osamu dazai was a japanese writer, artist and general nuisance. born shuji tsushima, dazai grew up in tsugaru in the aomori prefecture of northern japan to a family of landowners he stresses were nouveau riche. his stories are like little vignettes into his life, though he incorporated fiction into his autobiographies and autobiographies into his fiction. critics question whether his work has worth as literature at all, but he's gotten republished recently because of bungo stray dogs, which has lead to him being exposed to new audiences who find him and his work relatable all this time later.
i'd been meaning to read no longer human for about three years now since a friend recommended it to me, and to be honest half of me wishes i'd stopped putting it off and just read it sooner, and half of me wonders if i would have been able to appreciate it back then. i think it would have hit far too close to home. i really, really loved no longer human. ever since i read it, i've wanted to read as many of dazai's earlier works as i can, because i wanted to know what kind of person he was and what brought him joy. i really admire him even if he wasn't particularly good at being alive, and i think even though he lived a short life, it was a worthwhile one. live fast, die young, as they say.
dazai's suicide was sensationalised by the media at the time and is still sensationalised today. he was a literary celebrity whose body was found washed up upon the riverbanks on his birthday, a tragic and poetic end to a life of suffering- it makes for a good story. people have a tendency to take dazai at face value, refusing to acknowledge the nuance of his work or engage with his unreliable narrators. they aren't very sympathetic towards him, often saying that he didn't want to get better or that he did everything for attention.
“the defects in his character, a goodly half of them, could have been cured by cold-water massage, mechanical workouts, and a regularized life [...] to employ something of a paradox, an invalid who does not wish to recover does not qualify as a true invalid.”-yukio mishima (1955)
"i know [mishima] loves me, though..."-osamu dazai, smug cat, inventing "you wanna fuck me so bad it makes you look stupid" (1946)
he was an avid rakugo enthusiast who preferred to study traditional comedy rather than read contemporary literature and i think it really shows in his writing. he was an incredibly funny person, and i like to think of his stories as akin to listening to a stand up comedian- taking it with a huge grain of salt, because of course he's bending the truth to be funnier. i think he was incredibly dedicated to the bit, whatever that meant for him.
"why do i bother writing novels? am i lured by the glory of literary celebrity? or do i simply want to write bestsellers and cash huge cheques? let me spare you the theatrics. i want both. so bad it hurts. but there i go again, another brazen lie. the sort of lie that ties you up in knots when you're not looking. as despicable and treacherous a lie as they come. why do i bother writing novels- i had to bring it up. oh well. at the risk of giving you a pompous explanation, i'll put it this way.-the flowers of buffoonery (1935)
to take revenge.
let's move on to the next scene. i'm a real life artist, not a piece of art. if my odious confessions lend this work a modicum of nuance, all the better."
but i discovered that, for me, what might become art was not the scenery of tokyo, but the ‘i’ inside the scenery. had i been deluded by art? had i deluded art? conclusion: art is ‘i.’-eight views of tokyo (1941)
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