The Saga of Dazai Osamu A Critical Study with Translations
PHYLLIS I. LYONS
ST A N F O R D U N IV E R S IT Y P R E SS Stanford, C alifornia
19 8 5
Published with the assistance of the Japan Foundation
Stanford University Press Stanford, California © 1985 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University Printed in the United States of America The photographs on pp. 73-76 are repro duced by permission of the Mainichi Shimbun-sha, Tokyo. The drawings by Dazai in Tsugaru are reproduced by permission of Mrs. Tsushima Michiko. CIP data appear at the end of the book
For Peter and Joy
Preface To the Japanese, Dazai Osamu is not just one of the most famous of all modern writers; he is a star. A number of his stories have achieved the status of classics; and his life— not to mention his legend, much of it created by Dazai himself in his stories— is as much a topic of general and critical interest as they are. Critical studies of his work abound in the literary journals, and even popular magazines regularly publish articles on his life with much the same tone as the latest revelations about Elvis Presley in this country. Six editions of his complete works, some in multiple printings, have been pub lished since his death in 1948. Dazai is always included in anthologies of modern literature, his stories are published in popular editions by every ma jor press, and most leading literary critics and even writers have at least one essay on his work. In 1968, when Japanese students like their fellows around the world were in a period of social and political ferment, a survey conducted by one of Japan’s premier newspapers, the Asahi Shimbun, showed that stu dents at four major Japanese universities placed Dazai’s novel N o Longer Human ninth on the list of books that had most influenced them, in company with Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Camus’s The Stranger, and Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. Annually on the anniversary of his death, television crews go out to film the memorial services at his graveside as a human-interest feature for the evening news; they are still well attended, though it is over thirty years since he killed himself. Yet Dazai is relatively unknown in the United States, even though two of his novels have been available in English for over twenty years. He was one of the first Japanese writers to be translated after the war, because in his short postwar career he spoke so strikingly of the condition of defeated Japan. Yet no new translations have made his work accessible to the general reader since the 19 5 0 ’s; what translations there are (a considerable number— see Appendix B) have been published mainly in specialist journals. Fame is alas fleeting; foreign writers tend to pass out of public attention if they do not do something unusual (for example, commit ritual suicide like Mishima Yukio or win the Nobel Prize like Kawabata Yasunari), or if they are not regularly reintroduced in new translations. That more of Dazai has not been made
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readily available to Western readers is perhaps a result of the intensely per sonal and autobiographical nature of his most characteristic untranslated stories from his much longer prewar period. Such stories need no explana tion to a Japanese audience, but may have daunted translators who preferred to deal purely with stories and not with context. This book presents both together; through it, Western readers may see the artistic strengths and per sonal weaknesses that are the reasons Japanese readers respond so strongly to Dazai. Dazai’s autobiographical stories can certainly stand by themselves, but they resonate most richly when read, as they are by Japanese readers, with a knowledge of the events that lie behind them. Most translators have been at pains to choose the most seemingly fictional of Dazai’s stories, to treat each story in isolation and not in relation to other stories, or to downplay the relation of story to personal history. By contrast, this study directly ad dresses that relationship, and the translations that accompany it introduce some of the best and most intimate of Dazai’s stories. Together, they provide a context for understanding why Dazai is so popular in Japan, and for seeing how Dazai, while a man like all other men of whatever society or culture, is at the same time specially and revealingly Japanese. To read Dazai is to see Japan from the inside, not as a place of extreme and inexplicable relationships, but as the home of people with strong ties to each other and often as strongly conflicting needs. Unlike Kawabata and Mishima, probably the two Japanese writers best known to Western audi ences, Dazai has no stories of ultranationalistic terrorists, lesbian princesses, insane monks who burn down temples, neurasthenic aesthetes dallying with geisha (when he does have such a plot, it is a touchingly familiar tale of an adolescent trying to be an adult and making a fool of himself), or old men who sleep with drugged girls. Dazai writes about real people (literally, often? with their real names) trying to understand how they fit into the world lov ing each other and yet often hurting each other. Ironically, it may be harder to export such familiar material from one culture to another without expla nation than it is to transfer fanciful plots in which everything is equally exotic. This book focuses on a number of issues raised by Dazai’s writing: what is specifically Japanese about it; what are the cultural complications about which he writes; and why are these of interest (and so familiar) to us as well as to Japanese readers. Because Dazai was writing about the things he con sidered to be the most necessary and important to himself as a human being, what he says will ring true to any audience, especially when the base condi tions are known. The translations in this book, of some of Dazai’s most important stories, show the special character of his writing, which is far warmer and more engaged than the nihilistic postwar stories available so far would lead one to suspect.
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Because the issues involved here are not just literary ones, there are in the Introduction brief discussions of the Japanese family as a social entity, and the role of suicide in Japanese culture, as well as Japanese literary history. Part I is both a chronological narrative history of Dazai’s life and a closer look at some issues in his life—his psychological history, as it were. The chapters of Part II tell the story of Osamu, the literary character Dazai cre ated of himself through the fifteen years of his literary career. It is what I call the Osamu Saga. Each chapter in this section takes form around one or more of the stories translated in the book, and shows how the stories relate to others that came before and after. The stories translated are five short stories and a “ nonfiction novel” (to use Truman Capote’s term) that is Dazai’s clearly articulated attempt to explain his own soul in terms of the physical and psychological geography of his homeland. This sort-of-novel, Tsugaru, is also a guide to a beautiful part of Japan that is different from that usually seen by the traveler, Japanese or foreign. Some technical notes on my practice in this book. I use the word “ story” often in a wider sense than is covered by the genre category “ short story.” Because the question of the relation of fact to fiction, autobiography to tale, is a basic one when dealing with Dazai’s work, in my discussions “ story” tends to include all forms of imaginative, as opposed to purely reportorial, writing; and so a story may be a novel, a short story, or a set of pensees. For the convenience of Western readers, I do use the conventional distinction between short story and novel when necessary, but please bear in mind that the difference is often more one of length than of form. The translations are as faithful as I could make them and still have them comfortably readable. While Dazai’s language is accessible and evocative, it is also idiosyncratic and sometimes oblique. I have chosen generally (al though not rigidly) to follow his le^d. When his sentences are long and mean dering, when he repeats words and phrases from one sentence to another, when his paragraphs run on for a page or more, I have tended to do the same, instead of editing him to more common English shape. However, in order to reduce strangeness for the English reader, I have violated one of Dazai’s frequently used stylistic devices: a mode of discourse between direct and indirect, that is, direct quoted statement without quotation marks. Since there is, in these spots, less of an author’s presence standing, like a stage manager’s, between reader and text-event, the effect in the Japanese is to make the text more permeable to the reader. I have generally added quota tion marks, even where they do not exist in the original. I have, however, preserved another characteristic of^Dazai’s writing style: the shift of pro noun referent within a single paragraph. The Japanese language as a rule avoids where possible the use of pronouns when the context makes clear who is meant (leading at times to ambiguity, as any observer of Japanese conversations will notice). Dazai uses this option freely, to produce rapid
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shifts in person that mirror the rapid flow of thoughts in a narrator’s mind. Once again, the device provides a more open text from the reader’s point of view, though the shape may at first seem strange to the syntactically orderly Western mind. I have also resorted, especially in the translation of Tsugaru, to the imperfect but useful device of footnotes, to explain why certain things are significant. Here again I was following Dazai’s lead, for he had a few in his text; particularly in this work, he was introducing special and perhaps unfamiliar qualities of a region to the rest of the country. Slightly more expla nation, then, will be useful for the non-Japanese reader. Transliteration of Japanese names and words is based on the Hepburn system (hence, shimbun, not shinbun). Vowel sounds in Japanese are similar to Italian vowels, consonants are like those of English. Long syllables are marked with a macron. Japanese names offer special confusions for West erners. Japanese name order is used— surname first (the reverse of En glish)— and a person is commonly referred to by his surname. Therefore, Ibuse Masuji is Mr. Ibuse. However, traditionally, when a name is a sobri quet or “ literary name,” the artistic personal name has been used for ad dress. For example, Natsume Soseki is the pen name of Natsume Kinnosuke; hence, he is referred to as Soseki. This is why, for another example, in Dazai’s “ Going Home,” Yagyu Jubei is “ Jubei,” while Okubo Hikozaemon is “ Okubo.” This study began as a dissertation at the University of Chicago. My thanks go to Edwin McClellan, who insisted always on being told not just what was in the books, but what those things meant, and who taught me a body of impeccable selective prejudices from which to make judgments of my own. M y early studies in Japan were guided by Hinotani Teruhiko of Keio Univer sity, who was more than commonly generous with his (and his family’s) time. For more than a decade, since I have been working on Dazai, Soma Shoichi (then teaching at Hirosaki High School, Dazai’s alma mater, and now at Joetsu Teachers College) has as a Dazai authority shared ideas and informa tion from his own work in progress; he has also been extraordinarily kind in answering questions about special local lore essential to the translation of Tsugaru. I would like to thank his family for their hospitality during my several visits to Dazai territory. My thanks go also to the administrative and educational officials of Kanagi, Dazai’s hometown, for the help and access to materials they gave me when I was there. Other teachers and friends in Japan and the United States have helped at various stages by discussion, patient review, elucidation, and response as this study developed: Harry Harootunian, Tetsuo Najita, Harrie Vanderstappen, Eric Gangloff, William Sibley, Fukuko and Takashi Masunari, Peter Lang, Janet Walker, Janet Un derhill, Chieko Ariga, Robert Peterson, Manel Valdes-Cruz, and Hiroki Kato. Natalie Hector was an enthusiastic reader as well as typist. Mike Ed
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wards of Berkeley, California, was the best of editors, sensitive and sensible at the same time; I owe him much for both his close reading and sense of the whole. Keiko Alphs and the staff of the East Asian Library of the University of Chicago were always ready to answer questions. I thank Mrs. Tsushima Michiko, Dazai’s widow, for her permission to translate the six stories in this book, and the Mainichi Shimbun-sha for per mission to use photographs from their volume Shashinshii: Dazai Osamu no shdgai. I am deeply grateful to the Japan—United States Friendship Com mission and the Japan Society of New York for awarding me the 1983 Friendship Prize for the translations of the six stories, thereby reassuring me that the translations are worthy to represent Dazai to readers of English. Last of all, I would like to thank my parents for getting me to Japan in the first place; that’s surely where it all started. P.I.L.
Contents Introduction / i D A Z A I’ S L IF E A N D T H E O SA M U SA G A Parti: Dazai’s Life 1. The Journey Outward / 2 1 2. The Journey Inward / 55 Part II: The Osamu Saga 3. Childhood and Adolescence / 77 4. Establishing the Writer / 10 2 5. Going Home / 12 7 6. Fatal Success / 149 Conclusion / 179 O SA M U S T O R IE S Five Short Stories Recollections / 189 Eight Views of Tokyo / 2 17 Going Home / 236 Hometown / 2 5 1 An Almanac of Pain / 262 TSUGARU / 2 7 1 Appendixes A. Chronology of Dazai’s Life and Works / 389 B. List of Dazai Stories in English Translation / 397 Selected Bibliography / 399 Index / 403 Four pages o f photographs follow p. j i
The Saga of Dazai Osamu
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Introduction You believe in my strength. You overestimate my abilities. And so you don't know about the great force of effort I have to make, my stupid, secret effort. You take an onion and peel it and peel it, right to the heart, and there's nothing there. There must be something, you believe, there must be—you take another onion and start peeling it, keep on peeling, at last, nothing. Do you understand the sadness of this monkey? —Dazai Osamu, “A Record of the Autumn Wind” 1
Dazai Osamu’s most famous novels, Shayd (The Setting Sun) and Ningen shikkaku (No Longer Human) were translated into English in the mid19 5 0 ’s, within ten years of their publication in Japan, giving Western readers some of the earliest postwar literary views of a country that was still an enigma after years of conflict and occupation. For the Japanese, after an era of marching under the sign of the rising sun, The Setting Sun provided in its title alone a metaphor for their defeat, and the phrase entered into the popu lar vocabulary. No Longer Human, the story of a man who is unable himself to feel or understand the feelings of other human beings, domesticated that image to show the defeat of an individual removed from the large historical stage. Western audiences recognized in these novels a universal cry of loneli ness and defeat; and the number of translated short stories that have ap peared since then, also mostly from Dazai’s postwar writings, have been selected—perhaps unconsciously—to reinforce the idea of Dazai as the poet of despair. But Japanese readers, who have access to the full range of his writing, have seen much more. While Dazai was indeed ultimately defeated by life, and while portions of his life were in fact confused enough to be called decadent, there are other qualities in his work that still give him, decades after his suicide, not just readers in Japan, but fans. Dazai may be likened to F. Scott Fitzgerald or J. D. Salinger in tone as well as in the nature of his popularity. But unlike those two writers, whose names summon up particular moments in American cultural history, Dazai does 1Dazai Osamu Zensbu z: 251. Hereafter, most references to this edition of Dazai’s complete works in the text will be made parenthetically, by volume and page number, omitting the title. Works cited in abbreviated form in the notes will be found listed in full, with English transla tions of Japanese titles, in the Bibliography.
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not speak for one particular historical generation, although in his postwar writings he vividly captured the atmosphere of defeat in the immediate aftermath of World War II. What Japanese readers respond to is exactly the time lessness of Dazai’s stories, which speak to the situation of each individual as he attempts to find his way in his own time and place. Dazai is an autobio graphical writer; he writes about himself, his own thoughts, his own prob lems. But he does this in such a way that he allows the reader to become actively involved in the process of following the most private of experiences, so that the process becomes in effect an investigation of the reader’s life as well; and he does this often enough with a redeeming touch of humor— ironic, sad, bemused, and sharp, but humor nonetheless. Japanese readers feel that, whether he is writing of the 19 2 0 ’s, 19 3 0 ’s, or 19 40’s, he is speak ing of their lives; Western readers as well are invited into his stories to feel what it is to be Japanese. This book explores Dazai’s most autobiographical stories, a number of them translated here for the first time. Although written separately, these stories fit into the structure of a much larger story, Dazai’s narrative of the life journey of the literary character he made of himself. It is the totality of what I call the Osamu Saga that makes Dazai so intimate to the hearts of Japanese readers, and that will, I think, reveal the Japanese mind to Western readers in a way that few other Japanese works have done. Dazai was archetypally Japanese; a sociologist could use the behavior of characters in his stories as case histories of what might be called “ the Japanese mentality.” But he was also in part a stranger in his own land, an outsider in his family, and an alien whose involvement with the central culture was always selfconscious and difficult. Some of the reasons for this, to be discussed in the following chapters, were personal and idiosyncratic; others were accidents of geography and history. But they made his writing, while classically Japa nese, open to all readers. Dazai Osamu (the pen name of Tsushima Shuji) was born in 1909 to a wealthy landowning family in northern Japan. The distance of this region, known as Tsugaru, from the central Tokyo—Kyoto area was cultural as well as geographical. Tsugaru’s traditional folkways, especially in the early years of the twentieth century, were distinctive, as was the local dialect which even today sometimes makes the language seem not quite Japanese. Had it not been for his father’s wealth and status, Dazai would perhaps have been a regional artist; as it was, those same conditions, while a passport to the wider world, were also a source of many of his future troubles. After a seemingly uneventful childhood, Dazai went away to high school and college. During those years of the 19 2 0 ’s, Japan as well as his own pri vate world went through some significant changes. The Russian Revolution in 19 1 7 caused ripples of response around the world; by the time Dazai was
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in high school, in the late 19 2 0 ’s, he and his generation of educated young people were more than conversant with the issues of class conflict being felt even in Japan. It was the contradiction of his own position— a wealthy child of what Marxists called the exploitative class and a sympathizer with at least the rhetoric of the exploited class— and other personal confusions that led to his first suicide attempt in 1929. This was the beginning of more than a decade of chaos in his life: he attended university in Tokyo for years but never graduated; he attempted suicide again, this time with a woman, married a geisha, and was cut off by his family for this and for involvement in the leftist movement in the early 19 3 0 ’s. There was another suicide attempt, a year of narcotics addiction, a suicide attempt with his geisha wife, final separation from her, and emotional exhaustion. In the midst of it all, he attempted to carry on a commitment—first arrived at, he says in one of his stories, while he was in high school— to being a writer. The writing both sustained him and was a record of the catastrophes of his life. From 1940 to 1946, the war years, he seemed to regain a sense of coher ence in his life. He married again, acceptably this time, had one child, then a second and a third. He became a moderately well-known writer. During the war, he wrote fairy tales and his own versions of seventeenth-century stories; he also wrote a novel about the Chinese writer Lu Hsiin, on commission from a government agency. He returned to Tsugaru to seek out the signifi cance of his provincial origins, and wrote about the journey. But after the 1 war, his own life mirrored Japan’s state of prostration as it began once again I to disintegrate, and his stories reflected the public and private despair. Still married, he became involved with another woman and used part of that experience to write The Setting Sun (the woman bore him a child). He be came involved with yet another woman. Worn down by ill health, alcohol, and burdens of the spirit, he completed No Longer Human, which deals with a man’s failure to find sustenance in life, and then committed suicide with this last woman in 1948. Right to the end, his stories chronicled the disasters, and frail successes, of his life. Why would anyone want to read stories about the life of such a man, and why would he be popular, to boot? First of all, because there is a certain undeniable soap-opera excitement in just seeing the events unfold and in identifying with the man experiencing them. Nevertheless, in and of itself, the plot would not be sufficient to maintain reader loyalty; but Dazai at his best was a very good writer, and it is the way he told the story that holds the audience. There is no denying that not all his stories are of equally high quality; one of the things this study does is to guide the reader to some of the best among some fifty short stories and three novels. Second, and the reason I call the stories in this book “ the Osamu Saga,” Dazai created a unified, many-chaptered narrative out of the confused and
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accidental events of his life and presented it as the life struggles of a strongly engaging character we can call “ Osamu,” as he himself did in some stories. It is Osamu, the literary incarnation of the writer, that captivates the reader as Dazai himself professes to be captivated; and Dazai’s sympathy and fas cination (and pity) communicate the vitality of Osamu’s existence to the reader. Osamu does terrible things, and terrible things happen to him, and as a result we come to care about what happens. Again, it is Dazai’s skill as a writer that makes our involvement possible. Osamu is rejected, Osamu longs to be forgiven, Osamu finds friends who have loved him all along, despite everything— and we are moved, for him and for ourselves, as Japanese read ers have been. While the story of Osamu is not the only thing Dazai wrote, it is the tale closest to him, and his best writing went into it. Dazai put life and art to gether in such a creative blend that fictionality itself is at question. Some critics have taken his stories as gospel truth, some have devoted lifetimes to identifying breaches in the factual record where elements of fiction have leaked in, and yet others have studied Dazai’s life as if it were the story. Before I address this issue, a few preliminary comments on Dazai’s literary context and some other issues, such as family and suicide, that played major roles in his life, might help clarify what, in his life and art, is an identifiable result of Japanese culture and what is distinctively “ individual.”
