NEWPORT BEACH, CALIF. -- Shortly before a 24-year-old university student named Hayashi Tadao piloted his airplane on a one-way trajectory toward the Pacific on the final day of the Second World War, he wrote a poem to explain why he had chosen to become one of history's first airborne suicide bombers. It ended:

Why should we hesitate to give our lives to
Stupid Japan.
Indecisive Japan.
You, although quite foolish.
Us, who belong to this nation,
Must rise for your protection.

Although he, along with about 3,500 other top students, had volunteered to join the tokkotai corps -- better known in North America as the kamikaze pilots -- Mr. Hayashi, as his poem suggests, did not exhibit the sort of maniacal zeal for the emperor we expect.

Quite the contrary. Like a surprising number of his fellow tokkotai, Mr. Hayashi was a cosmopolitan intellectual whose motives for becoming a human bomb were not so readily fathomable. He was openly disdainful of the religion of emperor worship that Japan had cultivated in the 20th century, with help from German consultants. Instead of the intense nationalism that was supposed to motivate the tokkotai, his was a skeptical, bitter patriotism. He was far from alone. Almost none of the kamikaze fully believed their own story.

A lot of these young men saw themselves as Romantics, in the European sense of the word, who were rescuing Japan, not just from the American invader, but from its lesser self: They hoped, illogically but romantically, that their suicide bombings would also bring an end to the Japan they knew, including the emperor for whom they were supposedly dying. They were guided by aesthetics, not politics, and emboldened by great literature. Hundreds of the kamikaze had memorized passages from Baudelaire's Les Fleures du mal and Nietzsche's Also Sprach Zarathustra. They were collectively enamoured with Goethe's Faust and Ralph Waldo Emerson. They read European literature in the original, often hundreds of volumes each, believed its idealist messages, and wrote their suicide notes in French, German and English.

We don't like to think of suicide bombers this way. We don't like to think of deliberate death this way: We would rather believe that it is an act borne of deep deprivation, of a simple-minded devotion to a desperate spiritual cause. We once believed this of Islamic bombers, but Mohammed Atta and his comrades have taught us otherwise: They weren't poor, weren't ill-educated, and weren't even as pious as we'd hoped.

The kamikaze are even more beguiling, as it turns out. The official myth -- that these young men who gave their lives in a morbidly Quixotic cause were blinded by love for country and emperor -- has remained intact in the West for 57 years. It has only been shattered by an American anthropologist named Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney, and then only by accident.

Ms. Ohnuki-Tierney, who teaches at the University of Wisconsin, was studying the symbolism of the cherry blossom, a powerful and politically loaded image in Japanese language, literature and ideology, especially in the 20th century. She found that many Japanese were alarmed at her mention of this symbol. The Cherry Blossoms, it turned out, had been the name not only for the kamikaze pilots of 1945, but for their flying bombs. The blossoms were intended by the emperor and the military authorities to symbolize a new faith in which the petals (the souls of the young pilots) would flutter to the ground, returning to spend eternity at the Yasukuni Shrine. When they flew to their deaths, they wore wreaths of cherry blossoms.

It was a novel belief in Japan, whose religion has never said anything about souls or life after death. These images were offered as a reason to volunteer for certain and pointless death. Almost none believed it, it turns out, but 3,500 still volunteered.

She began to read their letters and diaries, something no Western author has done. And she learned that the kamikaze were nothing like we had thought.

She has compiled an analysis of their writings and thoughts in a new study awkwardly titled Kamikaze, Cherry Blossoms and Nationalisms. Most extraordinary is her appendix, in which she indexes the books they have read. They were all obsessive readers of the great novelists and philosophers, including the literature of the enemy: Benjamin Franklin, John Stuart Mill, Oscar Wilde.

Sasaki Hachiro, 22, was an eager reader of Rousseau, Plato and Socrates, Shakespeare and H. G. Wells, a lover of Oscar Wilde's fiction and all manner of art-for-art's-sake philosophy. He was also a romantic Marxist, who believed his act of self-sacrifice would bring on a compassionate revolution in Japanese society. His colleagues were capitalists, Christians, nationalists, nihilists, Romantics, Europhiles, mothers' boys.

Here is how he described his kamikaze mission: "At the critical juncture in history 'we' cannot let old capitalists and irrational military men cling to the old regime. We (young men) ourselves must shoulder the responsibility of bringing in the new world."

It makes no sense. Their motives are individual, irreducible, beyond reckoning. Ms. Ohnuki-Tierney tries to explain it as méconnaissance,a lovely term made famous by psychiatrist Jacques Lacan that means "the absence of communication that results when people derive different meanings from the same symbols and rituals." Their cherry blossoms aren't our cherry blossoms, and they sure aren't the emperor's cherry blossoms. Death is supposed to be simple, stupid and blind; to find it complex, clear and lucid is unbearable.