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Dazai Osamu (1909-1948) - Pseudonym of Tsushima Shuji |
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Japanese novelist and a master storyteller, an outcast and rebel, who became at the
end of World War II the literary voice and literary hero of his
generation. Dazai Osamu made his self-destructive life the subject of
his books. His opposition
to the prevailing social and literary trends was shared by fellow
members of Burai-ha (Decadents). Dazai's life ended in
double-suicide with his married
mistress. "Indeed, the more carefully you examine the child’s smiling face the more you feel an indescribable, unspeakable horror creeping over you. You see that it is actually not a smiling face at all. The boy has not a suggestion of a smile. Look at his tightly clenched fists if you want proof. No human being can smile with his fists doubled like that. It is a monkey. A grinning monkey-face. The smile is nothing more than a puckering of ugly wrinkles. The photograph reproduces an expression so freakish, and at the same time so unclean and even nauseating, that your impulse is to say, "What a wizened, hideous little boy!" I have never seen a child with such an unaccountable expression.. (No Longer Human by Osamu Dazai, translated by Donald Keene, New York: New Directions, thirteenth printing 2012, p. 14; first published by New Direction in 1958) Dazai
Osamu was born Tsushima Shuji in Kanagi, in northern
Honshu, the tenth of eleven children ofTsushima Genemon, a
wealthy
landowner and politician, and his wife Tane. Because of her weak
health, Dazai was brought up mainly
by servants. When his father died in 1923, his eldest brother took over
as head of the household. Dazai never learned to know his father and
mother very well. Dazai's first story appeared in a school magazine; he was a bookish top student. He attended the Hirosake Higher School, and then
entered in 1930 the
University of Tokyo, where he studied French literature, but did not
attend lectures. Akutagawa Ryonosuke's suicide affected him deeply. After an affair with an apprentice geisha named Oyama Hatsyo, Dazai made his first suicide attempt in 1929 – he took an overdoze of sleeping medicine. They married in 1931 in a quiet ceremony. The couple lived first in a small apartment in Gotanda and then moved to Tokyo into a room in the home of his brother's classmate. Dazai recalled that "Gatanda was our crazy period. . . . 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. It was crazy. I did nothing." (quoted in The Saga of Dazai Osamu: A Critical Study with Translations by Phyllis I. Lyons, Stanford, CA: California University Press, 1985, p. 32) During this
period Dazai came into contact with Marxism, though his commitment to
politics ended in conclusion that at the bottom it refleced his desire
"to escape from my own shadow – being an aristocrat." ("Dazai Osamu" (pseudonym of Shuji Tsushima),' in World Authors 1950-1970, edited by
John Wakeman, New York: The H. W. Wilson Company, 1975, p. 367) What remained was a distrust in all
social institutions. Before marrying Hatsuyo, Dazai had met at the Hollywood Café a nineteen year old
bar hostess, Tanabe Shimeko. They spent two days drinking, took
sleeping pills, and then threw themselves into the sea off Tamatogaura. Shimeko
drowned, Dazai was rescued by a fishing boat. He was charged as an accomplice in her death, but the investigation
resulted in a stay of prosecution. (Suicidal Narrative in Modern Japan: The
Case of Dazai Osamu by Alan Stephen Wolfe, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990, pp. 148-149) While at the university, Dazai met the writer Masuji Ibuse, his literary hero and mentor. According to Ibuse, Dazai had threatened to kill himself if refused an intervew. At the age of fourteen, he had read Ibuse's Sanshouo (1929, The Salamander). "I felt with excitement that I had discovered a hidden, anonymous genius." (Studies in the Comic Spirit in Modern Japanese Fiction by Joel R. Cohn, London: Harvard University Press, 1998, p. 96) Dazai gradually dropped his studies, and developed a persona that in his novels was featured as both sensitive and cynical, a suffering clown and a misfit, who sees through the hypocrisy and shallowness of others. Dazai's stories began to appear in magazines in 1933. Between the years 1930 and 1937 he made three suicide attempts. The subject was brought up many of his short pieces, among them 'Dōke no hana' (in Bannen, 1936) and 'Tokyo hyakkei' (1941). A bit of a buffoon by nature, Dazai described in 'A Clown among Clowns' (1935) himself trying to describe the first suicide attempt. "Well, that one didn't work. Suppose we have a try at the panoramic method." Joseito (1939, Schoolgirl), narrated by a teenage girl, was Dazai's first work, which received wide publicity. "Mornings are grey. Always the same. Absolutely empty. Lying in bed each morning, I'm always so pessimistic. I't awful, really. All kinds of terrible regrets converge at once in my mind, and my heart stops up as I writhe in agony." (Schoolgirl, translated by Allison Markin Powell, New York: One Peace Books, 2011) 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),
"greatest writer in the world," as he proclaimed in the foreword of Shinshaku shokoku banashi (1945).
Also German authors, among them the poet Friedrich Schiller, inspired
Dazai's work. Dazai was exempted from military service due to
tuberculosis. Dazai wrote in a simple and colloquial style. "I want
to hit my target audience squarely," he said in the essay 'Sakka no zo'
(The Image of an Author, published in the Miyako shimbun in April 1940. Many
of Dazai's stories were based on his own experiences and were
classified in the
category known as the watakushi shosetsu,
or "I-novel," autobiographical / confessional fiction. Fathers are
often the targets of accusations and anger. Dazai also published
children's
stories and historical narratives. The tone of Dazai's postwar fiction
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 / A Shameful Life) was an attack on the traditions
of Japan, capturing the postwar crisis of Japanese cultural identity.