Dazai’s Literary World Dazai belonged to what might be called the third generation of modern Japanese writers. The first generation made a giant leap in meeting the chal lenge of new literary subjects, new storytelling techniques, and a new atti tude of seriousness toward the art of fiction, after Western ideas entered Japan at the end of the nineteenth century. In early modern Japan, “ West ern” was the model of “ modern,” and some of the first understandings of Western thought came from the writers of this generation. In the 1880’s, writers and critics like Tsubouchi Shoyo and Futabatei Shimei were still forg ing a new literary language to meet and also create the needs and demands of the modern man of the day. Within a short time, a number of writers had had actual experience of living abroad, and literary modernity was being not just translated but lived. Mori Ogai studied in Germany in the m id-i88o’s; Natsume Soseki was in England from 19 0 1 to 19 0 3; Nagai Kafu lived in the United States and then France from 1903 to 1907. These and other writers focused attention on a new kind of literary character, one who was not a grandiose hero, but a man like other men, often lonely, often perplexed, often misunderstood— and, as a result, all the more believable. Literature came quickly to reflect a fascination with what the West called
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the “ self,” the mind and psychology of the man lurking within the frame of the social being. The world in which readers and characters lived was differ ent from that of their parents, and the literature revealed those differences. By the time of the second literary generation in the 1 9 1 0 ’s and 19 20 ’s, mod ernization was accepted as having already happened. Comparisons between East and West were still made in Japanese novels, but the people making them saw themselves as modern people; the past of their own culture had receded with what they sometimes themselves saw as alarming speed. The concern of romanticism with the discovery and nourishing of the individual soul; the preoccupation of naturalism with the individual’s increasingly iso lated position in society; the desire of several schools more devoted to art for art’s sake to, variously, recover the style and even the matter of premodern writers or fight the depressing self-preoccupation of some naturalist writ ers— all were now part of the modern heritage of this second generation. Its leading figures included writers of the so-called White Birch school such as Shiga Naoya and Arishima Takeo; Tanizaki Jun’ichiro, Sato Haruo, and Akutagawa Ryunosuke; and later, the “ Neo-impressionists” Yokomitsu Riichi and Kawabata Yasunari. Of course these writers do not constitute a generation in any tidy chronological sense. Tanizaki, after all, started pub lishing in 19 10 , only four years or so after Soseki began, and wrote until his death in 19 6 5; Mori Ogai began a whole new conservative direction in his writing in 19 1 2 ; the White Birch writers were publishing at the same time as Soseki, and Arishima Takeo was in the United States (at Haverford College and Harvard) and Europe about the time Soseki was in England. Neverthe less, they tended to see themselves and to be seen by others as members of a new generation— as makers, in fact, of the modern Japanese literary tradition. When Dazai was growing up in the 19 2 0 ’s and early 19 3 0 ’s many of these second-generation writers were already famous, and in fact under pressure themselves from the strong but short-lived proletarian literature movement, which was as much a social perspective as a school. Proletarian literature, at its height in the late 19 2 0 ’s when he began writing, was Dazai’s first personal literary challenge, as the leftist movement was his first political involvement. Kobayashi Takiji’s famous indictment of oppressive landowners, “ Fuzai jinushi” (The Absentee Landlord) appeared in a major intellectual magazine the month before Dazai’s first suicide attempt in 1929. Although Dazai may never have read this particular story, he was clearly conscious of and exqui sitely sensitive to its sort of social message, which was in direct opposition to the apolitical literature of the preceding era. The rightist politics and censor ship of the 19 3 0 ’s put a stop to the social exhortations and agitation of the proletarian movement, political as well as literary, by the middle of the dec
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ade. Dazai by then had himself moved away from involvement in politics of any stripe, but the movement left its mark on him. Dazai was a child of the modern world, and not just in his college politics; his vocabulary of writers was eclectic. A large number of Western names appear in his stories: Ibsen, Strindberg, Verlaine, Baudelaire, Chekhov, Tol stoy, Dostoevsky. They float through, often without explanation or with only allusive reference, as if on the assumption that the audience too will be familiar with them. What is noteworthy about this list is that it is totally conventional; any reasonably educated reader would know the names. Like the writing of one of his favorite writers, Akutagawa, Dazai’s early writing fairly bristles with ample sprinklings of the names of these writers. Yet it is difficult to say how much Dazai knew about them or their work. In other words, it is more useful here to speak of their “ stimulus” than of their “ influ ence.” Dazai himself never seriously discussed any of them in his writing, nor does he ever give the impression that he grappled at any serious level with them. When he uses the Bible, his references are only of the most ob vious kind, such as any high school graduate would have known by the 19 3 0 ’s: the story of Abraham and Isaac, for example, or the parable of the prodigal son.2 Dazai’s acquaintance with premodern Japanese literature as reflected in his writings seems to have been limited to the major writers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Aside from his problems with left-wing politics, Dazai found that, like many Japanese writers before him, he had political difficulties of another sort. In Japan still, all roads lead to Tokyo. From the time he started his literary career, Dazai was labeled “ educated provincial come to the big city.” The literary world was and is dominated by a Active entity called the bundan (here translated “ the literary establishment” ), a self-contained institution that produces, supports, and controls both writers and their publishing op portunities, and even makes moral judgments about its “ members.” Writers tended to belong to literary schools, or at least to be classified by association. All such schools, even those in conflict with each other, were parts of the larger whole. A new voice had essentially to be sponsored by one of the established writers, even if the sponsorship was only formal; opposition by a major figure could end even a relatively well-known writer’s career, as happened when Kawabata turned against Ryutanji Yu in the 19 3 0 ’s and “ buried” him for having attacked the cliquishness of the bundan .3 There were several sponsor figures in Dazai’s career, including Ibuse Masuji and Sato Haruo, with whom Dazai had continuing though troubled relation 2Compulsory education went only through elementary school, so high school graduates were the lower rank of the educated elite. 3So, at any rate, contends Usui Yoshimi in “ Kawabata Yasunari seijika-setsu no haikei,” BungeiShunju 58, no. 8 (1977): 260-76.
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ships; but the sometimes censorious judgments of major powers like Kawa bata and Shiga (whom Dazai called both seriously and ironically, rdtaika, “ venerable great writers” ) caused him more than passing difficulties, person ally and in the literary world. Dazai never belonged more than briefly to any literary school; for a man who sought to find connections, both concrete and abstract, during his lifetime, and who collected an audience of devoted sup porters, readers, and publishers, he remained a lone wolf professionally. Some of his closest friends were writers, but his relations with the bundan were distant.
The I-Novel and Dazai’s Sincerity While Dazai never really belonged to any literary movement, his autobio graphical stories lie within a recognized genre, the watakushi shosetsu (or shishdsetsu), literally, “ I-novel.” Not exactly a movement, but a dominant mode in modern Japanese literature ever since Tayama Katai’s “ Futon” (The Quilt) in 1907, it refers to stories in which the first-person narrator or the third-person narrative perspective is clearly identifiable with the author. The events are the events of the author’s life; the conflicts are the author’s; the observing mind in the story is the author’s mind. The weaknesses inherent in such a narrative program are obvious: “ it tends to be narcissistic, self-satis fying dialogue with oneself or an exhibitionistic exposure of oneself.” 4 Masao Miyoshi succinctly points out the reader’s dilemma: “ If he is inclined to feel friendly toward the T,’ he will like the story; if not, he will be bored by it.” 5 The I-novel always partakes of the confessional; the author may be expressing anger or resistance, or he may be begging forgiveness, or simply investigating his state of mind, but always he is speaking of and for himself. Accordingly, the reader is expected to factor into his judgments of the story’s merits the question of whether or not the writer is sincere in his self-revelation. Thus critics were morally outraged at Shimazaki Toson’s behavior when his novel Shinsei (A New Life) began appearing serially from 19 18 to 19 19 , as it chronicled his incestuous relationship with his niece, but they nevertheless found it sincere in its depictions of the protagonist’s moral struggles. Whatever the murky ulterior motives of Toson the man in his actions and in writing the novel, the novel of Toson the writer was judged to be a moving document of pain, even though, according to one critic, it “ abounds in obfuscations.” 6 Although contemporary critics sometimes saw Dazai’s stories as self-indulgent, in the balance he too was felt to be writing sincerely in his medita4Lippit, “Aspects of the I-novel,” in Reality and Fiction in Modern Japanese Literature, 1 6. 5Miyoshi, Accomplices o f Silence, iz 6. 6McClellan, Two Japanese Novelists, 125.
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tions upon himself. And he made a special contribution to the genre, a con tribution through which he exploited its possibilities more thoroughly than any writer before him: the note of mordant humor that he injected into what had been a pretty dismal business. His ironic step back from himself pro duces what the critic Goto Meisei even calls a “ parody” of the I-novel; it is as if there were a “ fourth-person” narrator observing the writer observing the character.7 Paradoxically, it is this distance that allows the reader space through which to enter more intimately into Dazai’s struggles with himself than is usual in such stories.
Dazai and Family In Dazai’s life and writings, “ family” always meant the Tsushima family in Tsugaru, with Dazai’s eldest brother, the head of that family, as its embod iment. Part of Dazai’s difficulties in the adult world came from his inability to transfer his concept of himself as a child of the Tsushima family to a credible sense of himself as head of his own family, husband to his wife and father to his children. In some ways, the Japanese family is and was little different from, say, an especially close-knit American or European family. The group exists for the support and nurturance of the individual; the individual learns the ways of the group, tending to internalize the goals and mores of the society in which the family exists, and (so hope the parents) acts in a way that builds solidarity within the group and pride and a sense of integrity as the group faces the rest of society. These are of course cold and heavy words to describe the relations of parents and children: the love, caring, need, and mutual dependency, and the array of negative emotions that are the other face of love. But especially before World War II, the Japanese family has also played a more formal part in the social structure, clearly revealing its function as a legal entity. It has had kinds of power over its individual members that are not purely emo tional, but nevertheless produce their own set of potential emotional sup ports and complications for family members. The prewar Japanese family was legally an even larger unit than the current nuclear family. Its legal locus was in the koseki, or family register, kept in the home village of the family’s main branch. If a family member left the homestead, for example to go from the country to the big city, he might be set up in a branch family (bunke), thereby becoming the head of a new family, and a new family register could be established. Ultimately, however, record keeping was referred back to the bonseki (“ main register” ) in the original village. Thus, even today, a person’s legal residence and his main register may not be in the same place. All official 7Gotd, Shosetsu—ikani yomi, ikani kaku ka, 189. Goto attributes the term “ fourth-per son” to Yokomitsu Riichi.
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9
information concerning the individual’s formal relationship to the family was entered into the family register: birth, marriage, adoption, establish ment of branch family, divorce, disinheritance, death.8 Dazai is sometimes spoken of as having been “ disinherited” by his family, but his problems had nothing to do with the inheritance of property; Dazai received none on the death of his father. They involved emotional rather than legal sanctions. Dazai was in fact set up as a branch family head; he was not removed from the family. But legal solutions do not end emotional conflicts. Dazai’s removal to a branch family, rather than giving him a sense of inde pendence, only heightened the state of isolation and dependency he had al ready found himself in and would exhibit for the rest of his life. In effect shoved out of the nest before he was ready to fly (in a society that oriented itself to the group), he spent the rest of his life trying in his own perverse and contradictory way to climb back in. The position of family head, which Dazai’s oldest brother inherited upon the death of their father, was potentially a very powerful and (as Dazai came to realize) lonely one. If there were no male heir in a family (and the heir did not even have to be the eldest son), or if for any of a number of reasons male heirs were disqualified, a daughter could and frequently did inherit the fam ily headship.9 Often, to maintain the preferred strategy of male inheritance, this woman’s husband was then adopted into the family as the new family head. Such was the case with Dazai’s own father and mother, and Dazai shows other examples in his stories. The family head was responsible, in both senses of the word, for the welfare and behavior of the family members. Japanese society at large replicates the family system of responsibility: thus the director of the national railways may resign (or even commit suicide) following a major accident. Therefore, Dazai’s behavior, even after he was officially set up in a branch family (as a partial result of an unacceptable marriage), was a concern to and reflection on his family in Tsugaru; and his relationship with his eldest brother shifted from that of younger brother to elder brother to that of black-sheep son to necessarily authoritarian father when their own father died. Very human feelings of love and genuine concern continued to temper the rigidities of legal responsibility; if Dazai’s brother did apply considerable pressure to end Dazai’s leftist activities and for years forbade Dazai entry to the house, he also continued to support Dazai long after Dazai had any legal right to expect it. The emotional nature of the strong but troubled ties between Dazai and his family is particularly evident 8There are some differences in the kinds and degrees of information entered in family regis ters. See Toshiyuki Yanase, “ The Koseki as a Source for the Scholar of Japan,” in Studies in Asian Genealogy, ed. S. J. Palmer (Provo, Utah: Brigham Young University Press, 1972), 117 . 9See Jane M. Bachnik, “ Recruitment Strategies for Household Succession: Rethinking Jap anese Household Organization,” Man 18, no. 1 (March 1983): 178-79.
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from the stories discussed in Chapter 5. His writings show that his emotional needs were greater than the ability of the family, and his parents and brother in particular, to provide. That was perhaps more Dazai’s personal problem than a result of the pressures of the Japanese family system.
