03/06/14 18:36 Osamu Dazai

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Osamu Dazai (1909-1948) - Pseudonym of Tsushima Shuji

Japanese novelist and a master storyteller, who became at the end of
World War II the literary voice and literary hero of his generation.
Dazai's life ended in double-suicide with his married mistress. In many
books Dazai used biographical material from his own family
background, and made his self-destructive life the subject of his books.
For a time he joined the communist movement. His opposition to the
prevailing social and literary trends was shared by fellow members of
Burai-ha (Decadents).
"Dazai's life and work, many Japanese critics have pointed out, are
closely intertwined. The more reader knows of Dazai's life, so the
argument goes, the more Dazai can and should be admired for nding
a literary means to bare his soul." (J. Thomas Rimer in Reader's Guide
to Japanese Literature, 1999)
"Mine has been a life much shame." (The opening sentence of No
Longer Human, 1848)
Dazai Osamu was born Tsushima Shuji in Kanagi, in northern Honshu,
the tenth of eleven children. His father was a wealthy landowner and
politician. Dazai was brought up mainly by servants. After attending the
Hirosake Higher School, he entered in 1930 the University of Tokyo,
where he studied French literature. During this period Dazai came into
contact with Marxism, though his commitment to politics ended in
distrust in all social institutions. In 1931 he married Oyama Hatsuyo,
saying later that it "was truly a shameless, imbecilic time. I scarcely
showed up at school at all, of course. I abhorred all effort, and spent my
time lying around watching H[atsuyo] indifferently." Before marrying
Hatsuyo, he had met a nineteen year old bar hostess, Tanabe Shimeko.
They spent two days drinking, took sleeping pills, and then threw
themselves into the sea. Shimeko drowned.
While at the university, Dazai met the writer Masuji Ibuse, his literary
hero and mentor. Dazai had read at the age of fourteen Ibuse's Sanshouo
(1929, The Salamander). "I felt with excitement that I had discovered a
hidden, anonymous genius." Dazai gradually dropped his studies, and
developed a persona that in his novels appeared both sensitive and
cynical, a suffering clown and a mist, who saw through the hypocrisy
and shallowness of others.
Dazai rst attracted attention in 1933 when his stories began to appear in
magazines. Between the years 1930 and 1937 he made three suicide
attempts. The subject was also brought up many of his short pieces,
among them 'Doke no hana' (1936, in Bannen) and 'Tokyo hyakkei'
(1941). 'A Clown among Clowns' describes Dazai trying to describe his
rst suicide attempt. "Well, that one didn't work. Suppose we have a try
at the panoramic method."
03/06/14 18:36 Osamu Dazai
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In 1939 Dazai married Ishihara Michiko and turned a new leaf in his
life. A number of the stories, which Dazai published during World War
II, were retellings of stories by Ihara Saikaku (1642-1693). Also German
authors, among them the poet Friedrich Schiller, inspired Dazai's work.
Dazai wrote in a simple and colloquial style. Many of his stories were
based on his own experiences and were classied in the category known
as the watakushi shosetsu, or "I-novel", autobiographical / confessional
ction. He also wrote children's stories and historical narratives. The
tone of Dazai's postwar ction was dark, but his scandalous life, drug
addiction and alcoholism, love affairs, despair, and spirit of
rebelliousness touched the lost generation of youth. In his masterpieces,
such as Shayo (1947, The Setting Sun), about the decline of an
aristocratic family, Dazai addressed many social, human and
philosophical issues. The word 'shayo' (setting sun) gave rise to the word
'shayozoku' (impoverished aristocracy), covering those whose world
died in the war. Ningen Shikkaku (1948, No Longer Human) was an
attack on the traditions of Japan, capturing the postwar crisis of Japanese
cultural identity. "I never personally met the madman who wrote these
notebooks..." begins the epilogue of the story.