The story opens with the line: "Mine has been a life of much shame."
Framed by an epilogue and prologue, the story is told in the
form
three notebooks left by Ōba Yōzō, whose calm exterior hides his
tormented soul. Unable to understand human life, he builds a bridge to
other people through assuming the role of the clown.
"I never personally met the madman who wrote these notebooks," reads
the first line of the epilogue. Ōba Yōzō first appeared in the
autobiographical story 'Flowers of Buffoonery' (1935, Dōke no
hana). 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 amazing how much better soup tastes when you eat is as Mother does,
sitting serenely erect, than 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 Setting Sun, translated by Donald Keene, New York: New Directions, 1956. p. 5) 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
"Disqualified as a Human") was Dazai's second novel. This 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 confined 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." (Ibid., p. 22) Among Dazai's finest short stories is 'Viyon no tsuma' (1947,
Villon's Wife). The narrator is the wife of a poet, who has virtually
abandoned her. She finds 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. The director Senkichi Taniguchi adapted Dazai's story 'Hashire
Merosu' (Run, Merosu!) into screen in 1966 under
the title Kiganjo no boken (The
Adventures of Takla Makan / Adventure in Kigan Castle). The
film, 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.
The screenplay was written by Kaoru Mabuchi (i.e., Takeshi Kimura). 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." (quoted in All Hell Let Loose: The World at War 1938-45 by Max Hastings, London: HarperPress, 2011, p. 201) On June 13, in
1948, Osamu Dazai jumped into Tokyo's Tamagawa reservoir; his body was
recovered six days later, on his thirty-ninth birthday. Dazai left
behind unfinished the
novel Gutto bai (Goodbye).
Shortly before his death, Dazai wrote a letter in which he branded
Ibuse an "evil man" (Ibuse-san wa akunin desu). 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. Ibuse said in Sekibetsu (1948, Parting Regrets), that he really did like Dazai, he died without "leaving behind anything written for me." (quoted in Pools of Water, Pillars of Fire: The Literature of Ibuse Masuji by John Whittier Treat, Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1988, p. 144) Dazai's daughter Yuko Tsushima also became a writer. She published her first short story in 1969. For further information: 'The Immutable Despair of Dazai Osamu' by David Brudnoy, Monumenta Nipponica, Vol. 23, No. 3/4 (1968); Accomplices of Silence: The Modern Japanese Novel by Masao Miyoshi (1974); '"Dazai Osamu" (pseudonym of Shuji Tsushima),' in World Authors 1950-1970, edited by John Wakeman (1975); Dazai Osamu by James A. O'Brien (1975); Modern Japanese Fictioin and Its Traditions: An Introduction by J. Thomas Rimer (1978); Landscapes and Portraits: Appreciations of Japanese Culture by Donald Keene (1978); Dawn to the West: Japanese Literature in the Modern Era by Donald Keene (1984); The Saga of Dazai Osamu: A Critical Study with Translations by Phyllis I. Lyons (1985); Akutagawa and Dazai: Instances of Literary Adaptation, edited by James A. O'Brien (1988); Suicidal Narrative in Modern Japan: The Case of Dazai Osamu by Alan Stephen Wolfe (1990); Origins of Modern Japanese Literature by Kojin Karatani (1993); 'Dazai Osamu: Laughing at the End,' in Studies in the Comic Spirit in Modern Japanese Fiction by Joel Ralph Cohn (1998); 'Dazai Osamu, Sakaguchi Ango, and the Burai School,' in The Columbia Companion to Modern East Asian Literature, edited by Joshua Mostow (2003); 'The Image of an Author' by Dazai Osamu, in The Columbia Anthology of Japanese Essays: Zuihitsu from the Tenth to the Twenty-First Century, edited by Steven D. Carter (2014); Dazai Osamu to sensō = Dazai Osamu and The War by Utsumi Noriko, Ozawa Jun, Hira Kōichi hen (2019); Watakushi no Dazai Osamu ron by Asada Takaaki (2019); Dazai Osamu no bungaku: sono senryaku to hen'yō by Sōma Akifumi (2020); Dazai Osamu ron = Dazai Osamu: The Work and Life by Andō Hiroshi (2021); "Dazai Osamu no Tsugaru" no keizaigaku by Ōyano Eiji cho (2022); 'Translator's introduction,' in Self-Portraits: Stories by Osamu Dazai, translated and introduced by Ralph F. McCarthy (2024) - See also: Yukio Mishima, who committed suicide in 1970. Mishima and Dazai just met once, in a restaurant, some time in 1947. "Mr. Dazai," Mishima said, "I hate your work." After a silence Dazai said for those sitting close by: "I know he loves me, though; otherwise, he wouldn't have come here." ('The Death of the Author Considered as one of the Fine Arts: The Aesthetics of Suicide in Mishima Yukio's Yūkoku' by Thomas Hackner, in Enacting Culture: Japanese Theater in Historical and Modern Contexts, edited by Barbara Geilhorn, Eike Grossmann, Miura Hiroko & Peter Eckersall, 2012, p. 246) - Novellisuomennoksia: Yllätysvieras ja muita novelleja, suomentanut sekä esipuheella ja seityksin varustanut Pekka Masonen (2025); Erinomainen emäntä ja muita novelleja, suomentanut Pekka Masonen (2024); Merenneito ja muita novelleja, suomentanut sekä esipuheella ja selityksillä varustanut Pekka Masonen (2023); 'Vasaroinnin ääni', suom. Jarkko Laine, teoksessa Shōsetsu: japanilaisia kertojia, toim. Veikko Polameri (1983) Selected bibliography:
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