Suicide The Japanese probably have as many words for suicide as the Eskimo have for snow. Suicide in Japan takes many forms. The kamikaze pilots in World War II were honored to know they were sacrifices for their country. A guard at a European art exhibit in Tokyo in the late 19 60’s committed sui cide to accept personal responsibility when one of the paintings was stolen. An alarming number of aspiring college students commit suicide when they fail to gain admission to the university of their choice. The samurai in pre modern Japan was prepared to die by his own hand for any of a multitude of reasons. Mishima Yukio, a modern Japanese novelist frequently mentioned as a candidate for the Nobel Prize, committed seppuku, or ritual suicide, in 1970. Kawabata Yasunari, who won the Nobel Prize in 1968, committed suicide in 19 72. These suicides are obviously not of the same kind, but should we understand Dazai’s five suicide attempts as part of the national fascination with self-immolation, or was his impulse toward death a private compulsion? The answer to this question will emerge in the following pages, but some things can be said at the beginning. Suicide in the Western European Chris tian tradition has had strong religious and social sanctions against it. Even though it was morally taboo, a certain fascination with some kinds of selfdestruction has existed—witness, to mention only one example, the persis tence of the Romeo and Juliet theme. But in Japan, in a society that has been since the 13 0 0 ’s dominated by a warrior mentality, there have not been even any religious impediments to suicide; paradoxically, it has even been seen as the best way out of certain situations. The warrior who chooses or is allowed to choose suicide in preference to the dishonor (and possible torture) of capture or execution is one such case. The samurai who follows his lord in death, the wife who will not live without her husband, the man who dies in reparation for a wrong, or because he has been shamed and will not live with the stain (or because he has no other redress but to turn the shame back on the man who caused it), are others. The anthropologist Takie Lebra identifies three motivations for (or functions of) suicide in Japan that cover these cases and more: the desire for communication, the urge to seal social cohesion, and overinvolvement in what she calls “ status-role commitment.” 10 Lebra sees Mishima Yukio’s suicide as an example of the first, that is, as an act 10Lebra, Japanese Patterns o f Behavior, 190-200.
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intended to communicate his peculiar personal beliefs about the moral laxity of contemporary Japan. Included in this category are suicides or suicide threats intended to cause guilt in a specific target. Dazai was on occasion accused of this form of emotional blackmail, he says in several of his stories. The samurai emphasis on death as a course of honor or freedom has had its effect on the society at large. And so suicide may be a demonstration of social cohesion in such traditional forms as junski, or following one’s lord in death, and shinju, or dying with another person, usually one’s lover.11 Three of Dazai’s attempts were at least externally of the shinju type, that is, they involved a woman (the element of “ love” is questionable). In the first case the woman died, in the second she survived, and in the third both Dazai and his partner died. While ideally such suicide is an expression of feelings of inseparability, sometimes it is the case that “ someone in despair but unable to commit suicide alone may acquire the courage to take his life when he finds a suicidal companion.” 12 According to Dazai’s testimony, this was at least partly true of his first two attempts at sbinju; critics have seen it (espe cially since Dazai had been unsuccessful four times already) in the third as well. Lebra’s third type of suicide, committed through compulsive identifi cation with a role or guilt over failure in role performance, is exemplified by the suicides of young people who kill themselves for failing or even fearing to fail college or job applications. This was a factor in at least two of Dazai’s attempts, and Lebra sees Kawabata’s suicide in this light, as resulting from his inability to bear the burden of world acclaim. While currently the Japa nese suicide rate is well within the range for other major industrialized na tions, there is no denying that suicide looms exceptionally large in Japanese culture. To explain the suicides of Mishima and Kawabata by the above schema would of course be simplistic, but it is true that modern Japanese writers have been a high-risk group. Dazai had, in addition to a personal neurotic compulsion toward suicide, a tradition that seemed to authenticate his actions.13
Dazai's Style To Japanese readers, Dazai Osamu is one of the most accessible and inti mate of modern authors, both in subject matter and in style. More than most Japanese writers, Dazai reveals what it is like to be a Japanese— and to be having difficulty being one. This picture emerges not necessarily from the things the characters do in his stories (for sometimes they do strange things indeed), but from the way his narrators think, what they think about, and n Now also used to cover cases where a parent kills his family and himself. 12Lebra, 196. 13 One of Dazai’s disciples, the writer Tanaka Hidemitsu, committed suicide at Dazai’s graveside the year following his death. Was this junshi?
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Introduction
how they show the process of their thoughts. The effect is reinforced by his rich, idiosyncratic, and many-layered prose style, and by the obsessive con cerns and elegiac tone of the matter of the stories. Because the stories are close to the life and the mind of the writer, they tend to deal more with emotions and perceptions than with events. As a result, plot and characterization tend to have lower priority than sincerity of revelation, whether of actual or fictional events. The passions evoked are generally not on a grand scale, but are the very intimate human emotions of shame, loneliness, love, envy, and anger toward family and friends. These emotions produce stories obviously shading toward depression and feelings of rejection, but they also open possibilities of humor of a very tender kind. The stories’ protagonists take the same chances and make the same mistakes we all make. By falling on their faces for us, they show us how foolish but also how worthy and in need of cherishing we all are. Sometimes they even absolve us. For we may be right, it may indeed be the world that is “ out of joint.” Some works, like “ Fugaku hyakkei” (One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji) and Otogizdshi (Fairy Tales) are openly humorous and, in scenes, even comic. But many of the autobiographical stories have a tone of irony, sharp, self-directed, yet humane, that often turns sadness into something warm and forgiving. Dazai’s most distinctive writing—the writing in which he is at his most Dazaiesque—has a special strength, in that Dazai seems to speak the reader’s own thoughts for him. Its weakness is that some readers may have grown tired of those thoughts, or may be unwilling to see some of the strange situa tions in Dazai’s stories as extreme cases of common agonies. Therefore, Da zai’s Japanese readership exhibits an interesting characteristic: it is con stantly augmented by new crops of sixteen-year-olds who are struggling for the first time with some of the problems of self-definition that Dazai writes about; but it tends to lose numbers of twenty-three-year-olds who believe they are finished with that business, who have either made their peace and solved their problems, or have given up thinking about irresolubles. Such a large number, however, continue to be faithful readers that since his death at least three editions of his collected works have been published, most recently in 1977. And for these readers, the favorite works tend to be not the most publicly famous ones, but the autobiographical stories that are the focus of this study. Japanese, then, read Dazai as if monitoring the flow of their own thoughts. Although, in a given passage, connections are sometimes illogical, antecedents ambiguous, or allusions mysterious— endemic difficulties in Dazai’s stories— the stories as a whole are not obscure or abstractly meta phorical, and the reader never has ,to wonder about what is happening in them. There is a self-evident quality to Dazai’s prose, something that makes
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questions unnecessary. Even when Dazai’s narrator is quoting Western fic tion or the Bible, while the content may be unfamiliar to the Japanese reader, the way it is integrated in the narrative makes it seem totally familiar. It is this almost metalinguistic aspect of the writer and his writing that is the hardest to convey in translation, for it resides not in the words but in the cultural milieu in which the words are embedded. But at the same time, perhaps because Dazai grew up speaking a nonstandard dialect of Japanese, he is also fascinated with language itself, and his own diction exploits fully the rhetorical, grammatical, and even orthographic possibilities of the lan guage, in both its modern and its classical forms— as, for example, when he integrates the writings of an eighteenth-century doctor into his book about Tsugaru. In some ways, these emotional and formal elements make Dazai as much a sensei, or teacher, as a writer. He was a most unlikely candidate for teacherhood, a self-proclaimed misfit. “ I had nothing to be proud of, no learning, no talent; my body was falling apart, my spirit was weak.” But there was a sense in which he too could see himself as a model: “ I had passed through enough pain.” (2: 159.) His autobiographical stories are devoted to reveal ing the grounds for his authority, in a rich mix of language that admits the reader into the process of revelation. Accordingly, this is not a conventional “ life and works,” although it has many features of such a study. It treats in extenso mainly the autobiographi cal works of the Osamu Saga, which comprise about one-third of Dazai’s total oeuvre, although of course many other works are discussed too. It goes into detail on Dazai’s philosophy of literature (such as it is) largely as that has bearing on the progressive telling of the tale of Osamu’s life. But in addi tion, since I hope here to draw readers into a more intimate relationship with Dazai, they will find themselves being guided closely through a number of the major stories. As Dazai repeatedly quoted his own works in later stories, so too will readers of this study see certain significant passages from Dazai’s writings appear more than once. Even the uninitiated will notice that the stories in this book fit together; but readers who know who N and T and H are, or how Osamu, Shuji, and Oba Yozo are related to Dazai the author, will experience the writings more closely. This is my attempt to reconstitute for English-speaking readers the feeling, as I understand it, of reading Dazai with the shared cultural experience of being Japanese.
The Structure of the Osamu Saga Dazai Osamu’s one great novel is not The Setting Sun or No Longer Hu man. Nor is it to be found between any two covers. It is a story that extends the entire length of his writing career, told in pieces, with doublings back,
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Introduction
false trails, and fresh starts. Dazai never directly spoke of the pieces as all part of a single narrative, but from 19 33 until his suicide in 1948 his artist’s instinct kept him engaged in writing the story of Osamu—the story of his life. The hero of each story is not always named Osamu, but the Osamu character—the literary incarnation of the writer—is always recognizable. Between the many “ chapters” of this story were dozens of other stories and novels (his collected works fill eleven volumes), many of them quite good in and of themselves; but Dazai never lost sight of the central focus of his liter ary attention. While he never isolated the parts of the story, its structure is apparent to the reader. The writing of it measured Dazai’s maturation both as a man and as a writer; but while the story gave form to his life, the process of bringing order out of confusion was a movement toward death instead of richer life. The Osamu Saga is Dazai’s investigation of his own past; in it he attempts to come to terms with, if not understand, what has made him the man he is. At the same time, it is a study of the persistence of the past, of its interaction with the present. It is a story with a foregone conclusion: the hero is to die, the accomplishment of his search is to be death. It is a suicide note, a farewell to the world, that took fifteen years to write. Writing it was the motivating force of Dazai’s life, and completing it meant long-overdue release from the pain of existing. In 19 3 3 , a twenty-four-year-old Dazai Osamu published a story entitled “ Omoide” (Recollections). He had already been writing, in school maga zines and little family journals, for nearly ten years; but 19 33 saw the begin ning of his public reputation and the adoption of the pen name by which he is known. Writing, he said in “ Recollections,” had early become a way of populating his loneliness, of helping him sort out which of the masks he wore was his real self. By 19 33 he had already attempted suicide twice; “ Recollec tions” was to be a literary testament in farewell to the world before he tried again. Many years would pass, with three more suicide attempts, before he would fulfill that promise to himself. “ Recollections” introduces Osamu, the narrator. Of some indeterminate adult age, he relates the story of his life from infancy through high school. The story was supposed to show why Dazai was going to die, he explained eight years later; but what it shows instead is that Dazai had fallen in love with his Osamu. This character was too attractive, and too useful, to die. Dazai would not die until Osamu did; and Osamu would not die until Dazai had succeeded in telling the story of his life to his own artistic satisfaction. However damaged the man was, the writer had clear standards of literary judgment that had to be met, and although the man was ready to die, “ Rec ollections” did not meet the writer’s purposes. “ Recollections” answered no
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questions; instead, it gave the writer inspiration to go on writing, which meant living. In Dazai’s case, he literally lived to write. All this is explained in “ Tokyo hakkei” (Eight Views of Tokyo), which did not appear until 19 4 1. In between were years of pain and horror for Dazai. “ HUMAN LOST” 14 and “ Nijisseiki kishu” (Standard-Bearer for the Twen tieth Century), both from 19 37 , indicated allusively that something terrible had been happening to Osamu since the story had left him at the end of high school; but what that was did not become clear until “ Eight Views of To kyo.” Its narrator is an older Osamu, weary, emerging from a kind of emo tional shell shock, and recuperating in a new life, with a new wife and a new, serious commitment to a career as a writer. It is as much about Dazai’s emer gence as a writer as “ Recollections” was about his development as a child. Now thirty-one, in “ Eight Views of Tokyo” Dazai makes a discovery whose implications are wider than even he realizes: he does not simply draw inspi ration from his life to create art; art is himself. Although Dazai did not fully know it, he was now well embarked on the Osamu Saga, his own life journey and his protagonist’s. The search and its depiction are both equally artistic creations. At the same time that Dazai was treating, for the first but not the last time, the events of the preceding few years, with their implications of a wider fate determined from birth, he was opening up another avenue of speculation concerning Osamu. This one approached that birth and fate directly. It was a return to Osamu’s primitive base; through it, Dazai explored not the life of an intellectual in Tokyo, but the origins of a country boy in northeast Japan. Tsugaru was the region he came from, and parallel to the story of Osamu in Tokyo (as the writer Dazai) is that of Osamu in Tsugaru (in the persona of Shuji, his real name). “ Zenzo o omou” (Thinking of Zenzo) in 1939 intro duces the emotional response that from here on characterizes all references to the narrator’s home: intense longing for a return to a fantasized paradisia cal past, a desire to belong, guilt for misdeeds, and resentment at insensitivity toward his needs. “Aomori” and “ Goshogawara” (the names of towns) in 1940 pin down, through memories of Osamu/Shuji’s childhood, some of the actual names and places on which “ Recollections” was modeled. “ Kikyorai” (Going Home) in 1942 describes the uneasy visit of the thirty-threeyear-old Shuji to his home after a ten-year absence— a tentative bridging of the split between him and his family that had been occasioned by the misbe havior depicted in “ Eight Views of Tokyo.” “ Kokyo” (Hometown) the next year brings Shuji and his wife and infant daughter home to see his critically ill mother. It marks a true, if unhappy, reconciliation of the family, in which Osamu/Shuji finally realizes that he can never really go home again. 14The title is Dazai’s own, and he spelled it in capital letters. Since he knew the rules for capitalization in English, he must have wanted the title to stand out strongly, like a public notice.