Shayo is a tragedy in postwar Japan. It deals with the fall of an
aristocratic family, and how traditions or "proper etiquette" is destroyed
by the war. "This may not be the way of eating soup that etiquette
dictates, but to me it is most appealing and somehow really genuine. As
a matter of fact, it is as Mother does, sitting serenely erect, that when
you look down to it. But being, in Naoji's words, a high-class beggar and
unable to eat with Mother's effortless ease, I bend over the plate in the
gloomy fashion prescribed by proper etiquette."
The protagonist, Kazuko, a young woman, wears Western clothes, but
her outlook is Japanese. She is evacuated from Tokyo during the war
with her mother. They look hopefully to the return of the son from
southeast Asia. He does return, but as a drug addict. At the end of the
war, Kazuko loses her mother. Her brother Naoji is caught in the web of
his own and society's failures, driving him eventually to kill himself.
Kazuko decides to have a child with the disillusioned intellectual
Uehara, hoping that the child will be her moral revolution.
No Longer Human (its actual Japanese title is "Disqualied as a
Human") was Dazai's second novel. The book is one of the classics of
Japanese literature and has been translated into several languages. The
protagonist is a young man, who feel himself alienated from society but
reveals his true thoughts to the reader. The story also gives an account of
the author's personal decline and his relationships to women. "I have
been sickly ever since I was a child and have frequently been conned to
bed. How often as I lay there I used to think what uninspired decorations
sheets and pillow cases make. It wasn't until I was about twenty that I
realized that they actually served a practical purpose, and this revelation
of human dullness stirred dark depression in me."
03/06/14 18:36 Osamu Dazai
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Among Dazai's nest short stories is 'Viyon no tsuma' (1947, Villon's
Wife). The narrator is the wife of a poet, who has virtually abandoned
her. She nds meaning in her existence by taking a job for a tavern
keeper, from whom her husband has stolen money. Her determination to
survive is tested by hardships, rape, and her husband's self-delusion, but
her will is not broken. In 'O-san', translated in Japan Quarterly
(October-December, 1958), the wife revals the disparity between the
writer's reasons and his actual reasons for suicide. Dazai's story 'Hashire
Merosu' (Run, Merosu!) was adapted into screen in 1966 by the director
Senkichi Taniguchi under the title Kiganjo no boken (Adventures of
Takla Makan). The lm, starring Toshiro Mifune, Tadao Nakamaru,
Tatsuya Mihashi, and Makoto Sato, was partly shot in Iran near Isfahan
and at Toho Studios (Tokyo). In the story, set in the distant past, a
Japanese adventurer and a priest travel the silk road in their search for
Buddha's ashes.
After the war, Dazai's alienation continued. He made observations of
those who had supported the militaristic regime before but in the new
political situation embraced democracy. Dazai himself had said after the
attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 that he was "itching to beat the bestial,
insensitive Americans to a pulp." On June 13, in 1948, Dazai drowned
himself in Tokyo and left behind unnished the novel Gutto bai
(Goodbye). Shortly before his death, Dazai wrote a letter in which he
described Ibuse as an "evil man". There is a theory that the lady,
Yamazaki Tomie, who drowned with Dazai actually pushed him in; and
she possibly wrote the note in question, some claimed. Ibuse insisted in
'Parting Regrets' (1948), that Dazai died "without leaving behind
anything written for me." Dazai's daughter Yuko Tsushima also became
a writer and published her rst short story in 1969. Her works in the
1970s arose from the collapse of the economic bubble and coincided
with a return to the Japanese variant of the rst-person novel, in which
vivid descriptions of the mundane reality of the author's own private
world predominate.
For further information: The Immutable Despair of Dazai Osamu by D.
