Dazai Osamu ron (Dazai Osamu - The Work and Life)

Osamu Dazai is a Japanese novelist whose representative works of modern Japanese literature have been translated into more than 60 languages. In Japan, he is a beloved author whose works often appear in junior and senior high school language arts textbooks. His novel Ningen Shikkaku [No Longer Human] continues to be a hidden bestseller, with several tens of thousands of copies being sold each year. This book compiles research on Osamu Dazai spanning several decades. The book’s more than 1,200 pages, comprising 40 chapters and 48 columns, clarify the idiosyncrasies and appeal of the Dazai’s works from multiple angles.
 
The book consists of a Forward followed by Parts I to IV. The Forward, written in the style of a literary critique, presents a blueprint for the book. It is recommended that readers first read the Forward for an overview of the discussions contained in the book. Part I paints a picture of the historical and social background by examining Dazai’s biography prior to becoming a novelist in detail. Part II contains detailed discussions of Dazai’s first novel Bannen [The Final Years], which is an exemplar of his extremely high literary sense and, in this book, considered Dazai’s greatest literary achievement. Examinations in this part focus particularly on the influence of foreign literature and contemporaneous trends in international literature. Part III explores the challenges faced by Dazai resulting from the extreme success of Bannen and traces the author’s efforts to reconstruct his literature after setbacks experienced following the publication of his first novel. Part IV clarifies Dazai’s response to the National Mobilization Law enacted during the Second World War, the evolution of his narrative mechanism during this period, and how this led to the author’s literary suicide after the end of the war.
 
The consistent viewpoint of this book is the characteristic “anachronism” of Osamu Dazai’s works. One example of this is Dazai’s views on family, which he faithfully internalized while being raised as the son of a regional land baron under the family system as encoded in the former civil law and ultimately prevented him from achieving the ideal of an “equal family” after enactment of new civil law in post-war Japan. That said, it is this struggle that reveals the essence of the challenges facing the modern family system. In most cases, individuals do not set out to be “original.” Rather, it is their incompatibility despite efforts to be in step with the times that causes them to stand out. The uniqueness of this book lies in its laying out of a blueprint for modern Japanese literature and its discussion of modern literature and modern society, as revealed by the curious paradoxical circumstances that led Dazai’s anachronism to create leading-edge expression for his time.
 

(Written by ANDO Hiroshi, Professor, Graduate School of Humanities and Sociology / 2022)