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Introduction
In all of these Tsugaru stories three characters, in a paradoxical way all equally real and equally fictional, exist simultaneously superimposed: the Tokyo writer Dazai, the Tsugaru son Shuji, and a very young, emotionally unstable Osamu. The pure literary creation, this “ Osamu” is the repository of all the unmet needs, demands, and hopes of the actual man. Although his names change— to Dazai, to Shuji, finally in No Longer Human to Oba Yozo—it is recognizably the same Osamu character that forms the equation between Dazai the writer and his literary works. The climax of that charac ter’s story, after which it is a downhill trip to artistic maturity and personal extinction, came in 1944 with Tsugaru. This novel recounts the travels of the thirty-five-year-old Shuji through Tsugaru, in a journey that settles the prob lem of home and deep past once and for all. There are no crises, no confron tations in this story; in fact, it is a wonderfully calm and reflective account, told with much warm humor. But the moving visits to old friends and old places, and the recreation of old times, gradually make clear to the narrator that there is indeed no place for him in this world. Something went wrong from the start; what he can have, he does not need, and what he needs, he will never get. His heart’s longings will never be met. With this realization, Osamu has completed his Tsugaru journey. Back in Tokyo, Osamu the professional writer continued to explore his world. In 1942 and 1943 a number of short pieces, not included in this book, repeated and reworked from different perspectives some of the experiences of Osamu already chronicled in other stories. The Pacific War interrupted the autobiographical flow from Tokyo, but after the war “ Kund no nenkan” (An Almanac of Pain) and “ Jugonenkan” (Fifteen Years), both from 1946, brought the account of Tokyo Osamu up to date. The Osamu Saga was almost complete. The Setting Sun in 1947 was almost an explosion of fear, a hesitation before the final chapter. In this short novel, two of the characters, Uehara and Naoji, are recognizable personae of Dazai and incarnations of different aspects of Osamu; but the experience of the central character, the girl Kazuko, is fictional to the writer. Yet the identification between author and heroine is strong and significant: it is as if, for a moment, Dazai hoped desperately there might be some other way out for him than death. In the end, though, Kazuko triumphs just because she is a woman, while the men are discarded and shattered. No Longer Human in 1948 marked Dazai’s success as a writer and his release from servitude. Now almost thirty-nine, he created a wholly new incarnation of Osamu in the novel’s protagonist, Oba Yozo. Yozo’s story is totally familiar in outline, for it has been told in “ Recollections” and “ Eight Views of Tokyo” and everywhere else, and yet it is totally fictionalized. At long last, Dazai found the perfect way to tell his story. He, who had for so long attempted to tell the story from the inside, as he had lived it, in the end
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discovered a more abstractly literary vessel to contain it better than any so far. All the other Osamu stories plunge us in medias res. Their narrators are intimate actors who sound as Dazai must have sounded. But in N o Longer Human the narrator is “ a writer55 who is given some notebooks of someone he has never known; and then the notebooks of Oba Yozo speak for them selves. Dazai Osamu, that most intrusive of authors, does not appear in this novel. The writer gives his limited testimony, and Oba Yozo gives his, and No Longer Human is their novel. That N o Longer Human represents Dazai’s coming of age as a novelist is clear from the work’s internal consistency and completeness. But it also is evidence that Dazai was prepared to die. By the end of the book Yozo is either dead or crazy, but in any case the concluding words indicate a hope that he rests in peace. And sure enough, Dazai never lived to see the entire novel published. Like Confucius who, in a legend referred to at the end of Tsugaru, put down his pen and stopped writing; or perhaps more like Proust, who is said to have died upon writing the last words of his Marcel Saga, Dazai finished the last chapters of No Longer Human, thereby completing his own Remembrance o f Things Past, sent them to his editor, and went off to die. What he had learned, what the Osamu Saga recounts, were hard-won insights into the limitations of love. Such is the outline of the Osamu Saga. The many other stories that flesh it out show the integrative process whereby a writer becomes dedicated to the production and elaboration of a single literary creation formed of history and imagination— in this case, himself. Dazai conveys to readers a sense of conviction that he is giving them a true and sincere exploration of human passions. He did have his novelistically weak moments, of course— at certain periods in his life they were lamentably frequent—in which his storytelling becomes a kind of special pleading for the reader’s sympathy. But when his artistic judgment is at work, and that is much of the time, he tells with both humor and sorrow a story that Western readers as well as Japanese recognize as their own story, an archetypal yet distinctively Japanese version of the human comedy. It may be from this that the continuing appeal of Dazai’s work derives. It took Dazai a lifetime to write the saga, and the writing of it determined the span of his life; but more than any one single work he wrote, it is the totality of the story of Osamu that makes up Dazai’s contribution to Japanese and world literature. Part I, which follows, discusses the facts of Dazai’s life in detail, and inves tigates some of the childhood and family factors that, as Dazai testifies in his stories, continued to haunt him for his entire life. Part II is the story of Osa mu’s life as Dazai chronicled it in the Osamu Saga; it is the section of this study that comes closest to pure literary criticism. The stories translated in this book are six installments of the saga, one of novel length, beginning with
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“ Recollections,” the story Dazai said started it all. Although the stories are generally in chronological order, Tsugaru is out of order, in part because it is the longest, but also because structurally it serves as a benediction for this set of stories— a loving summation of Osamu’s life. The reader may of course skip directly to the stories and then return for the biographical and critical background, but my hope is that the experience of reading them will be richer if the background is absorbed first.
D AZAI’S L IF E AN D T H E OSAMU SAGA
PART I: D A Z A I’ S LIFE
i . The Journey Outward More than anything, he liked to bring people pleasure. —Dazai Osamu, Righteousness and Smiles1
Dazai Osamu was born Tsushima Shuji on June 19,19095 the tenth child of Tsushima Gen’emon, a wealthy landowner in northern Japan. At the time of his birth there were some thirty people living in the huge, newly completed Tsushima mansion: his great-grandmother, maternal grandmother, father, mother, a widowed maternal aunt and her four young daughters, seven older Tsushima children (three boys and four girls), and numerous servants. The oldest two male children had already died, so young Dazai was counted as the sixth son. The Tsushima family had risen in three generations from obscure peasant origins in the village of Kanagi to social prominence throughout the region. It was Dazai’s great-grandfather “ Kanagi Village Sosuke” who had built up considerable wealth through moneylending and the family fortune was in creased by Sosuke’s son Sogoro. Sogoro had only girl children, so in 1888 the family adopted Matsuki Eizaburo, aged sixteen,2 a younger son of an important family in nearby Kizukuri, to marry the eldest daughter Tane, aged fourteen. They were Dazai’s parents. Sogoro, who was in ill health, died the year following Eizaburd’s adoption. Sosuke retained family head ship. When he retired in 1900, family succession passed directly to the sonin-law, Eizaburo, now renamed Gen’emon. The patriarch Sosuke died at the age of seventy in 1905, but the various widows lived on many years longer, and their matriarchal presence continued to be felt in the family. Gen’emon, an able man, soon became politically active. As one of the four wealthiest landowners in Aomori Prefecture he was elected to the national Diet, where he served from 19 1 2 until his death in 19 2 3; accordingly, he was absent in Tokyo during much of Dazai’s early childhood. Gen’emon’s wealth was recognized in 19 22 when he was selected on that basis for the Upper 1Zenshu 5:18 8 . 2Ages are by Western count, as can best be ascertained. When Dazai refers in his writing to himself or his family, ages may be a year or more higher, since Japanese traditionally count a child as one year old at birth.
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D A Z A I’ S L IF E
House of Peers. He died three months later, in March 19 23. The eldest son Bunji, just graduated from Waseda University and recently married, suc ceeded as head of the family. The tradition of public service begun by the father was continued with the other surviving sons, except for Dazai. Bunji, for example, was mayor of Kanagi, governor of Aomori Prefecture, and a longtime representative in the Diet. Dazai, however, was to define his own “ service” differently. One of Gen’emon’s major family tasks was the rebuilding of the Tsushima house into a form commensurate with the family’s risen status. From what had been a barracks-like, rambling structure distinguished from its neigh bors only by its extent, the new Tsushima mansion soared high above sub stantial surrounding brick walls, rivaling the local temple in grandeur. Even today, when the mansion has been converted to an inn, its roof is still one of the major landmarks, together with the temple, the concrete town hall, and a small office building, that stand out as one approaches the town across the Tsugaru Plain. It was not just this family background, but the nature of the area itself in which his family acquired social importance and he grew to young adult hood, that had its effect on the man Dazai was to become. Aomori is the northernmost of the six prefectures that make up Tohoku, the Northeast Region. And the Tsugaru Peninsula, a part of Aomori, projects yet farther northward from the mainland, at the very end of the island of Honshu. Hok kaido lies just eighteen kilometers away, across the Tsugaru Strait from Cape Tappi; on a clear day the mountains of southern Hokkaido lie low along the horizon across the swiftly moving waters. But history— economic, political and literary—flew straight from Tokyo to Hokkaido, as the airlines do to day, without stopping at this little backwater. At the turn of the century, young literary romantics had their fling at Emersonian self-reliance in Hok kaido, and economic exploiters toyed there with various schemes. Hok kaido, for all its distance from the capital, had about it the aura of Wild West freedom. But only today is the central government turning its attention to the development of northern Tohoku, which has occupied in Japan a place similar to that of Appalachia in the United States. It is important to remem ber that Dazai Osamu, the Tokyo litterateur and would-be decadent, came from such an area, a region whose folkways and social fabric were distinctly different from those of the central region. Tradition has it that the inhabitants of this culturally and economically backward Tohoku region are naturally taciturn. It is widely repeated in Ja pan that the peculiar Tohoku accent known familiarly as zu-zu ben (because the su sound of standard Japanese emerges as zu) results from climatic con ditions: it is very cold up there, and people have to keep their mouths fairly well closed to conserve heat. This kind of crude anthropologizing is amus-
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ing, perhaps; but very real is the agony still today confessed by natives of Tohoku when they move to Tokyo and find they must “ remedy” their speech so as not to be laughed at. And if zu-zu ben is a peculiar dialect, within it the Tsugaru ben (“ dialect” ) is very nearly a separate language. Superstition aside, to be a native of Tsugaru seems to have been, and is still, somewhat of a handicap in Japan. The natives of Tsugaru are not to be dismissed as “ nat urally taciturn,” however. They speak volubly and with much evident humor in their own backyards; it is when they make the leap to Tokyo that a sense of inferiority bred of their peculiarities dries up the wells of spontaneity, perhaps in personality as well as in language. Some have laid this conviction of backwardness to northern Tohoku’s nonparticipation in the politics of the modernizing Meiji period, during which a new national educational sys tem first began propagating throughout Japan a standard speech based on dialects of the central region. Whatever the source, Tohoku people are still self-conscious about their speech. Dazai Osamu, who captivated audiences of friends with unforgettable conversation, had to rid himself of a backwoods twang. Despite the contacts his wealthy and prominent family enjoyed with Tokyo, his high school copy books show in their spelling that as a child he spoke the nonstandard local dialect. He himself relates that his sister teased him about these discrepancies when he wrote to her at school. Occasionally in his writings he mentions his “ muddy Tsugaru dialect,” and he reveals that his mentor, Ibuse Masuji,\ \ “ fixed up” his early writings. Already saddled with a well-developed sense of being an outsider, he was no doubt hindered in his adjustment to Tokyo by the stigma of speech. In this sense, Tsugaru was always with him. To him, that meant that his family was also always with him. Although Dazai left Tsugaru at the rela tively advanced age of twenty-one, almost never to return, even in Tokyo he 1 was scarcely free of ties to the family that stayed behind. Whether they were I supporting him financially or interfering in his first marriage or disinheriting him or forgiving him, for years they were a constant force in his life. And, his writings reveal, he would not have had it otherwise. In fact, there is an under current of lament that he could never fully go home again once he had left. Nevertheless, Dazai’s feelings toward his family were ambivalent. He himself considered early childhood significant in producing in him a sense of not belonging to anyone or anything. His mother was a semi-invalid. The infant Dazai was soon put to a succession of wet nurses and substitute moth ers. His aunt Kiye apparently gave the child some of the affection he craved; Dazai’s memories of her in his writings are for the most part warm and grateful. But when he was six, her own daughter married, and she left the Tsushima house to live in a somewhat distant town with the young couple. Apart from a few significant visits, Dazai felt he had lost her.
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A fourteen-year-old girl named Take, who was one of Dazai’s aunt’s maids, became his nursemaid when he was two. Her influence on his devel opment was profound. In “ Recollections,” at the beginning of his writing career, and Tsugaru, near the end, are his memories of Take and what she taught him; indeed, Tsugaru is so organized that the reunion with her, after nearly thirty years, is both the justification for and the dramatic climax of the trip. Take taught him to read, he said in his stories; she taught him his first lessons in morality, those first lessons that strike so deep. She would take me with her to the temple and explain all the picture scrolls of heaven and hell. They were horrible: arsonists were being forced to carry baskets on their backs with red flames shooting out from them; men who had had mis tresses were being crushed by blue snakes with two heads; there was the lake of blood, and the mountain of needles, and the bottomless pit with white smoke coming from it; and everywhere, pale, emaciated people, their tiny mouths open, were crying and screaming. Once she told me, “ If you tell lies, you’ll go to hell, and your tongue will be pulled out like this by devils.” I burst out crying in terror.
[1:24.] Suddenly, when Dazai was six, Take disappeared, having gone to a distant town to get married. She left without a word of explanation at the time, Dazai wrote in “ Recollections” ; perhaps, he speculated, it was feared he would follow her if he knew where she was going. This “ desertion,” follow ing hard on his aunt’s, left its mark on the child. Dazai’s eldest sister died when he was two; the last child of the family, a boy, was born later the same year, when Dazai was three. Dazai seems to have done exceptionally well in the local elementary school, better than the other Tsushima children.
Steps Toward the Outside World The death of his father in 19 23, when Dazai was thirteen, seems to have impressed him largely because of the length of the funeral cortege and the fact that it was mentioned in the Aomori newspapers (with, of course, his own name included in the list of survivors).3 The next month Dazai entered Aomori High School, the first time he had been away from home and family.4 3Such, at least, is Osamu’s testimony in “ Recollections.” But in Dazai’s final novel, No Longer Human, the response of the protagonist to his father’s death suggests that, even years later, the author was still reacting to the death of his own father. 4In the prewar educational system, the first six years, called lower or elementary school, were compulsory. Following that were various options: middle school (here translated “ high school,” to which it most closely corresponds), lasting four or five years; higher or upper school (here “ college” ), lasting three years; and university. In addition, Dazai attended an upper ele mentary school for a year before middle school. Since relatively few students went beyond middle school, by the time Dazai was in Hirosaki College, he was a member of a would-be sophisticated elite.
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Instead of living in the dormitory with the other boys, he boarded at the home of a distant relative, Toyoda Tazaemon, who appears somewhat to have taken the place of his father during the years Dazai lived in Aomori. Years later, when he wrote about Toyoda, he used the Tsugaru dialect word for “ father,55 odosa, to indicate that he wanted to think of himself as one of the children of that family. If only “ father55 could have lived another five or ten years! Then he would have written something good and made him happy. “ When I think of ‘father5 now, I remember all the wonderful things about him, and I feel such a loss.55 (10: 209.) The Tsushima brothers shared literary and artistic interests; here the chief influence was probably Bunji, who had been the first to enter university in Tokyo. Dazai speaks of the amateur theatricals they used to write and pro duce for the amusement of the family when all the children were home for the summer; they also published little literary magazines, with such names as Seiza (Constellation), to which they were the main contributors. One of Dazai’s earliest dramatic efforts appeared in Seiza in the summer of 1925. That autumn the brothers started the journal Shinkirb (Mirage), which en joyed a regular publishing life for more than a year; during the same period Dazai also began having stories printed in the Aomori High School literary magazine. Another of the family magazines was Aonbo (roughly translata ble as “ Big Boy Blue55), which was edited by Keiji, Dazai’s next older brother, now an aspiring sculptor. There was six years5 difference between them, eleven between Bunji and Dazai.5 But the family games came to an end grad ually, as responsibilities began to fall on the older brothers. Bunji was elected mayor of Kanagi in October 19 25, at the age of twenty-seven, two years after assuming family headship; the second brother, Eiji, had married the pre vious August. In April 19 2 7 Dazai started at Hirosaki College. Once again instead of living in the school dormitory he boarded at the home of family friends. He did well, placing sixth in his class, and received special praise for his English compositions. But that summer, his eighteenth, he began to change. Already secretly aspiring to be a writer, he was stunned by Akutagawa Ryunosuke’s suicide in July. Perhaps with that stimulus, though more likely because of internal dynamics long since set in motion, his style of life took on a more self-consciously artistic coloration. Already while Dazai was in middle school, Bunji had expressed doubt and disapproval of his continuing literary interests, fearing they would interfere with his studies. At that time Dazai had reassured him that they were helping him study all the harder; but now Japanese has separate words to indicate the relative birth order of children in the family. In Dazai’s stories about his family there are three older brothers: Keiji (deceased by the time the stories were written), Eiji, and Bunji. These will be referred to (in ascending order of age) as follows: next older (Keiji), next oldest (Eiji), and oldest (Bunji).
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he began to turn away from academic pursuits. Always, he had hated school, he wrote; now that feeling began to affect his behavior. Impressed by the castle-town atmosphere that still survived in Hirosaki, he began to take les sons in gidayu, a traditional musical art form; his apparel was calculated to produce certain stylish effects; and he started to frequent the restaurants and teahouses of Aomori and the nearby hot spring town of Asamushi. That autumn, at the home of his gidayu teacher, he met a young geisha, Oyama Hatsuyo. She was his first love, and their ten-year affair set the tone for the mutual disappointment and destruction that characterized his relations with women. Hatsuyo did not become an important issue in his life until 19 30, how ever, when he went to Tokyo to enter Tokyo Imperial University (now Tokyo University). In the meantime, he was writing more and getting involved in the literary scenes of Hirosaki and Aomori; and his political conscience was awakening. He had tried out some of those new ideas earlier, to little effect. When I was in fourth or fifth grade, I heard about “ democracy” from my next older brother. Even my mother knew the word, and I would hear her going on to guests about how taxes were soaring because of “ democracy” and how nearly all the rice crop was being taken by taxes; and the whole concept confused and made me uneasy. Still, I would help the servants in summer cut the grass in the garden, or in winter lend a hand in sweeping snow from the roof of the house, and while I worked, I would teach them about this “ democracy.” But in the end, I realized that the servants were not especially pleased to have my help. It turned out that they would have to go over and redo my “ help.” [1: 42.]
