of ashes, all that remained of the incense that the lovers had lit before departing.
After the police began an intensive search for the couple’s whereabouts, they eventually found a suspicious-looking place along the Tamagawa Canal, midway between Dazai’s own home and Tomie’s residence. A strip of wet grass lay flattened from the top to the bottom of the bank, as if something heavy had slid down into the water. The ground nearby was strewn with several objects—a small bottle or two, a glass plate, a pair of scissors, and a compact. A little ways downstream, two pairs of wooden clogs were found against the lock of a dam. Despite these ominous signs, an intensive search along the canal failed to turn up anything more. It was almost a week later—on July 19, the author’s thirty-ninth birthday—that a passer-by happened to notice two waterlogged corpses in the canal tied together with a red cord. This discovery occurred less than a mile from where the couple had evidently entered the water.
During this period of uncertainty, a few of Dazai’s friends reportedly entertained hopes that he was merely in hiding. After all, they could remember those earlier occasions, including the two attempts at jōshi, when Dazai had gone away to commit double suicide only to return safe and sound. Perhaps, they reasoned, he would hesitate, or miscalculate, before again taking the fatal step—not merely to survive but, as usually happened, to write about his experience. In any event, given this history of abortive attempts upon his own life, it is only natural that certain friends might have held out hope even as they felt the deepest misgivings.
This life of desperation and tragedy seems wholly out of keeping with the favorable circumstances of Dazai’s birth. His family had risen to a position of wealth and authority in the northern prefecture of Aomori through land acquisition and moneylending during the three generations preceding his own. By the time Dazai was born in 1909, his father owned the bank in the family village of Kanagi. Eventually Dazai’s father would move into national politics, occupying a seat in each of the houses of the Japanese Diet at different times in his career.
Quite early in his life, however, Dazai began to see himself as a child of misfortune. The tenth of eleven children, he was more or less ignored by his frail mother. And the aunt and the nursemaid who did attend to him both went away while Dazai was still a child.
As the most intelligent of the family sons, Dazai did occupy the center of attention during most of his years of schooling. In the end, though, his intelligence proved to be detrimental, at least by his own estimation. Pressured to excel at school in order to uphold the family honor, Dazai came to hate his studies. After compiling an exemplary record in the local elementary school, he lapsed into mediocrity in the upper grades, and, shortly after enrolling at Tokyo University, he gave up altogether on his formal education. As schoolwork gradually became secondary, Dazai interested himself in the activities of radical students and worked at becoming a writer. His family became understandably upset by this turn of events, for its status and wealth were rooted in traditional social arrangements. One can readily imagine the family’s indignation when Dazai published a tale evoking the cruelty and indifference of a landlord toward his tenant farmers, the landlord being a thinly disguised version of the author’s father, already deceased at the time.
Even after Dazai left his home region in 1930 to enter university, he continued to plague his family. He insisted on marrying a low-class geisha, and he accepted a substantial monthly allowance from his family on the pretext that he was still attending the university and working toward his degree, a deception bound to have severe repercussions once it was discovered. Subsequently, Dazai was formally disowned by his oldest brother, who had succeeded his father as the head of the household. The emotional shock of this action was compounded a few years later when the allowance he had continued to receive was terminated, leaving him in desperate financial straits. Dazai had a taste for personal extravagance, and he was generous too in subsidizing his radical friends, many of whom lived in poverty. His early years in Tokyo were wild ones, with lots of drinking and, for a time, even drug addiction to contend with. Such a life could only exacerbate the propensity for tuberculosis that Dazai shared with certain other family members.
Having fallen on hard times, Dazai resolved to change his ways. Separated from his first wife, he made overtures toward a reconciliation with his family back in the Tsugaru region of Aomori. Eventually a second marriage was arranged for him through the good offices of the novelist Masuji Ibuse,1 one that the family privately sanctioned. Following the wedding in January 1939, Dazai settled down to a stable life with his bride, Michiko Ishihara. Several months after the marriage, he took Michiko back to Tokyo from her home in Kōfu. A daughter was born in 1941, the first of three children.
During the years of World War II, Dazai gradually established his reputation as a leading writer of the time. He thereby achieved a degree of financial independence, and, just as important, he could now hope that the family might overlook his academic failure and even his youthful radicalism. Dazai openly cultivated the good will of his family, returning to his Tsugaru birthplace several times during the war. When his house in Tokyo was severely damaged in a bombing raid, he went back home with his wife and children, and there he remained until November of 1946.
Returning to Tokyo, he soon became lionized as the writer who best expressed the desperation of a society in chaos. Exhausted by illness and besieged by everyone from opportunistic editors to maternalistic women, Dazai was simply unable to cope. It was almost inevitable that he would revert to his earlier life of dissipation. At the time of his death he was writing a comic novel about a bon vivant who tries to rid himself of a whole stable of mistresses. Critics of Dazai occasionally suggest that the author was expressing his own wish to rid himself of Tomie Yamazaki, whose insistent efforts to lure him into that final suicide pact are well documented.
II
The works translated in this book have, for the most part, been deliberately chosen as representative of writing by Dazai that is little known outside of Japan. Since his most significant postwar works, The Setting Sun and No Longer Human, are widely read in Donald Keene’s translations, only one additional work has been selected from this period. This is “The Sound of Hammering,” whose young protagonist exemplifies the mood of hopelessness evoked in the two novels.
“The Sound of Hammering” consists almost entirely of a letter written to an unnamed author. In fact, Dazai himself received a letter that provided him with the basic structure for his story. Strictly speaking, then, the story cannot be called autobiographical. And yet, the desperate and somewhat confidential tone of the letter in “The Sound of Hammering” is quite similar to the manner of certain works by Dazai that qualify in some measure as autobiographical. One can hardly doubt that the actual letter struck a deeply sympathetic chord in Dazai.
Two works in this volume, “Memories” and “On the Question of Apparel,” would certainly be regarded by most Japanese critics as primarily autobiographical. “Memories” recounts the childhood and adolescence of a figure whose circumstances closely resemble those of the young Dazai, while “On the Question of Apparel” describes with deadpan humor a number of mishaps that occur to an author with Dazai’s drinking habits. While the degree of personal revelation present in any Dazai work is difficult to gauge with precision, both of these compositions ask the reader to accept the narrator’s word that the events actually happened to him. Like “The Sound of Hammering,” “Memories” and “On the Question of Apparel” together suggest the range of Osamu Dazai when he writes in a mode of personal revelation.
The remaining eight stories in this book show Dazai as an inventive storyteller, rather than as a craftsman of reminiscence. With the exception of “Undine” and “Monkey Island,” these works were all composed between the time of Dazai’s marriage to Michiko in 1939 and the end of the war in 1945. As mentioned earlier, these years were relatively quiet ones for Dazai, a period when he worked to consolidate his writing skills, learning above all to diversify the autobiographical impulse by integrating his personal obsessions with fairly orthodox methods of storytelling. Dazai’s own personal involvement in the tales will sometimes be obscure to the reader unfamiliar with his writings. It might be remarked here that, in order to provide some guidance on this and other matters, each of the tales in this volume has a prefatory note.
Though impelled to embody his personal concerns