Brudnoy (Monumenta Nipponica, 23/1968); Traditions and Modernity in
Modern Japanese Fiction by G.B. Gunn, in Japan Christian Quaterly, 35
(1969); Landscapes and Portraits by D. Keene (1971); Accomplices of
Silence: The Modern Japanese Novel by Masao Miyoshi (1974); Dazai
Osamu by J. O'Brien (1975); Modern Japanese Fictioin and Its Traditions
by J. Thomas Rimer (1978); Dawn to the West by Donald Keene (1984);
The Saga of Dazai Osamu by Phyllis I. Lyons (1985); Akutagawa and
Dazai: Instances of Literary Adaptation, ed. by James O'Brien (1988);
Suicidal Narrative in Modern Japan: The Case of Dazai Osamu by Alan
Stephen Wolfe (1990); The Origins of Modern Japanese Literature by
Kojin Karatani (1993); 'Schiller and Dazai Osamu' by Okumura Atsushi
(2000) - See also: Yukio Mishima, who committed suicide in 1970
Selected bibliography:
Bannen, 1936 [The Final Years]
D!ke no Hana, 1937
Nijusseiki kishu, 1937 [Standard-Bearer for the Twentieth
03/06/14 18:36 Osamu Dazai
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Century]
Kyoko no hoko, 1937 [Wanderings in Falsehood]
Ai to bi ni tsuite, 1939
Joseito, 1939
Fugaku hyakkei, 1940 [One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji]
Dasu gemaine, 1940 [The Common Herd]
Hashire Merosu, 1940 [Run, Melos!]
Onna no Kett!, 1940
Shin-Hamuretto, 1941
Kojiki gakusei, 1941 [Beggar Student]
Kakekomi uttae, 1941 [I Accuse]
Tokyo hakkei, 1941 [Eight Views of Tokyo]
Human Lost, 1941 (in Japanese)
Seigi to Bisho, 1942
Udaijin Sanetomo, 1943 [Sanemoto, Minister of the Right]
Tsugaru, 1944
- Return to Tsugaru: Travels of a Purple Tramp (translated by
James Westerhoven, 1985)
- Tsugaru: kulkija ky kotona (suomentanut Kai Nieminen, 1996)
Otogi-z!shi, 1945 [Fairy Tales]
Sekibetsu, 1945 [Regretful Parting]
Shinshaku shokoku banashi, 1945 [Tales of the Provinces]
Pandora no Hako, 1946 [Pandora's Box]
Fuyu no hanabi, 1946 [Winter's Firework]
Kyoshin no Kami, 1947
Shay!, 1947
- The Declining Sun (tr. 1950) / The Setting Sun (translated by
Donald Keene, 1956)
- Laskeva aurinko (suom. Kyllikki Hrkp, Donald Keenen
engl. knnksest, 1965)
Biyon no tsuma, 1947
- 'Villon's Wife' (trans. in 1956)
- lm 2009, dir. by Kichitaro Negishi, screenplay by Yz Tanaka
Tokatonton, 1947
- Vasaroinnin ni (teoksessa Shosetsu: japanilaisia kertojia, toim.
Veikko Polameri, 1983)
Nyoze gabun, 1948
Haru no kareha, 1948 [The Fallen Leaves of Spring]
Ningen shikkaku, 1948
- No Longer Human (translated by Donald Keene, 1953)
- Ei en ihminen (Donald Keenen engl. knnksen mukaan
suom. Aapo Junkola, 1969)
Gutto bai, 1948 (Good-bye; unnished)
- lm 1949, Goodbye, dir. by Koji Shima, starring Hideko Takamine, Masayuki
Mori, Masao Wakahara, Tamae Kiyokawa
Jinushi ichidai : Mihappy! sakuhinsh", 1949
Dazai Osamu zensh", 1952 (10 vols.)
Dazai Osamu zensh" 1955-56 (12 vols., rev. ed. 1967-68, 1979)
Crackling Mountain and Other Stories, 1989 (translated by James
O'Brien)
03/06/14 18:36 Osamu Dazai
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Self-portraits: Tales from the Life of Japan's Great Decadent
Romantic, 1991 (translated by Ralph F. McCarthy)
Blue Bamboo: Tales of Fantasy and Romance, 1993 (translated by
Ralph F. McCarthy)
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