The problem of ideology became intermingled with that preexisting con cern, truthfulness: But then, when I did tell the truth in my [school] compositions, I was sure to get into trouble. .. . Once, we were given the title “ If War Were to Break Out,” . . . I wrote that. . . first of all I would run and hide in the mountains, and then I would invite my teachers to join me; teachers were human, and I was human, and surely we were all equally afraid of war. This time, the principal and the assistant head master were the committee of two that interrogated me. They asked me in what spirit I had written; I evaded them flippantly, saying, “ Mostly for fun.” The assis tant entered “ He did it out of curiosity” in his notebook. Then he and I started a little debate. He opened: “ You wrote, Teachers are human and Pm human,’ but are all men equal?” I muttered that I thought so. I was becoming hopelessly tongue-tied. “ Well then,” he asked me, “ if the principal and I are both equal, why are our salaries different?” I thought a while and answered, “ Well, isn’t it because your work is different?” Putting on his steel-rimmed glasses, the thin-faced assis tant immediately wrote my answer in his notebook. Until then, I had liked this teacher. Then he posed a final question to me: “Are we your father’s equals?” I was on the spot, and couldn’t answer anything. [1: 27.]
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Then it had been a child’s problem. But now it was an adult concern. The late 19 2 0 ’s was a time of great political agitation. The nationwide roundup of leftist activists on March 15 , 1928, had a deep impact on young people.6 The students of Hirosaki College were no exception. They demonstrated their political consciousness in February 1929 when they held a week-long strike to protest misappropriation of school funds by the college’s principal, Suzuki Shintaro; Dazai was a member of the strike organizing committee. Furthermore, Dazai writes in “ Kuno no nenkan” (An Almanac of Pain), he was deeply tormented by his position as son of one of the wealthiest land owners in Aomori. “ I approved of armed insurrection. A revolution without the guillotine is meaningless. However, I was not of the common people. I was of the class that was to be sent to the guillotine.” (8: 208.) In “ Shufuki” (A Record of the Autumn Wind), published in 1939, he describes the evil of the middle class to which he belongs in emotional terms, not economic. The middle class lives only in recollections of guilt, he feels. “ This ‘bourgeois,’ is it a bad thing?” asks the young woman. The narrator answers: “At least I think so. Unhappiness, suffering, gratitude— all dabbled at with a dilet tante’s zest. They’re self-satisfied, utterly complacent. They live only for their own pride.” (2: 257.) But in 1929 he felt the inequity with sharp and direct pain. The precedent had already been set for Dazai’s solution to the conflict. In 19 2 3, the writer Arishima Takeo had committed suicide, ostensibly for love. But he had had a long connection with humanitarian movements, and the year before his suicide he published his manifesto “ Sengen hitotsu” (A Dec laration) : he was a member of the bourgeoisie, an aristocrat; there was noth ing he could do to help the oppressed lower classes. Sympathy was not enough, but he was disqualified by birth from acting in concert with the laboring masses. Renewal and liberation would have to come from within their ranks; one could not impose freedom from oppression from the out side. He divided his extensive landholdings in Hokkaido among the tenant farmers who worked them—the same farmers whose plight he had depicted in his 19 1 7 novella Kain no matsuei (The Descendants of Cain). A year later he was dead. Young Dazai shared his dilemma. Dazai’s writings of that period show the proletarian movement’s influence, but he was not of the proletariat. While, strictly speaking, he was not of the aristocratic class either (the dis tinction between pedigree and social circumstance was to cause him conflict in later years), his family was one of the premier families of the region, albeit through newly created wealth. He had as yet done nothing to alienate him self from his family; he still identified strongly with their definition of social Proletarian writer Kobayashi Takiji memorialized the roundup in a story, “ Senkyuhyakunijuhachinen sangatsu jugonichi” (March 1 5 , 1928 ).
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class, and was conscious of even such differences as his living in a private home instead of a dormitory like the other students. The monthly allowance Dazai’s family was sending him at the time was about 15 0 yen a month, or the equivalent of a college professor’s salary.7 In “An Almanac of Pain” Da zai stresses his political confusion and guilt as the source of his first suicide attempt with an overdose of sleeping pills when he was nineteen. Dazai was in fact vague in dating the attempt, and chronologies compiled by early crit ics who relied only on Dazai’s testimony have a number of different dates. More recent research by critics such as Soma Shoichi, who have done much to separate fact from Dazai’s fiction, not only fixes the date at December 10, 1929, but suggests that more than ideological confusion and class guilt were troubling Dazai at the time. Soma points out that this was the night before second-semester final examinations at Hirosaki College. Dazai had entered college near the top of his class; by the end of the first year he had fallen to thirty-one out of thirty-five. At the time of the suicide attempt, as a result of his extracurricular activities in writing and entertainment, he would quite likely not have been able to complete seven out of his eleven courses. That the suicide attempt, however serious in intention, might have been a way of escaping other unpleasant consequences, is not unlikely. Dazai himself owns up to a similar sort of subterfuge in “ Recollections” when he describes using his father’s death as an excuse for getting a waiver of the high school entrance examination. Soma does not doubt the suicide attempt, but gives less weight to Dazai’s political consternation than to the potentially disastrous effect on his pride of flunking school. Both factors combined would have amounted to considerable cause for upset.8 At the same time, Dazai was continuing his literary associations. In April 1928 he began publishing the journal Saibd Bungei (Cell Literature) with some of his schoolmates. They solicited and received a contribution from Ibuse Masuji, then beginning to be known in Tokyo literary circles, which was published in May. Dazai himself contributed to every issue, under var ious pseudonyms. He spent his summer vacation in Tokyo, hoping to meet Ibuse then, but did not succeed on this trip. Later, Ibuse was to become his literary sensei and personal mentor. During his three Hirosaki years, from 19 27 to 1930, Dazai was busy writing for all the local sources open to him. 7Kitagaki, Dazai Osamu no seishin bunseki, 5 6 (hereafter cited as Kitagaki). 8Soma, Wakaki hi no Dazai Osamu, 196-97. Close investigation of Dazai’s childhood and youth, as well as his family history, relies to a great extent on this and other works of Soma Shoichi, a writer from Dazai’s native prefecture of Aomori. It is a peculiarity of Dazai criticism that it required an Aomori critic to deal with the primary materials (school records, family registers, etc.) of Dazai’s early life. Most Tokyo critics, for nearly twenty years after Dazai’s death, touched on this life only in the most general and stereotyped ways, drawing from Dazai’s works for their evidence; since then, they have tended to rely on Soma’s work for Aomori material.
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He was on the literary staff of the school paper; he published in the Aomori literary magazine Zahyd (Coordinates) and the local newspapers. On January 5, 1929, Dazai’s younger brother Reiji died at the age of sixteen of blood poisoning. Reiji was closest to him in age, the only child in the family younger than himself, and had followed him in school to Aomori and Hirosaki. But this was not the only death he had to face then. The next year in June his older brother Keiji died in Tokyo at the age of twenty-seven, of what is reported to have been tubercular urinary tract inflammation. (Tu berculosis was the family illness: their father had died similarly, as had sev eral older sisters; Dazai’s mother had repeated bouts with it and Dazai him self was plagued off and on throughout his life with the same condition.) Dazai had just entered Tokyo Imperial University and was living at a board ing house near Keiji’s house when Keiji became suddenly ill and died shortly thereafter. “ So many of my relatives have died,” Dazai was to write almost a decade later. “ M y eldest sister died at twenty-six. Father died at fifty-three. Youngest brother at sixteen. Third brother at twenty-seven. This year my next older sister died, thirty-four. A nephew, twenty-five, a younger cousin, twenty-one. They were both close to me, but they died anyway, one right after the other this year.” (2: 248.) In years past, he recollected, relations with these two brothers had not been good. He had been jealous as a child of the attention Reiji had received, and he envied the good looks he felt that those brothers shared and that he did not. But as they grew older, the broth ers had grown closer together. Dazai led the way in fashion for Reiji, and in turn modeled himself on the elegant Keiji, whom he felt to be an extraordi narily promising sculptor. Within a year, he was bereft of those supports, just as he was beginning his university career.
Arrivals in Tokyo In April 19 30, Dazai entered the Department of French Literature at To kyo Imperial University, Japan’s premier institution of higher education. “ I didn’t know a word of French, but I wanted to hear the lectures on French literature,” he says in “ Recollections” ; a much-repeated story has it that he chose that department because he had heard they had few applicants and no entrance examination. In fact, Dazai was dismayed to discover, there was an examination, a portion of which was in French. He had to report his total incapacity to Professor Tatsuno Yutaka, a famous translator of French po etry mentioned in “ Recollections” as being a man Dazai “ faintly revered” ; Tatsuno is said to have been so entertained at Dazai’s cheek that he admitted him despite his lack of qualifications.9 Shortly after, Dazai finally met Ibuse Masuji at Ibuse’s office in a publish9Kitagaki, 65.
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mg house in Kanda. This was the beginning of Ibuse’s lifelong role as his mentor. But Dazai’s literary efforts for the moment seem to have been limited to continuing previous commitments in Aomori. Jinushi icbidai (A Land lord’s Life) was being serialized in Zahyd; it eventually remained incomplete because, explained a note in a later issue of the magazine, there were “ certain external circumstances beyond the author’s control.” 10 This was the last of Dazai’s pre-Tokyo writings and, for the time being, he slowly abandoned literature as his personal life grew more confused. In the autumn of 1930, the affair of the geisha Oyama Hatsuyo reached a crisis point. Before Dazai had even left for Tokyo, there had been talk that Hatsuyo’s contract would be bought out by one of her patrons who would then set her up as his mis tress. This threat to their easy dalliance apparently drew Dazai and Hatsuyo even closer together; when he left, he promised to take care of her in some unspecified way. But the pain and confusion of Keiji’s illness and death so soon after distracted him, and as time passed, his correspondence with Hat suyo lapsed. Fearful that she would have to go with her new patron, Hatsuyo contacted a mutual friend to have him tell Dazai she was fleeing her contract house. With Dazai’s connivance, she managed to make her way to Tokyo. Toyoda Tazaemon, at whose house Dazai had boarded during the high school years in Aomori, was sent to Tokyo to try to head her off, but had to return empty-handed.11 Bunji, as family head, came to Tokyo immediately to attempt to dissuade Dazai from what everyone thought was, and later turned out to be, folly. When Dazai proved adamant about keeping her with him, Bunji made an alternate proposal: he would be allowed to marry Hatsuyo, but would be set up as head of a branch family, being removed thereby from the main Tsu shima family register. There were two conditions: he would not be given the property settlement that was customary with the establishment of branch houses, but instead would receive a monthly stipend of 12 0 yen while he was at university; and he would not be allowed into the family home.12 Dazai accepted. Bunji was allowed to take Hatsuyo back to Aomori until he could buy her contract from her house. Because the effects on Dazai of this extreme solution were so devastating emotionally and psychologically, as well as legally, it might be more appro priate to speak of it not as disinheritance but as excommunication. Up to that point, Dazai had apparently not planned to marry Hatsuyo but only to enjoy her favors, in imitation of the tastes of the elegant traditional artists he 10The circumstances were never explained, but it is known that this story of a villainous and degenerate landowner, based on a tenant farmers’ revolt that had taken place in Akita, had displeased Dazai’s brother Bunji by its resemblance in details to the Tsushima family situation. Sanekata, Dazai Osamu jiten, 49. 11Soma, “ Dazai Osamu,” pt. 1,13 6 . 12Ibid., 138.
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had started to model himself on during his college days in Hirosaki. But events carried him beyond his ability to control them. This was a case where the cure was worse than the disease: a little over a week after the Hatsuyo arrangements were agreed upon, Dazai, cast out (as he saw it) by his family and without Hatsuyo, attempted suicide with a bar hostess he had just met. Tanabe Shimeko, aged nineteen, worked at the Hollywood Cafe, on To kyo’s main commercial thoroughfare, the Ginza. Separated from her hus band, who was an unsuccessful painter, she apparently shared Dazai’s pros tration in the face of life’s complications.13 (Shimeko’s husband was only the first of several painters who came to hold special meaning for Dazai. Hatsuyo’s lover several years later was also one. Painters are often disguised writers in Dazai’s writing. Dazai chose the persona of a painter in No Longer Hu man; and Naoji in The Setting Sun, in order to protect the reputation of the woman he loves, pretends in his suicide note to his sister that her husband, the writer Uehara, is a painter.) Dazai and Shimeko spent two days drinking and wandering around Tokyo, went out to the seaside resort of Kamakura on November 29, and threw themselves into the sea off Tamotogaura, sup posedly a point on the small nearby island ofEnoshima. Passing fishing boats pulled Dazai out in time, but Shimeko was dead when they finally retrieved her. So goes Dazai’s version, and early critics took him at his word and refer to this incident as the “ attempted death by drowning” ; but the research of Nagashino Koichiro and others suggests that Dazai and Shimeko took sleep ing pills on shore at Koyurugigazaki, a point on the mainland across from Enoshima (Tamotogaura is a local designation for part of Koyurugigazaki), and that their bodies were found there, on shore. In one fictionalization of the incident, “ Hi no tori” (The Firebird), Dazai in fact makes no mention of drowning. Taken to a rest home named Keifuen in Kamakura, Dazai was later charged as an accomplice to the woman’s suicide. The charges were dropped when Bunji applied some political pressure. This double suicide attempt is one of the first and deepest events in Dazai’s literary iconography of guilt and betrayal. Here, by not dying, he deserted the woman, as he was to desert his communistparty comrades.
Dazai and Hatsuyo: Early Married Life In January 19 3 1, Dazai was taken by his next oldest brother Eiji to Ikarigaseki, a hot spring town near Aomori, to recuperate, and there the twentyone-year-old Dazai and nineteen-year-old Hatsuyo exchanged vows in his 13The name of Dazai’s first suicide partner has never been fully established. Her family name has been spelled with a number of different characters; her first name has been reported var iously as Shimeko, Atsumi, Junko, and several others, although Shimeko does seem to have been her official name. Kitagaki, 73.
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mother's presence. The couple began their married life in a small apartment in Gotanda, but, as Dazai relapsed into political activities, moved often dur ing that year and the next to escape police surveillance. Dazai describes his early married life as follows: Gotanda was our crazy period. I had no will at all. I had not the slightest hope of a fresh start. I lived, simply reflecting the moods of friends who dropped by. Far from being ashamed of my disgraceful crime [the Enoshima incident], I was even faintly proud. 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 Hfatsuyo] indifferently. It was crazy. I did nothing. I slipped back into that [political] work, but this time there was no passion. The nihilism of the idle.
