Spreading meaningless love in an age without a world.
How Should We Judge Dazai Osamu as a Person?
At the root of Dazai Osamu’s thought is a profound sense of original sin. It gave him a powerful impulse to punish himself. His earliest published fiction consisted of exercises imitating proletarian literature. After encountering left-wing thought, he felt an intense aversion to his own birth into the landowning class. Dazai called being “a rich man’s child” a “handicap” or a “defect.” There is a passage in “Eight Views of Tokyo” that reads:
I believe that the children of the rich must descend into the vast hell befitting the children of the rich. To escape is despicable. As a child of evil karma, I must make every effort to die with dignity.
So when Dazai’s family fortunes declined, this turned out to be the most stable period of his life—perhaps because he had been freed from “the unhappiness of a wealthy family.” Take his novel The Setting Sun: the point is not that aristocrats are all sick and unhealthy, but that bearing the title of aristocrat makes them so. Aristocrats have only one way out: to integrate with ordinary townspeople or peasants. Uehara, the novel’s nature-loving character, says:
I hate aristocrats. They all have disgustingly arrogant faces. […] I’m a peasant’s son. Whenever I pass a stream like this, I cannot help remembering how, as a child, I used to fish for crucian carp and scoop up scad in the stream back home. It stirs me deeply. […] But you aristocrats not only cannot possibly understand our sentimentality—you will even despise it.
To “atone” for his aristocratic status, Dazai once gave up his studies, used his family’s money to support workers, and ate and lived alongside them. Ibuse Masuji recalled that in winter Dazai left the good clothes for those living at his expense, while his own clothes did not keep him warm and made him look shabby.
This sense of original sin ran through Dazai’s entire life. On the one hand, he sought happiness in family life. Look at what he wrote to Ibuse Masuji:
I consider myself a family man. For better or worse, I cannot endure a life of dissipation. […] I believe that marriage and family both require effort. I believe it takes serious effort. There is nothing frivolous in my intentions. Even in poverty, I will keep making that effort all my life. If I break my marriage vows again, please abandon me as you would an utter madman. These words may be commonplace, but I would say them before anyone; even before God, I could swear to them without shame. Please believe me.
By Dazai Osamu.
On the other hand, after marrying Michiko and experiencing the happiness of family life, Dazai felt a sense of guilt, to the point of concluding that the family had to be destroyed and was the root of all evil. This does not mean that Dazai hated his family. Quite the reverse: it would be closer to the truth to say that he loved them too much. The more happiness family life gave him, the more he hated himself. His sense of original sin was very, very strong, and not simply because he was a great landowner’s son. If that were the only reason, he should have been able to rest easy with a clear conscience once his family’s fortunes declined. Dazai’s sense of original sin was something deeper: it is not some particular thing that makes him guilty; he is guilty first, and only then does he find what he is guilty of. It is precisely when his life is most tranquil that he is in greatest danger, because then he has no other target for the knife he has raised: he can only aim it at himself.
Why Did Mishima Yukio Dislike Dazai Osamu’s Literary Works?
Chiefly, it was an “aversion to someone like himself.”
To some extent, Mishima and Dazai were both ironists, but their relationships to irony were diametrically opposed: Mishima’s irony intervenes directly in reality, while Dazai’s is rather a means of “withdrawing” from reality and catching his breath.
More specifically, Mishima’s seemingly sincere act—his suicide—actually has an ironic significance. Dazai’s irony, just as he describes it in No Longer Human, works in precisely the opposite way: it conceals his sincerity. In everyday life, too, Dazai would often do something baffling and “clown-like” immediately after his real feelings showed. This can be understood as his psychological defense mechanism. The clearest example came after a rather unsuccessful meeting with a prospective bride. He could not help crying, but let out just one sob before immediately telling his mentor, Ibuse Masuji, who was beside him: “I’m going to the police station to tease the police.”
Many researchers have pointed out that Confessions of a Mask was written to counter No Longer Human. The two novels have much in common in their portrayals of “divided selves” and their use of “confessional notebooks.” But the differences matter more. Dazai wrote No Longer Human in order to die; Mishima wrote Confessions of a Mask for precisely the opposite reason. But notice: by “opposite,” I do not mean that Dazai wrote about death and Mishima about life. Mishima still wrote about death—that is what makes it so uncanny. He wrote about a kind of “death in reverse.” Here Mishima offers a very mysterious and profound comparison:
In Mishima’s comparison, a film of someone jumping off a cliff to kill himself is run backward: the figure hurtles from the valley floor to the clifftop and returns from death to life. What this book seeks to depict is just such an “art of returning to life.”
Although Mishima uses the word “life” here, we must remember that his starting point is still death. Without dying first, there can, of course, be no “return to life.”
In other words, for Mishima, death itself has meaning. In Patriotism, he treats death as a form of art—although art itself has an ironic element here. Dazai is the opposite: for him, death has no meaning whatsoever. He once told his mentor, Ibuse Masuji, that death was what he despised most.
After Mishima Yukio’s suicide, his mother is said to have remarked proudly that this was the first time her son had followed in others’ footsteps. But Mishima’s suicide was in fact deeply ironic and original. Karatani Kōjin makes a brilliant argument:
Mishima Yukio brought the “spirit of Shōwa” to an end by reawakening it. […] There is no more ridiculous spectacle than right-wingers and conservatives invoking Mishima’s death. His action was ironic through and through.
These conservatives probably haven’t read much of Mishima’s fiction, because he certainly pulls no punches when he attacks the emperor in his novels. The clearest example is Voices of the Heroic Dead, in which the young officers and soldiers of the February 26 Incident, executed for rebellion, curse Emperor Shōwa for betraying them.
Mishima knew perfectly well that the spirit he was summoning did not exist. The others did not know, and precisely because they did not know, he had to summon it for them to see. He was not crushing something beautiful; he was bringing them something already broken.
Mishima once remarked that at least half of Dazai’s anguish could be cured by cold-water rubdowns, gymnastic exercises on apparatus, and a regular daily routine. Dazai was in agony; Mishima might as well have told him, “Drink more hot water.” But this remark, too, is actually deeply ironic. Mishima knew perfectly well that Dazai’s suffering was by no means merely a matter of private life: there were political problems too. So however healthy his body became, only half could be cured. During the war, Dazai was, for the most part, a writer who did not pander to the authorities. He was also deeply repelled by the political correctness of Japan’s literary circles. Sakaguchi Ango’s famous “Discourse on Decadence” held that, within six months of the war’s end, “the face of society had changed dramatically.” But Dazai felt that Japan had not changed one bit: it was just as stupid as ever. This was also Mishima’s view. His suicide was less an attempt to set Japan right than an act that laid this stupidity completely bare.