pank—who gained fame for his mountain films and nature documentaries—nor from what Masahiko referred to as “something behind things” and “the forbidden zone.” If Negeli constantly thinks of and longs for the voice his father whispered into his ear just before his death—a father who lures him toward death—then it is difficult to say that he, too, has completely broken free from the archetype Masahiko imagined as possessing “an unblemished longing for death.”
Negeli is a deceased soul. For the deceased, this world is not home. The deceased move back and forth between reality and the afterlife, always occupying the position of a wanderer wherever they find themselves. They have only one foot firmly planted in the real world. This may be the reason Negeli displays a somewhat indifferent attitude toward the political situation surrounding him.
But isn’t the very existence of an artist characterized by a similar relationship to reality? An artist can be a ghost-like presence floating through reality. Therefore, the novel’s title, ‘The Dead’, can be read as another name for the artist. An artist is a being who depends on reality while simultaneously sidestepping it, and it is precisely through this sidestepping that they are able to create a unique artistic world that transcends reality.
If so, to what extent can indifference and irresponsibility be permitted in the name of artistic creation? Can the notion of an artistic genius who has made a pact with the devil still be accepted today? Negeli is hailed as a pioneer of cinema. The avant-garde is an ideology inextricably linked to the freedom of artistic creation. In the fictional world of art, the avant-garde can emerge and be respected only when the freedom to transcend all boundaries, to venture into forbidden territories, to reject representation, or to represent the forbidden is recognized.
In today’s context, where the distinctions between literature and politics, and between literature and the ethics of reality, are becoming increasingly blurred, the question of whether the literary avant-garde can survive is one that ultimately returns to Kracht himself—who, while drawing on the historical backdrop of the early 1930s when fascism was on the rise, views this era as a turning point in artistic expression and explores the possibilities of new narrative forms by masterfully employing artistic composition, style, and technique.
Negeli, who believed in the metaphysics of black-and-white silent films at a time when cinema was moving toward sound films in pursuit of perfect representation, appears to be a reflection of Kracht himself—who, even in the 21st century, when art has become more closely tied to reality and the value of the artistic avant-garde is no longer self-evident, still insists on the possibility of the avant-garde.