[.4 - 55-] Older classmates from Hirosaki and Aomori days were already deep in leftist activities (“ that work” ) by the time Dazai entered university in 1930. By 19 3 1 he had been drawn in to assume a definite, but passive, role in the movement. He gave shelter in successive apartments to fugitive comrades, kept leaflets and posters when various secret headquarters were raided, and most important, provided funds from the money his brother was sending him. Although still formally enrolled at Tokyo University (a condition for his receiving the stipend from Bunji), he attended virtually no classes, and did almost no writing, except to dabble a bit in haiku circles. In September 19 3 1 the Japanese army took over in Manchuria— the cele brated Manchurian Incident that heralded Japanese military expansion on the Asian continent. Suppression of leftist elements on the home front be came increasingly harsh. In July of the following year, 19 32, Dazai was called back to Aomori by the civil authorities for questioning on his political activities, of which something was known; again through Bunji’s interven tion, he was released. He was called back for further questioning in Decem ber, but by then he had already dropped his leftist connections. We can only speculate on what, during the summer and autumn, happened between Da zai and his brother— or within Dazai himself—to make him abandon the political movement to which he had so far been loyal despite the conflict it caused him. Dazai makes only oblique reference to the events in his writings. Bunji was rising in the political world, and clearly applied pressure to have Dazai drop associations that were more than an embarrassment. In the 19 3 0 ’s, affairs with geisha and attempted suicides were one thing; political sedition was another. After the 19 30 suicide attempt, while Eiji went to the rest home to see Dazai, other family friends had gone to his rooming house to destroy any incriminating papers. In fact, consideration of Dazai’s politics had entered into the conditions Bunji set when Dazai married Hatsuyo: he already knew of Dazai’s financial involvement in the leftist cause, and he
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realized that, if he limited Dazai’s income so that the two would have to live on less than Dazai had been receiving as a single college student in Hirosaki, there would be less Tsushima money to go to Dazai’s comrades.14 Now he cut off support for two months, and when he resumed sending the monthly stipend in June, the amount was reduced from 120 yen to 90 yen. Dazai himself is silent about the reasoning process, but he wrote of the effect on him of this second “ betrayal” (the Enoshima affair having been the first): “ Soon the youth betrayed even the leftist cause. He himself pressed the burn ing brand to his own forehead, leaving the label ‘coward’.” (3: 51.) At this time, Dazai says, he received a shock from Hatsuyo, which no doubt played its part in the process of his political “ conversion” by increas ing his general confusion. She revealed that she was not the pure creature he had thought her, that she had had experience of men before him. The effect of this revelation can only be gauged in relation to the kind of naivete he must have had to have believed her “ pure” in spite of the life she had previ ously led as a geisha; and it also makes clearer how much without substance had been his pose of sophistication as he had traveled around the tea houses in his college days. For, he wrote in “ Eight Views of Tokyo,” he had not “ known” her until the night before Bunji took her back to Aomori in the autumn of 1930. It was against this background of personal disaster that political pressure, added to the burden of guilt and sense of isolation from standing against familial authority, had its effect. Dazai and Hatsuyo went away for the month of August to Numazu, a hot spring resort town on the Izu Peninsula, to recoup their scattered strength. They returned to Tokyo in September, and Dazai began to write the story that emerged the next year as “ Recollections.” It was as if separation from political activities had released some kind of desperate energy in the young writer; he was beginning to write his last will and testament. “ Recollections” was the first of the autobiographical logs of his life to date that were to appear periodically throughout his career. Later that year they moved into a room in the home of a young couple in Tokyo who came from Dazai’s home region. The husband, Tobishima Sadashiro, who had been a classmate of Dazai’s older brother Keiji at Hirosaki College, worked for Tokyo Nichinichi Shimbun-sha, a newspaper publisher. To some extent, the slightly older man probably replaced for Dazai the family ties he had lost. He and Hatsuyo lived with the Tobishimas for four years, moving with them when they got a new house in 19 3 3 .15 14Soma, “ Dazai Osamu,” pt. i, 139. 15Here is another of those points on which Dazai and his critics differ chronologically. “ Eight Views of Tokyo” states that it was spring 1934; Bessho Naoki (Dazai Osamu kenkyii, 13 1) says it was in May 19 33; and Okuno Takeo {Dazai Osamu ron, 198) says Dazai misremembered, and that it was September 1933.
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One thing to bear in mind about this tioubled period between the appear ance of Oyama Hatsuyo in 19 30 and Dazai’s more conventional marriage in 1939, is that although he was officially on worse and worse terms with his family in Tsugaru, he seems never to have sought to break away from them psychologically, and in fact sought replacements for the nexuses that seemed to be disintegrating. Bunji, strung on by lies Dazai told to cover up his nonattendance at classes, continued to send money for his schooling until 19 35. He was still sending some monthly support (via Ibuse Masuji) as late as 1940, when Dazai reported to him that his income from writing was now sufficient for the amount to be cut. As if to demonstrate that he was still peripherally in contact with family, Dazai planned a magazine in 193 2 with his elder sister’s brother-in-law and Hatsuyo’s uncle, but it never reached the publishing stage. Even after 19 3 5, as his life became increasingly erratic, still ties were maintained by two close friends of the Tsushima family who had helped out after the 19 30 suicide attempt, Kita Yoshishiro in Tokyo and Nakabata Keikichi in Tsugaru, who, rather in the position of loyal family retainers, ran liaison errands and served as family representatives, to save Bunji from having to be personally involved. In the large feudalistic family, the presence of the family head in any negotiations would have involved too much hierarchic weight, rather as if the Queen of England were to deal per sonally with the schoolmasters when one of her children (the youngest one, at that) got into a scrape at school. Kita particularly was the imperial equerry, and he seems to have been genuinely fond of and concerned about Dazai. It was he who went to the Keifuen rest home after the suicide attempt at Enoshima; he had Dazai rest at his house a few days before he went on with Eiji to Ikarigaseki; he was Dazai’s guarantor after a police questioning episode in 19 3 2 ; and he was one of the family representatives at the 1939 wedding. Early in 19 3 3 , under the critic Kon Kan’ichi’s sponsorship, Dazai was introduced into the circle of young writers who were publishing the literary journal Kaihyd (The Sea Lion). This was the first connection of Dazai’s that was to prove immediately fruitful. Through the group, he met Dan Kazuo and Yamagishi Gaishi, who became among his closest friends, and he began attracting public attention with the stories that appeared in Kaihyd. He was beginning to find his way in the Tokyo literary world; but his Aomori back ground continued to be important. In February 19 33 the Aomori newspaper Too Nippo (Northeastern Daily News) sponsored a literary competition in its Sunday supplement. The story that won, “ Ressha” (The Train), was by a young writer named Dazai Osamu. Tsushima Shuji, after trying on and dis carding a number of pen names, had finally found the one that pleased him, and he used it from this point on. He explained in “ Kojiki gakusei” (Beggar Student), published in 1940, that “ somehow or other, I was ashamed to use
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my [real] name, and precisely because I was so paltry, I chose this vigorous, pugnacious name, 'Dazai.5 ” (3: 305.) While the narrator of “ Beggar Stu dent” seems to explain the provenance of the name “ Dazai,” he is in fact not named Tsushima Shuji, Dazai’s real name, but Kimura Takeo; so his testi mony may be no more reliable than any other. Perhaps it was the hallowed associations attached to the word dazai as a title of office and a seat of gov ernment that caused him finally to settle on it as his name. There are other explanations, but none is conclusive. Among them is the account the actress Seki Chieko says Dazai gave her in 1948: friends had first suggested, in their love of classicism, “ Kakinomoto Shuji,” after the famed poet of the eighthcentury Manydshu poetry collection, Kakinomoto Hitomaro. “ Kakinomo to” was too pretentious even for Dazai; but when talk continued on the subject of the Manyo poets, and the poet-governor of Dazaifu was men tioned, a connection was made between that gentleman’s love of drinking and Shuji’s, so “ Dazai” it became. The “ Osamu” came about because both the “ Shu” and “ ji” of his real name mean the same, so there seemed no reason not to use just one— “ ji,” also read as “ Osamu.” This was his story, but Soma Shoichi observes, from the evidence that none of his intimate friends say that they know where his name came from, that this version may also have been invented by the author himself.16 The following month, Dazai published “ Gyofukuki” (Metamorphosis) in Kaihyd; this was the first of his stories to achieve favorable critical notice from the Tokyo establishment. But Ibuse Masuji kept him from being swept off his feet: In 1933, when I was [twenty-three], an eighteen-page short story titled “ Meta morphosis” . . . became the jump-off point of my writing career. But because of the unexpectedly positive response it drew, Mr. Ibuse, who until then had care fully corrected my writing, muddied by my Tsugaru diction, was surprised. He warned me, looking truly disturbed: “ There’s no reason for it to have caused such a stir. Don’t get too excited—there may be some mistake.” And from then on, he remained in suspense that there might indeed have been some mistake. The two people who probably remained forever uneasy about my writing were Mr. Ibuse and my eldest brother back in our family home in Tsugaru. [8: 216.]
From April to July, “ Recollections” appeared in three installments. By the end of the year Dazai was a regular member of the literary circle that in cluded Dan Kazuo, Ima Harube, Nakamura Jibei, Kitamura Kenjiro, Kon Kan’ichi, and Yamagishi Gaishi. Yamagishi, Dan, and Dazai were to form a lifelong triumvirate of close friends. 16Sdma, “ Dazi Osamu,” pt. 2,122—23. Ibuse Masuji’s theory is that Dazai’s Tsugaru accent was immediately obvious when he pronounced “ Tsushima Shuji,” while the syllables of “ Dazai Osamu” would not have revealed it. Soma, Dazai Osamu to Ibuse Masuji, 26.
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Starting as a Writer The Japanese literary scene has historically been like a tidal pool, a fertile breeding ground for little journals that form with one insweeping current, break apart with the ebb, and form new combinations with the next tide. Most of these journals last less than a year, but there have always been new ones forming, and they have offered a forum for new writers. In this rich environment, Dazai swam well. Dan Kazuo was one of the editors of the quarterly Ban (Moorhen); Dazai’s “ Ha” (Leaves) appeared in its first issue, in April 1934, and his “ Sarumen kaja” (Monkey-Faced Youth) in the second issue. In Seiki (Century), the magazine of Tonomura Shigeru, Nakatani Takao, and Ozaki Kazuo, he published “ Kare wa mukashi no kare narazu” (He Is Not the Man He Used to Be). And in December, he joined Yamagishi, Dan, Ima, Kon, Kitamura, and the poet and critic Nakahara Chuya in put ting out the journal Aoi Hana (Blue Flower), which presented Dazai’s “ Romanesuku” (Romanesque) in the first and only issue. The next year, the Aoi Hana group merged with Nihon Roman-ha (Japanese Romantic School), the journal of Yasuda Yojuro, which was self-consciously dedicated to a “ rediscovery” of the spirit of Japan. It was to number among its members the critic Kamei Katsuichiro, the novelist Sato Haruo, and the poet Hagiwara Sakutaro. Dazai wrote some pieces for it for a year, and then dropped out of the group. The year 19 35 was a pivotal one for Dazai. The process of disintegration evident in his personal life— a process reflected in his writing, but not yet impairing his pace of publication— here took a sharp downward plunge and solidified at that state, partly through external chance and partly as the inev itable outcome of character weaknesses he had already evidenced. The year began with mixed omens, however. In February, part of the ominously titled “ Gyakko” (Losing Ground) appeared in Bungei. This could actually have been a promising sign, for it was the first story to come out in a noncoterie magazine. In other words, Dazai was gaining an audience outside his own immediate group. But around this time, he was finally forced to admit that he would never graduate from Tokyo University. Early in March, probably under Tobishima Sadashiro’s urging, he took the entrance examination for the newspaper Miyako Shimbun (Capital News). He failed it. On March 15 , taking the entire stipend, now reduced to ninety yen, his brother Bunji was still sending him every month, he invited a friend, Kodate Zenshiro (the brother-in-law of one of his older sisters), to go carousing with him. In a familiar pattern, they spent the day and night wandering from Shinjuku to the Ginza and Asakusa; and finally Dazai parted from Kodate in Yokohama. He went on alone to Kamakura, and on the sixteenth he tried to hang himself in the wooded hills behind Hachiman Shrine. Unsuccessful in this third
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halfhearted attempt at suicide, Dazai returned to Tokyo on the seventeenth in the middle of the night, “ with the rope marks still around my neck.” (4: 62.) In “ Eight Views of Tokyo” he saw this as a failure to settle his own fate by himself. In April he was suddenly stricken with an attack of appendicitis, rushed to the hospital, and operated upon. However, peritonitis developed, and he also began coughing blood, as the chronic lung ailment flared up again. To assuage the pain of these aggravated complications, the doctor prescribed a narcotic. This proved to be just the escape his dependent and shattered psy che needed. By the time he left the Fujiwara Hospital in Asagaya, he was addicted. He spent the next two months at the Kyodo Hospital in Setagaya. The hospital director was a friend of his elder brother, and he was treated well— unfortunately, for that meant his access to drugs was not limited. In July he left the hospital and went to Funabashi to recuperate. He bought a house and lived there with Hatsuyo for over a year, still supported by his brother’s stipend. He said he loved that house; it was the first he had ever owned. He received friends there at first, and gradually emerged for visits to Tokyo. On one of those excursions he went with Yamagishi Gaishi to see the poet and novelist, Sato Haruo, and Sato, like Ibuse, became one of his mentors. That spring, the journal Bungei Shunju (Literary Seasons) had announced that it was establishing a literary prize competition for new au thors. The first Akutagawa Prize (from that time on, the most prestigious award a young writer could receive) was granted in August. Dazai had of course entered a story in the competition, both at Ibuse’s and Sato’s urging and because he wanted to, for winning it would not only mean following in the footsteps of his early idol, Akutagawa Ryunosuke, and proving to his family that he was a respectable and publicly acclaimed writer; it would also vastly improve his financial situation, which was perilous. In Funabashi he had found a pharmacist foolish enough to sell him drugs on credit, but his bill was rising astronomically. There was a cash award for the Akutagawa Prize; additionally, it would bring him requests for manuscripts from other journals, and raise the prices he could command. Dazai submitted the completed “ Losing Ground” — and lost to Ishikawa Tatsuzo. He had been quite confident of winning; what made the defeat doubly bitter was the moral censure clearly stated in Kawabata Yasunari’s published opinion as one of the judges. Kawabata by the 19 3 0 ’s had already achieved the position of preeminence in Japanese letters that he was to oc cupy until his suicide in 1972. Therefore, his comments carried perhaps the heaviest weight of any of the judges’. In his stunned and bitter response, “ Kawabata Yasunari e” (To Kawabata Yasunari), which appeared in the November issue of a minor Tokyo publication, Bungei Tsushin (Literary Notes), Dazai quoted from Kawabata’s statement: “ ‘Indeed, [his writing] is
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filled with the author’s views on life and literature, but as I see it, there is an unfortunate cloud over his life at present, which regrettably prevents his talent from emerging straightforwardly.’ ” (io: 26.) Dazai had had no warn ing of such an attack (as he saw it); he had simply come across it by accident, when he picked up the magazine at a shop counter. “According to this,” he expostulated, “ one might think that you alone decide the Akutagawa Prize.” (io: 26.) In turn, he attacked what he called Kawabata’s hypocrisy: “ To spend your time raising birds and going to dance concerts— is this such a splendid life?” (1 o : 28.)17 Nevertheless, the Akutagawa Prize competition did have some positive effect for Dazai: along with the other three runners-up, he was commis sioned to write a story for Bungei Shunju. The result, “ Dasu gemaine” (The Common Herd), appeared in October, but he spent the entire income from it in one night’s carousing that started in Tokyo and ended at the Izu hot spring town of Yugawara. He was accompanied by Dan Kazuo, Yamagishi Gaishi, and Kodate Zenshiro, the friend who had been with him the night before his March suicide attempt.
Dazai and Hatsuyo: Collapse and End Dazai was now twenty-six years old. He was still receiving money from his brother. He had failed to gain family approval for his marriage; he had failed to graduate from university; he had failed in his sole attempt to gain reasonably conventional employment; he had failed to achieve sufficient critical acclaim for his literary talents. He had a drug habit, and a lung con dition that showed no signs of abating. Not for another three years was he to make, even to himself, a final and deep commitment to writing as a career. In 193 5 he was still ambivalent, wanting to be a success at it but not willing or able to expend the energy required to be a successful writer. From late 19 35 to mid-1938 his life was a shambles. Many of his most moving works deal at least in part with that period. That is, they are moving when read singly. In the aggregate, however, their tone of droning misery, of unrelieved self-pity and self-indulgence, presents a rather unattractive picture. During this pe riod his friends and family were inundated with importunate requests for money. Dazai borrowed from everyone— from his brother, from friends, from his mentors Ibuse Masuji and Sato Haruo. He solicited advances on manuscripts not even requested by publishers. And always the form was the same: breast-beating for past failures, apologies for present chaotic scenes, and fanatic promises of reform in the future. Typical is a letter he wrote to Sato Haruo on February 5 ,19 3 6 : 17Kawabata perhaps indicated an answer to Dazai’s rhetorical question with his own suicide years later.
