Spreading meaningless love in an age without a world.
English-edition note: Quotations are translated from the Chinese wording used in this article. “Gloom” and “gloomy” render sang (丧), a colloquial Chinese label for dejection that can also describe a style.
Why Do So Many People Like Osamu Dazai When He Is So Gloomy?
Answer:
We have to start by asking Yukio Mishima, because Mishima acknowledged that Dazai was an excellent writer, yet hated him. He hated Dazai for being so good at “turning his weaknesses to his advantage” that it became “self-deception.” Mishima also said: “A patient who does not want to be cured has no right to be a patient.” What his long criticism really comes down to is this: by aestheticizing his “gloom,” Dazai had lost the desire to escape that state. To Mishima, Dazai was deeply narcissistic, and probably making a bit of a fuss over nothing.
First of all, I disagree with Mishima. To him, Dazai’s “gloom” was simply a style, a choice. But if we look at Dazai’s life, we find that his “gloom” was certainly not a matter of making a fuss over nothing. Nor was it that Dazai did not want to get well (though he did refuse to go to the hospital for a time); otherwise, he would not have turned to suicide. For Dazai, suicide was “on the contrary, something only people with a desire to live would do.”1 I have said a great deal about Dazai’s sincerity in my other answers about him, so I will not go over it again here.
Still, Dazai certainly did aestheticize his “gloom.” He wrote fiction precisely to solve problems in his actual life. His fiction is a process of drawing ever closer to that life. Perhaps only after receiving the affirmation of being a “child of God” in the final paragraph of No Longer Human could Dazai go to his death with an easier conscience.2 Dazai himself also said that he wrote fiction not to “lecture others,” but only to heal himself. Look at this famous passage from his collection The Final Years:
I had very much wanted to die. But this January someone gave me a garment as a New Year’s gift. It was made of hemp, with fine mouse-gray stripes. Probably something to wear in summer. I decided I would live until summer, then.
Gloom and despair are different. True despair is what the chorus sings in ancient Greek drama: “The best thing is not to be born; the next best is to die immediately after birth.” Perhaps despair actually becomes illusory the very moment you write it down.
Of course, I am not saying Dazai did anything wrong here, much less that “true despair” is somehow nobler. All I want to say is that gloom is, I suppose, a state of deep but not complete despair. Much as Lu Xun put it: “Despair is as illusory as hope.”3
Returning to Mishima’s criticism: it does not really fit Dazai, but it can be applied to many of his fans. They have not had experiences like Dazai’s and know nothing of trauma. Their “gloom” really is just a style. A choice. By Mishima’s standard, they certainly cannot count as “patients,” because they have no wish to be “cured” and even think their “illness” is cool.
This is how Dazai described himself: he was plainly empty from the start, yet grinned and said, “I’m only pretending to be empty.” With many Dazai “fans,” isn’t it the other way round? They are plainly only pretending to be empty, yet say, “I was empty from the start.”4
On the other hand, Dazai has long since become a cultural icon, endlessly consumed as a commodity. Of course, this does not mean he is not a good writer. Still less does it mean he did anything wrong. I am only saying that his becoming this popular, in this particular way, has probably departed a long way from what he himself would have wanted. Nor do I think there is anything wrong with Bungo Stray Dogs or Takeshi Obata (whose cover illustration led to Dazai’s No Longer Human selling 210,000 copies in one year, against a total of just 370,000 over the preceding sixteen years).5 There is nothing fundamentally wrong with people consuming Dazai’s image as a commodity (a sign), either. I only wish they would take a look at his own words:
I place no hopes whatsoever in a writer’s personal charm. What I despise most are poets who, instead of getting on with their writing, put on airs of lofty solitude in their lives, sulk petulantly, toss around words like despair and nothingness, and endlessly flaunt their charming style—making others laugh, feeling pleased with themselves, and still pretending to be humble.
He also said:
Even if you read my fiction, your life will not become any easier, much less any greater.
But perhaps many people who like Dazai have never read his fiction. Actually, I do not think there is anything wrong with that, either. If you are short of time, I suggest “Run, Melos!” It is fairly short.
Dazai was a sincere, gentle person, and those qualities are much harder to learn from him. This is what he said about friends who came to visit: “I keep thinking: they are all such good people, and they have gone out of their way to come all this distance to a place in the countryside like mine, yet I have nothing to offer them. Won’t they go home carrying a sense of loneliness, disillusioned and forlorn? Once that worry takes hold, it spreads over me in an instant like the dark clouds of evening, and I lie in bed tossing and turning again.” Just before this passage, Dazai says that he cannot speak openly with others unless he drinks; he is always timid and withdrawn. That is why, at the end of No Longer Human, someone says Yōzō was a good boy even when he drank. Much of Dazai’s gloom really is protective coloration.
At Dazai’s core is not gloom but sincerity. He called sincerity “an undertaking so difficult that only a great genius can accomplish it.”
