Crackling Mountain
and Other Stories
Osamu Dazai (1909-1948), the pen name of Shuji Tsushima, was born, the tenth of eleven children, into a family of wealthy landowners in northern Japan. He began writing short stories while studying French at Tokyo Imperial University and soon became well known among the younger generation for his excessive bohemian lifestyle. After World War II, he gained wide recognition in the West for his pessimistic novels, notably The Setting Sun (1947) and No Longer Human (1948). Despite his troubled life and rebellious spirit—he made several suicide attempts and eventually ended his life with a married lover—Dazai wrote about a wide range of personal experiences in a simple and colloquial style.
James A. O’Brien is Professor of Japanese in the Department of East Asian Languages and Literature at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He received his Ph.D in Japanese from Indiana University. He is the author of many works on Japanese literature, including Dazai Osamu (1975) and the edited volume Akutagawa and Dazai: Instances of Literary Adaptation (1988).
Osamu Dazai
Crackling Mountain
and Other Stories
Translated by James O’Brien
TUTTLE PUBLISHING
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Published by Tuttle Publishing, an imprint of Periplus Editions (HK) Ltd., with editorial offices at 364 Innovation Drive, North Clarendon, Vermont 05759 USA and 61 Tai Seng Avenue, #02-12, Singapore 534167 by special arrangement with Peter Owen Limited, London
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First Tuttle edition, 1989
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Contents
Acknowledgments
Before mentioning my debt to those who helped with the earlier translations, I must thank Wayne Lammers for his advice on several pressing questions. Those who did provide me with thoughtful comments and suggestions on the Cornell East Asia Papers edition of the translations include Marian Ury, J. Thomas Rimer, Royall Tyler, and Brett deBary. John Timothy Wixted and Wesley Palmer also contributed significantly to improving the three tales not included in the Cornell edition. I thank both the editors of the Cornell and Arizona State series for their interest in seeing that these translations reach the wide audience which Dazai’s stories and sketches deserve.
The Japan Foundation has been instrumental in this process of translation and revision by awarding me a grant to work on the initial drafts and by providing a subsidy to assist the present publication. The Graduate School of the University of Wisconsin too has facilitated the work by supporting me for four months of research leave. Donald Keene and Howard Hibbett have also lent their much appreciated support. I must also thank Donald Richie for his enthusiastic review of my earlier translations, and for endorsing, along with Professors Keene and Hibbett, the publication of the translations in this new format.
The revising of these translations over the past year has been greatly aided by two editors from Tuttle. Ken Mori Wong encouraged me to rework my earlier translations of Dazai and made a number of pertinent criticisms and suggestions along the way, while Stephen Comee supervised the editorial process, especially in its latter stages.
Introduction
I
Osamu Dazai had tried to take his own life on a number of occasions, two of these attempts assuming the form of jōshi, the traditional Japanese suicide pact entered into by a pair of lovers. But when he disappeared with his mistress on a rainy night in mid-June of 1948, the signs that he was thoroughly prepared to die were unmistakable. Dazai and his companion, Tomie Yamazaki, left behind a series of farewell notes to friends and kin, the author conscientiously composing a last will and testament for his wife, Michiko. Photographs of Dazai and Tomie stood next to one another in Tomie’s lodging in the Tokyo suburb of Mitaka,