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Not one word of what I say is a lie or exaggeration. The pain of life piles up—piles up—all I think of is death. You, Mr. Sato, are my sole support. I know my responsibility to you. I have written something excellent. From now on, I can write more and more splendid stories. I have been trying to live these ten years. I am a good human being. I am serious, but my luck has been bad so far, and now Tm just a step short of death. If I win the Akutagawa Prize, I will weep at the sympathy shown me, Pm sure. And then I will be able to fight any kind of pain, and go on living. My strength will grow. Do not laugh; help me, please. You can help me. Please don’t hate me. I will pay you back, for sure. Should I visit you? If you tell me what day and time, I will come running, despite snow or rain. I pray you earnestly. Homeless Swallow18
Dazai was looking for Sato’s support for the third Akutagawa Prize; Sato’s response to the letter was to urge Dazai to enter Saiseikai Hospital, in Tokyo, where Sato’s younger brother was working. His own friends rallied to him. In November 193 5, at Dan Kazuo’s insti gation, the publishing house Sunagoya Shobo agreed to publish Dazai’s first collection of short stories. It was a selection from the stories he had been writing since 19 32. He chose the title Bannen (The Final Years), meaning that his life was drawing to a close, and intending the collection as his last will and testament. The book came out on June 2 5 , 1 9 3 6 , right after Dazai’s twenty-seventh birthday. On July 1 1 his friends held a celebration banquet at the famous Seiyoken restaurant in Ueno. But, witnesses to the event re called, the guest of honor was a sorry sight. The state of his mental and physical health was all too visible. Sato Haruo had induced him to enter Saiseikai Hospital in February to treat the drug addiction, but he left only two weeks later, still uncured. He wandered around for the next few months in almost total disorder. In August he went to Tanigawa hot spring, in an other halfhearted and unsuccessful attempt to break the addiction. While there, he learned that he had failed in the third Akutagawa Prize competi tion. In letters to Ibuse, Sato Haruo, and other friends, he spoke variously of suicide, and of plans to spend two years in a TB sanatorium. Finally, on October 13 , Ibuse and the family representative Kita Yoshishiro prevailed and, with Hatsuyo’s help, took him to the Musashino Hos pital in Egota. Too sick to ask questions, Dazai was nonetheless stunned to discover, once he was an admitted patient, that it was a mental hospital. That, at least, is the interpretation that has traditionally been put on Dazai’s reaction to the hospitalization: that he was the victim of a well-meaning plot. But investigation of correspondence between Ibuse and Sato more than sug 18Shaskinshu: Dazai Osamu no shogai, 155. This letter was written while Dazai was living in Funabashi to Sato in Tokyo.
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gests that Dazai was fully cognizant (or as aware as his condition permitted) of what was being done to and for him, and that the admitting physician had made amply clear to Dazai at the interview the regimen he would be expected to keep.19 Therefore, the sense of betrayal Dazai claims to have felt over this incident was far more conditional and subjective than external facts might seem to indicate. Nevertheless, the alleged treachery of his friends, with the regimen of the hospital, had the desired effect not only of shocking him into reality, but also of curing the addiction and arresting the lung condition. But it broke his spirit. The night he left the hospital, November 12 , he began “ HUMAN LOST,” and soon after, “ Standard-Bearer for the Twentieth Cen tury.” But that was almost all the new writing he did for over a year. While he was in the Musashino Hospital, Hatsuyo had sold the house in Funabashi and moved to an apartment in the Suginami section of Tokyo. They moved again days after he left the hospital; and then again Hatsuyo was left alone when he went to Atami to recover and write. One day early in 19 3 7 he learned that Hatsuyo had had an affair with a painter friend of his while he was in the hospital. Dazai had considered this cousin-by-marriage, five years his junior, a special and cherished friend. Hatsuyo’s friendship with him had grown while Dazai was forbidden visitors, as she visited him in another hospital (where, curiously enough, he was recuperating from a suicide attempt of his own).20 This was the final betrayal Dazai would suffer at Hatsuyo’s hands. In March he persuaded her to go with him to Minakami hot spring, and there they attempted suicide together. “ Ubasute” (Discard ing the Old Woman), published in 1938, deals with that unsuccessful epi sode. They returned to Tokyo. Her uncle took her back to Aomori, and by April had arranged a final separation. Little is known of Hatsuyo after this. There are various accounts of her end: that she went to Hokkaido with an elderly patron; that she went to Manchuria with a military patron; that she returned to Tokyo briefly and visited the Ibuse house; that Dazai sent her money several times during an illness, perhaps the facial neuralgia said to have given her a “ laughing, crying expression” in a final photograph; that she died in Aomori or (most proba bly) in Tsingtao in Shantung Province, in 1944. She died alone at the age of thirty-four, with nothing beside her but her handbag, it is said.21 Surely Dazai must have played some part in shortening her life, if his testimony in stories to the insecurity and hardship he caused her during their years together can be trusted. Yet, also as he portrayed her, she was little interested in many things important to him, and not much of a companion. In “ Eight Views of Tokyo,” Hatsuyo seems to have been emotionally shallow and intellectually 19Soma, Dazai Osamu to Ibuse Masuji, 14 4-45. 20Ibid., 54. 21Kitagaki, 105-6.
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uncurious, and she betrayed his expectations and trust. Still, Dazai’s expec tations may have been unrealistic, and her life with him could scarcely have been pleasant, with the frequent moving and penury of their years together, and the knowledge that his family would under no circumstances accept her. Indeed, ultimately Dazai seems to have seen her more as a victim than as an aggressor. Other women in his life also resemble the ones in his stories— the much-abused wives and lovers who suffer in silence— but Hatsuyo was the model for them longer than anyone else, and her ghost seems to have haunted Dazai as he continued in his stories to draw portraits based on her until the end of his life. When in No Longer Human, his last important work, love proves insufficient to save two people who truly love each other, Dazai seems to be trying still to understand what happened to himself and Hat suyo. What he shows is a man unable to open himself to emotional commit ment, even for someone he loves, and even though he seems to demand it of her and of himself.22 At least in that novel Dazai seems not to blame the woman for her inability to live up to his expectations. The affair of Dazai and Hatsuyo does seem to have been a case of tragic mismating.
N ew Marriage, New Start In July 19 3 7 Japan entered war with China. During the year, Dazai had two books published, Kyoko no hoko (Wanderings in Falsehood) and “ Stan dard-Bearer for the Twentieth Century,” both collections of stories he had written and even published earlier. He did some traveling with friends, but he is generally silent about most of 19 37 and the first half of 19 38; it seems to have been the silence that accompanies recovery from (or at least adjust ment to) a great shock. This was the end of almost ten years of confusion that had mounted to a near rout. Early in the summer of 19 38, at the age of twenty-nine (thirty, by J apanese count), Dazai at last decided irrevocably that he was going to make his career as a writer, and started writing again. In July he began “ Discarding the Old Woman,” which in effect marked the end of the Hatsuyo affair. It was pub lished in the journal Shincho (New Currents) in September; with the pro ceeds he went to join Ibuse Masuji at Misaka Pass, in the foothills of Mount Fuji. Ibuse, who had been finishing up a manuscript, returned to Tokyo soon after, and Dazai remained alone there until mid-November. The Tsushima family representative, Kita Yoshishiro, had meanwhile contacted Ibuse, and had asked him to find Dazai a wife. Ultimately, a miai (“ arranged meeting” ) took place between Dazai and the fourth daughter of a Kofu geologist. She was Ishihara Michiko, twenty-six, well-educated— and teaching at an upper school for girls in Kofu, at the base of Misaka Pass. Two months later they 22Kitagaki agrees with this analysis. See his pp. 34 1-42.
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were engaged, and Dazai left Misaka to take a room in Kofu. On January 8, 1939, they were married at Ibuse’s house in Suginami. Michiko’s family was represented by her elder sister and brother-in-law, and Dazai’s by the faithful Kita and that other Tsushima family retainer, Nakabata Keikiehi. The young couple rented a house in Kofu, and Dazai began writing. In March, “ Ogon fukei” (Golden Landscape) won a fifty-yen prize in the Tokyo newspaper Kokumin Sbimbun (Nation’s News), a not inconsiderable sum for them, as their rent was six yen fifty sen a month. Dazai’s stories were now being published with great regularity. He seems to have been at pains to reassure his wife and her family, who of course knew of his checkered past. He traveled with Michiko to the resort town of Kamisuwa in May, and again in June took her, her mother and younger sister to visit the hot spring towns of the Izu Peninsula. In July, he and Michiko moved to Mitaka, just outside Tokyo, where they were to live until his death, except for a period at the end of the war when they evacuated to Tsugaru as refugees from the air raids in Tokyo. In the autumn of the year they were married, Dazai received the Kitamura Tokoku Award for “ Joseito” (Schoolgirl). In short, he settled into married life, and behaved like a typical young husband, getting to know his wife and her family, working hard and piling up a steady stream of small successes in the form of stories and books published. The next few years, in spite of the deepening war, saw a continuation of those successes. In 1940 Dazai traveled a great deal, alone and with friends, sometimes for pleasure and sometimes to hole up and write; on one of those trips Michiko joined him. He was invited to lecture at Niigata College in November, and used the opportunity to visit Sado Island (he later wrote a sketch, “ Sado,” about the trip). He lectured at Tokyo Commercial Univer sity, on “ The Illness of Modernity.” He did a major part of the organizing for a party to celebrate the publication of Yamagishi Gaishi’s literary biography Akutagawa Ryunosuke, perhaps to pay back his friends for their similar gesture to him four years earlier. He wrote a radio script. And the stream of writing continued. “ Kakekomi uttae” (I Accuse), his version of Judas’s betrayal of Jesus, appeared in the important critical journal Chuo Koron in 1940. In July he went to Izu to write “ Eight Views of Tokyo,” recapitulating the Hatsuyo period, and it was published in 19 4 1. In February 19 4 1 he went to Shizuoka to begin writing Shin Hamuretto (A New ‘Hamlet’), his first full-length novel; in April he joined his wife in Kofu, to which she had returned in order to await the birth of their first child. On June 7 a daughter, Sonoko, was born. And in July the Bungei Shunju Press published A N ew ‘Hamlet" Dazai resumed physical ties with his family in August, when at Kita Yoshishiro’s urging he returned briefly to Kanagi after a ten-year absence, to visit his ailing mother. A year later, in October 1942, he brought his wife and
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daughter for their first visit, to meet his mother who was then in critical condition. “ Going Home” and “ Hometown” deal with those visits.
The Writer Established In November 19 4 1, as Japan mobilized for war, Dazai was called up for the “ writers5 draft” (special journalistic service in lieu of military service), but was exempted because of his weak lungs. The next month Ibuse left for Southeast Asia, where he remained with the army as a correspondent for a year. On December 8 (December 7 on the American side of the international date line) Japan entered war with the United States. Dazai never said much about the war, except to indicate a sense that he had a moral obligation to be as responsible a citizen as possible, a role that both provided structure for his life and imposed an almost unbearable burden. “ Shinro” (The Bridegroom) and “ Junigatsu Y oka” (December 8), both written right after Pearl Harbor, have that dual tone of dedication and desperation, of the hope of a reformed sinner and the self-directed irony of a man without faith. Before wartime rationing of printing materials became severe, in January 1942, Dazai per sonally supervised the printing of a limited, luxury edition of “ I Accuse.” This year he spent more time around Kofu, as his wife visited her family with the new baby. In February he was at a hot spring outside Kofu writing his second novel, Seigi to bisho (Righteousness and Smiles), a novel in diary form about a young man's intellectual and moral growth. The title and the content reflect Dazai’s seriousness at the time: the youth will act out of a sense of right, but not with a pinched and self-righteous attitude (the source, quoted in the novel, is Matthew 6 :16 , “ Moreover, when ye fast, be not, as the hypocrites, of a sad countenance . . .” ). War preparedness was stepping up, with increased air raid drills and the like. In October he had his first brush with censorship: “ Hanabi” (Fireworks), which had gotten past the censors initially, appeared in Bungei (Literary Art), but the magazine was removed from the stands when the authorities decided the story was “ inappropriate to the emergency situation.” Republished after the war as “ Hinode mae” (Before the Dawn), it deals with a wastrel son’s abuse of his family, and implies that the father drowned him to free themselves of him. Dazai was heading for Shizuoka to begin writing his next major novel, Udaijin Sanetomo (Sanetomo, Minister of the Right), about the thirteenthcentury shogun,23 when he received news that his mother was dying. He arrived in Kanagi in time; she died on December 10 at the age of seventy, a mother who had little understood her youngest surviving child, but who had suffered over him. 23Shoguns also held court rank; central ranks were highest, followed by those of the left and right (in that order).
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By 19 43, Dazai could be said to have fully come of age as a responsible family man and as a writer. “ Fugaku hyakkei” (One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji), dating from 1939, was selected for a series, Shbwa meisaku senshu (The Best of Showa Period Literature), published by the major house of Shinchdsha. He returned to Kanagi with wife and child for his mother’s memorial service, conducted according to Buddhist practice on the thirtyfifth day after her death. And in April he served as master of ceremonies at the wedding of a friend. But while he was encountering success in his per sonal life, increasingly the censors were interfering with his work. A com pleted novel, Hibari no koe (Voice of the Lark), was about to be published by Koyama Shoten; it was based on a diary kept by one of Dazai’s readers (whom he had never met) while the man was hospitalized for tuberculosis. There was enough ambiguity in the censors’ response (although they did not absolutely refuse it) to make Dazai and the publishers, who feared a repeti tion of the “ Fireworks” incident, agree not to go through with it at that time. Sanetomo, Minister o f the Right, finished in March at the hot spring near Kofu, was published in September. Dazai recalls in “ Fifteen Years,” pub lished in 1946, that some superpatriot made a flap about it, reading Sanetomo’s title udaijin as yudayajin (“ Jew ” ), and claiming Dazai was mocking the shogun by making him a Jew. The problem of collaboration with the authorities during the war was one that much troubled the Japanese literary world once the war was over. The heavy suppression of leftist literature, of which the death of Kobayashi Takiji in 19 33 after police torture during questioning was only one notorious ex ample, led to mass ideological conversions (tenko) to the official right-wing government line by many writers, and involved sharp scrutiny by censors of whatever continued to be published. Some major writers, able to weather the period through royalties and private sources of income, responded to such attempts at thought control with silence for the duration. And some few, like Dazai, trod a thin line between freedom of creative expression and tacit acquiescence in the status quo. Once the war was over, he did not rush, like so many others, to deny that he had had any willing part in the war effort. In fact, quite to the contrary, he made clear that his loyalties were then and still were to Japan, that he had acted then in a way consonant with his belief in what was needed, and would continue to do so. In 1946, he wrote: Japan made its unconditional surrender. All I felt was shame. I was so ashamed, I could say nothing. The number of people who had bad things to say about the Emperor increased dramatically. But when I saw what was happening, I realized how deeply I had come to love the Emperor. I professed myself a conservative to my friends. [8:
212.]