Life is not art, nor is nature. To put it in the most extreme terms, fiction is not art either. […] What matters most in writing is to “strive for accuracy”—nothing else.
How Should We Understand Osamu Dazai’s The Setting Sun?
Answer:
The image of the setting sun is interesting in itself. Two discussions are worth setting out here.6 The first is Haruka Aoyagi’s. Quoting the description of the setting sun in “Run, Melos!”, she points out that the setting sun marks the moment when hope within despair is about to defeat despair. The passage in “Run, Melos!” reads:
The setting sun cast its red light on the leaves; the branches and leaves shone fiery red. There was still some time before sunset. Someone is waiting for me. Someone is waiting quietly, with unwavering faith. […] Run, Melos!
The second argument is Kōjin Karatani’s. He begins by pointing out that the overall narrative framework of The Setting Sun is largely based on Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard. And The Cherry Orchard describes the setting sun like this:
The cherry orchard has been sold, it is gone—that is a fact, a fact. But don’t cry, Mama. You still have life ahead of you, you still have your beautiful, pure soul … Let us go together, my dear, let us leave this place, let us go together! … We will plant a new garden, more luxuriant than this one; you will see it, you will understand, and joy—quiet, profound joy—will come into your heart as the evening sun (the setting sun) descends at dusk, and you will smile, Mama! Let us go together, my dear! Let us go together! …
By Osamu Dazai.
Here, too, the setting sun symbolizes a kind of hope, but this hope does not so much stand opposed to despair as reside within it. As Hölderlin said, where there is danger, there is salvation. Karatani is speaking of sensibility: he believes that Dazai and Chekhov share a feeling for the setting sun, that both find “quiet, profound joy” in it. Karatani points out that many of Dazai’s works treat light and darkness not as opposites but as two interdependent elements. In the mother in The Setting Sun, darkness lies beneath the light; in Uehara, there is light within the darkness. Beneath his outwardly decadent way of life lies the robust vitality of the common people as a class. For Karatani, the whole of The Setting Sun is:
A world where light calls forth darkness and darkness calls forth light—a subtle world of light and shadow that comes into being as the four lives intersect.
Karatani also points out that Dazai’s own thinking at this time was in an ambiguous state, with light and darkness interwoven. His political position appeared very unstable; that, on the contrary, was evidence that he was genuinely thinking about politics. By comparison, those Japanese who followed Emperor Shōwa before the war and MacArthur after it had not changed at all: they were merely accommodating themselves to changing circumstances. Kazuko, too, asks in The Setting Sun: “Revolution—where, exactly, is it to take place?”
Karatani also reminds us that, although Dazai devotes a great deal of space to Kazuko’s worldview, this does not necessarily mean he agrees with her. We could say that all the principal characters are equally projections of Dazai’s thought. They are different embodiments of Dazai.
There is one point Karatani does not make: Uehara and Kazuko’s love affair bears the unmistakable stamp of D. H. Lawrence. Dazai also mentions Lawrence by name in the novel. Uehara and Kazuko’s love affair is typically Lawrentian in its binary oppositions: the metaphysical and the flesh, ideas and reality, an aristocracy fallen on hard times and a debased populace.
Incidentally, the religious themes characteristic of D. H. Lawrence are also very evident in The Setting Sun. Besides the direct quotations from the Bible, much of the symbolism is unmistakable. Kazuko, for instance, connects revolution with the “rainbow,” the image of the covenant in the biblical story of Noah’s Ark. She also frequently associates herself with “snakes”: on the night her father died, for example, she saw snakes everywhere. In the Bible, the serpent tempts Eve to eat the forbidden fruit and gain knowledge, to be “like God, knowing good and evil.” There is a clear symbolism of enlightenment and awakening here, along with implicit suggestions of a fall and destruction. The knowledge Kazuko acquires is precisely of this kind: antinomic, with light and darkness interwoven.
Then there is Naoji. In his suicide letter to his sister, he says of himself:
Simply because we were born into this family, we must forever live like relatives of Judas—in fear, apologizing, forced to go on living in shame.
Naoji’s sense of original sin at having been born into an aristocratic family is undoubtedly a projection of Dazai himself. Dazai said that children born into rich families must die in the depths of hell, so he himself was always trying to escape his aristocratic status.7 And he adopted the same method Naoji describes in his suicide letter:
I wanted to become a low sort of man, a brute. I thought this was the only way to become a so-called friend of the people. Drinking was no help at all. I had to become dazed, utterly oblivious. To do that, I had no choice but to use narcotics. I must forget my family. I must rebel against my father’s bloodline and reject my mother’s softness. I must be cold to my sister; otherwise I cannot obtain a ticket into the ranks of the common people.
Anyone familiar with Dazai will recognize this passage as practically a sketch of his own life. Naoji and his sister both wanted to become part of the so-called common people. Naoji’s approach was direct immersion in their way of life; his sister, though she too had experienced working people’s way of life, was more intent on bringing about a so-called “revolution in ideas.” The aristocracy must die. The sister and brother represent two different attempts, and two failures.