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He had made his uneasy political peace years earlier, when he had left the political world and retreated to a preoccupation with personal affairs. Now that he was finding his personal voice in his writing, it was only one more step to retreat to a world divorced from the harsh realities of wartime Japan. The major works of this period show a remoteness, not just in terms of fictionalization or time, but of distance from the author’s direct experience. Sanetomo, Minister o f the Right is set in the thirteenth century and is taken from the Azuma kagami (Mirror of the East), a historical document of that time. Shinshaku shokoku banashi (New “ Tales of the Provinces” ) was Da zai’s remaking of several stories by the seventeenth-century writer Ihara Saikaku. Otogizoshi (Fairy Tales) is a collection of four well-known and be loved national folk tales in Dazai-style retellings. Righteousness and Smiles was based on the diary of the brother of a friend. Sekibetsu (Regretful Part ing), commissioned by a government agency in January 1944 and intended to foster friendship between the partners of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, was about the early years as a medical student in Sendai of the Chinese revolutionary writer Lu Hsiin (who, however, is remembered as having participated in the Chinese national revolt against Japanese imperi alism). The character of Dazai can be recognized in the heroes of these nov els, but it was just this highly personal flavor that made them politically safe. For the rest, his commentaries on current events have an ambiguous note of “ how I wish I could raise loud hurrahs, but my poor weak voice just gets lost in the general tumult.” He did his war service by taking his turn as neighbor hood civil defense leader. But it is difficult to ascertain whether or not his tone is ironical when, for instance, he calls wartime Japan a “ good country” in which “ even if there is no bread, if the sake starts running out, at least there are flowers—yes, right in front of every flower shop masses of blooms. . . .” On a patriotic note, he concludes: “ Japan: bear the pride of this beauty before all the world!” ( 5 :11.) Totally dependent on income from his current publications to support his family, he could not afford to either antagonize or ignore the authorities. But, proving that every man, even one known for moral weakness, takes a stand on the point he deems important, Dazai remained true to his aesthetic ideals. His work of the wartime period can be considered propaganda only insofar as he too saw it his duty to attempt to bring some cheer into the increasingly bleak lives of his fellow countrymen. “ The beauty of art is, after all, service to the people,” he had said as early as “ Leaves.” (1: 11.) Consider in terms of morale building the prologue to Fairy Tales, for example. Written in 1945 during the worst of almost continuous air raids, it could not have helped but bring a smile to people who must have felt they were living much of their lives underground. By the time he finished the
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book, Dazai’s Mitaka house had been destroyed in raids, and his little family had taken refuge in Kofu, soon also to be burned out. < “ Oops, there they go!” The father lays aside his pen and stands up. Not one to jump up for mere warning sirens, he stops work when the antiaircraft guns begin to sound, dresses his five-year-old daughter in protective clothing, gathers her up in his arms, and heads for the air-raid shelter dug in the garden. Already the mother is crouching at the back of the hole, their two-year-old son on her back. “ That sounds pretty close.” “ Yes. This hole is cramped, you know.” “ That may be,” the father allows irritably, “ but still, it’s just about the right size. If it were any deeper, we might be buried alive.” “ Yes. . . but it could’ve been a little wider, don’t you think?” “ Um, well, you might be right, but the soil is frozen hard now, and it’d be nearly impossible to dig it out. Sometime soon. . . .” He silences the mother with ambiguities, and turns his ear to air-raid reports on the radio. When the mother’s discomfort has been soothed, now it’s the turn of the fiveyear-old daughter to start insisting that they leave the hole. The only way to pla cate her is with picture books. Momotaro, Kachikachiyama, Shitakiri suzume. Kobutori, Urashima-san,24and all the rest—the father reads them to his child. The father is poorly dressed, and he looks maybe a little stupid, but deep down he is quite a considerable person. This man has within him the truly extraordinary gift of creating tales.
ONCE UPON A TIME, LONG, LONG A G O . . .
Even as he starts reading the picture book in a peculiar droning voice, at the same time in his heart an entirely different tale begins bubbling up spontaneously. [7 : 272- 73.]
In January 1944, Dazai received an inquiry from the Toho film producer Yamashita Ryozo about filming his story “ Kajitsu” (Happy Day), a humor ous first-person account of one friend’s inept arrangements for another friend’s wedding. The same month, as previously recounted, he was commis sioned by a government agency to write a novel dramatizing one of the Five Great Principles of Greater East Asia, which this year was to be “ Friendship Between Peoples.” Since Dazai had always planned to write something about Lu Hsun, he said, he sought the commission and took this opportunity to begin research on the subject later in the year. The novel emerged the follow ing year, immediately after the end of the war, as Regretful Farting. But he spent some of January in Atami, preparing a script for the Toho film. Star ring Takamine Hideko and Fujita Susumu, both well-known, it was released in September as “ Yottsu no kekkon” (Four Marriages). In 1944 Koyama Shoten, a publishing house that was managed by a friend of Dazai’s, Koyama Kiyoshi, and was bringing out a series of fudoki, or 24Short titles of traditional fairy tales and names of characters in them. All but Momotaro appear in Dazai’s collection.
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regional studies, commissioned Dazai to write one about Tsugaru. The trip Dazai took between May 12 and June 5 as preparation was probably the most significant event in his life for making clear to him how deep the roots of Tsugaru and family reached into his soul. Tsugaru, published in Novem ber, may well be the most mature and thoughtful work he wrote. It is deeply touched with humor, sensitive to its author’s weaknesses but without selfpity, and full of open expressions of love for the people who had been signif icant in his early life— and who showed that their concern had outlasted the test of time and separation. The trip offered Dazai a chance to research his origins. “ I have felt uneasy with myself as a city man, and so I have hoped to grasp what I am as a man of Tsugaru,” he wrote. (7: 37.) An emotional refrain runs throughout the work: “ M y study is not Tsugaru; it is what men call, provisionally, love. What links one heart to another.” (7: 23.) He trav eled with a friend from high school days who had remained in Tsugaru, Nakamura Teijiro (the “ N ” of Tsugaru) to parts he had never seen as a child; he visited Nakabata Keikichi, one of those who had kept a concerned eye on him during the earlier Tokyo years; he spent some time with his family in Kanagi. But the work is so structured that the emotional climax comes near the end, with the reunion with his nursemaid Take after nearly thirty years. Shortly after his return from Tsugaru, Dazai sent his family to Kofu to await the birth of their second child. He commuted between Tokyo and Kofu several times, until a son, Masaki, was born on August 10 ; and he brought them all back to Tokyo in September. In November he finished N ew “ Tales o f the Provinces” ; Tsugaru was published; and the withdrawn Voice o f the Lark was typeset and ready to be printed at the Koyama plant. Early in December, however, a sudden night air raid totally destroyed the plant and the book with it. Fortunately, Tdho’s Yamashita Ryozo had a galley proof, as he was planning to film this novel too, and so the book itself was not lost. It was published in 1945, after the war was over, as Pandora no hako (Pan dora’s Box), but doubtless Dazai needed the income in 1944. This was his first direct physical loss of the war.
Evacuation to Tsugaru As the war turned desperate even on the home islands, Dazai’s pace speeded up. In January, N ew “ Tales o f the Provinces” was published; he completed Regretful Parting in February and began Fairy Tales in March. By the end of March, air raids were so continuous that he took his family up to Kofu. Shortly after he returned to Tokyo, at dawn on April 2, the Mitaka house was hit during a raid. Because of the danger of delayed time bombs, he took refuge temporarily with an old friend and literary colleague, the critic Kamei Katsuichiro, in nearby Kichijoji; then, leaving Koyama Kiyoshi to
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look after the house, he went to join his family in Kofu. Ibuse Masuji and other literary friends had also evacuated to the Kofu area, and there was some visiting back and forth until it was evident that Kofu too had become a target city. Dazai completed the manuscript of Fairy Tales in June and then moved his library and some household goods to a small village outside the city— and on July 7 the Kofu house was destroyed in a predawn airTaid. Koyama came up to see how Dazai and his family were. At the time, they were sheltering at the home of a local college professor. Dazai handed over to him the manuscript of Fairy Tales, which he transmitted to the publisher Chikuma Shobo. Dazai left Kofu with his family on July 28 and headed for Tsugaru via Tokyo. They arrived in Kanagi three grueling days later, after what was ordinarily a one-day trip, having had to change trains four times to avoid the air raids that were now ripping up Japan’s internal transporta tion system. How traumatic the trip was to Dazai can be seen from the fre quent mention of it in his stories during the next couple of years. Nearby Aomori was the major rail center for northern Japan, and was also soon to be bombed; Kanagi already felt the effects of raids, and Dazai arrived in time to help dig air-raid shelters. “ Since I was to die anyway, then less trouble to die at home,” he wrote in “ Tazunebito” (I’m Looking for Someone), pub lished in 1946. But the end of the war came swiftly, and it brought Dazai a rush of publications. Within two weeks of Japan’s surrender to the Allies on August 15 , 1945, Regretful Parting was published by the Asahi Shimbunsha. In October, serialization of Pandora's Box began; on October 25, Chi kuma Shobo published Fairy Tales. Dazai’s elder sister died on November 14 , at the age of forty. Dazai re mained at the family home in Tsugaru until November 1946. In the more than a year he spent away from Tokyo, he remained highly active in the literary world. He lectured at his alma mater, Aomori High School; he par ticipated in local literary gatherings; he received constant visits from young aspiring writers and students in the area. And he sent manuscripts to Tokyo and published in local newspapers. But it was not easy for him to be living in Kanagi. “ Shin’yu kokan” (The Courtesy Call) caricatures the trials he suf fered as a minor celebrity-in-residence. Additionally, he and his family were refugees. “ Yannuru kana” (Hoist with His Own Petard) hints at the hostility they and all evacuees must have had to face from some quarters. Hardest of all, he was once again dependent on his elder brother’s charity. In “ N iwa” (The Garden), he speaks of himself as a “ parasite,” with no rights or expec tations and in the uncomfortable position of having to listen passively to his brother’s opinions on everything from how to get on in the world to who are 'good novelists (Nagai Kafu and Tanizaki Jun’ichiro). ^ “An Almanac of Pain,” an autobiographical piece again summarizing the years of confusion, this time from a political perspective, appeared in March
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1946 in Shinbungei (New Literary Art), and the next month the similar “ Fif teen Years” came out in Bunka Tembo (Cultural Outlook). These two works marked the end of Dazai’s outward-looking phase and heralded a return to the autobiographical mode that, in its several guises, was to last until his death. In April, Bunji was elected to the national Diet in the first election held after the end of the war; and Take came from Kodomari to see Dazai again. The previous month, Dazai had written his first play, Fuyu no hanabi (Fire works in Winter). It was to be staged in December, but the Occupation au thorities closed it in rehearsal, probably for the “ immorality” expressed by its heroine Kazue. A year later, Kazuko in The Setting Sun was to carry these revolutionary ideas of personal moral liberation to a much farther extreme. Akutagawa Hiroshi, the actor son of Dazai’s literary hero Akutagawa Ryunosuke, visited him in May to discuss the possibility of having A N e w eHam let3staged by the troupe that he and the playwright Kato Michio had formed. We can only guess how Dazai must have been moved by Akutagawa’s twoday visit; having failed twice at the Akutagawa Prize, at a time in his life when critical recognition would have been like a lifeline thrown to a drown ing man, Dazai was now being consulted by Akutagawa’s son. Nevertheless, Dazai’s career as a playwright was very limited, and despite some interest from the theater world at the time, his plays are remembered more as printed texts than as working scripts. Fireworks in Winter, though banned from the stage, was published in June, as was Pandora's Box. In July, Dazai’s grand mother Ishi died, at the age of ninety. She was the last of his directly anteced ent relatives; she had outlasted her parents, her daughter and son-in-law, and most of her grandchildren. In September, Haru no kareha (Dry Leaves in Spring), Dazai’s second and last play, was published in Ningen (Hu mankind). On December 15 he returned to his house in Mitaka after an absence of one year and seven months. He celebrated his return to direct involvement in the Tokyo literary scene by participating in a round-table discussion with the writers Sakaguchi Ango and Oda Sakunosuke who, with Dazai, have been lumped together as the Buraiha, the “ school of irresponsibility and decadence,” after the characters they wrote about. The first discussion, sponsored by the journal Kaizo (Reform), never got beyond galley proofs, although it appeared later in Bunge?$ Dazai dokuhon (A Dazai Reader) in 1956. A second try in December, on the subject “ Speaking of the Modern Novel,” was chaired by the critic Hirano Ken, and published in the April 1947 issue of Bungaku Kikan (Literature Quarterly). A month after this second panel, Oda Sakunosuke was dead of a lung hemorrhage. Dazai was present at his funeral, and published a eulogy that might have been his own: Oda wanted to die. . . . I, above all other men, felt and understood deeply the sadness of Oda.
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The first time I met him on the Ginza, I thought, “ God, what an unhappy man,” and I could scarcely bear the pain. He gave the vivid impression that there was across his path nothing but the wall of death. He wanted to die. But there was nothing I could do. A big-brotherly warning— what hateful hypocrisy. There was nothing to do but watch. The “ adults” of the world will probably criticize him smugly, saying he didn’t have enough self-respect. But how dare they think they have the right! Yesterday I found recorded in Mr. Tatsuno [Yutaka] ’s introductory essay on Senancour the following words: “ People say it is a sin to flee by throwing life away. However, these same soph ists who forbid me death often expose me to the presence of death, force me to proceed toward death. The various innovations they think up increase the oppor tunities for death around me, their preaching leads me toward death, and the laws they establish present me with death.” You are the ones who killed Oda, aren’t you? His recent sudden death was a poem of his final, sorry resistance. Oda! You did well.
[10 :2 7 6 —77.]
“ Tokatonton” (A Sound of Hammering) and “ Merri Kurisumasu” (Merry Christmas) had appeared earlier that year. They both reflect an intensifica tion of the tone of defeat and nihilism already noted.
Final Novels, Final Women In February 1947 Dazai’s literary work became more than ever an exten sion of his rapidly disintegrating personal life. He went to Shimo Soga in Izu to spend a week with Ota Shizuko, a young woman whom he had known for several years, and who had been corresponding with him while he was in Tsugaru. Shizuko had first become interested in Dazai while she was suffer ing intense guilt feelings over the death of her infant daughter; the child had died, Shizuko was certain, because she no longer loved her husband. Accord ing to her daughter, writing years later, Shizuko had been trying to write out her feelings, to “ confess.” 25 Now divorced, she had been ecstatic when she read “ Doke no hana” (The “ Flower” of Buffoonery)—he had said it all! As camouflage Shizuko enlisted two of her women friends who were also inter ested in literature and went to visit Dazai in 19 4 1; their intimate friendship had dated from that time. In succeeding years, she had remained in touch with him, and corresponded under an assumed name with him while he was in Kanagi after the war. He had visited her briefly in January 1944, while he was nearby doing the film script for “ Four Marriages,” and now he stayed with her at the summer home to which she had evacuated during the war. While at Shimo Soga, Dazai began to write the first of his great postwar novels, The Setting Sun. Shizuko is the general model for Kazuko, the hero25Ota Haruko, “ Shuki” (Memoirs), in Shincho, April 19 6 5,14 6 -9 7.
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ine. She herself later published the diary that she had been keeping— and that, when Dazai stayed with her, she had urged him to use—under the title Shayo nikki (A Shay 6 Diary). But the events of this diary cover mainly the events of the first half of Dazai’s novel, and he had already been planning to write something of the sort soon after the end of the war, while he was still in Kanagi. He may have had Shizuko in mind when he portrayed Kazue in Fireworks in Winter, but the characters Naoji and Uehara come from his own experience and imagination. The fall of his family’s fortune, as a result of rural land reform under the Occupation, had struck responsive chords; he said he saw The Setting Sun, in its attempt to deal with the downfall of an aristocratic family, as a kind of Japanese Cherry Orchard. Dazai left Shimo Soga and went on alone to spend another week at an inn in nearby Shizuoka, where he wrote the first two chapters of The Setting Sun. He returned to Tokyo on March 8, wrote and published “ Viyon no tsuma” (Villon’s Wife) the same month, and continued writing the novel in the small workroom he had rented above a restaurant near Mitaka Station. It was here, about the same time, that he met a beautician, Yamazaki Tomie, the next and fatally last woman in his life. Although Dazai’s wife gave birth to their second daughter and third child, Satoko, on March 30, he remained involved with, first, Shizuko and Tomie together, and then, as she seemed to tighten her hold on his life, Tomie alone. Tomie’s husband had been sent to the Philippines by his company. After less than two weeks of marriage, he had been drafted from there. Since 1943 he had been missing in action, Tomie was already seeing Dazai at her apartment when, in July 1947, she received notice that her husband’s death had been confirmed. Within a week, she had written her first suicide note (which she kept; the one she ultimately left behind was her third) and had chosen the photograph she wanted to be her memorial picture. Her relationship with Dazai seems, from the evidence of her diary, to have been aimed toward death right from the start. A friend recalls that Dazai told him in July 1947 that he had had to promise “ a certain woman” that he would die with her within a year.26 In fact, her personality, suggests Kitagaki Ryoichi, had a kind of fierce, obsessive drive, and may have been the model for Kazuko in the latter parts of The Setting Sun, just as the circumstances of Shizuko’s life were for the first parts.27Tomie was in the last year of Dazai’s life his frequent companion in his workroom and at the neighborhood bars, his adoring disciple, and, as Kitagaki christens her for her unrelenting urge toward suicide, his “ angel of death.” 28 At the end of May, the play Dry Leaves in Spring was broadcast on radio in an adaptation by Dazai’s old friend, the writer Ima Harube. The Setting 26Kitagaki, 507. 27Ibid., 264-65. 28Ibid., 144.
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Sun was completed in June. There is evidence that it was to end in eight chapters with Naoji’s suicide note as the conclusion, but Shizuko was now pregnant with Dazai’s child, and this may have inspired him to substitute a more defiant ending. On May 24, Shizuko went to see Dazai with her younger brother to discuss her pregnancy, but Dazai avoided the oppo