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 in these tales as well, Dazai was not bound by certain natural limitations of his semi-autobiographical mode. In these more fictional tales, he could evoke realms of fantasy, juxtaposing them in some instances with the real world. In addition, he was able to give his characters greater scope for individual initiative than he was willing to permit the autobiographical figures. Characters in these less realistic tales are often beset with difficulties, but they sometimes attempt to surmount them. Doubts and uncertainties in the latter group of stories come more from the author breaking into his narrative to voice an opinion than from the characters acting out the story. As the prefatory notes will make clear, a number of these non-realistic tales are based on such diverse sources as the New Testament and the medieval Otogi Zōshi tales. Perhaps Dazai used these sources as offering scope for action which his own experience would not validate.
Dazai frequently ends a tale on an inconclusive note—most obviously when he has a narrator confess to bewilderment concerning the significance of the very tale he has just told. Although this might be regarded as a technical feature—the author’s way of prompting the reader to dwell on the work—it seems more likely that Dazai was giving vent to his own sense of things. How fitting for an author who flirted so with suicide to hesitate in writing “Finis” to end a story as well.
III
It remains only to remark that the translations that follow try to convey, in some measure, the highly idiosyncratic flavor of Osamu Dazai. In pursuing this goal, I have generally followed the author’s practice of frequently omitting quotation marks for what appear to be direct quotations. Though violating standard English practice, such a procedure helps, in my judgment, to preserve something of the author’s idiosyncratic quality.
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Memories Omoide |
Beginning in 1912 with the death of Emperor Meiji, this account is closely tied to the circumstances of the author’s own life. Just three years old at the time of his earliest memory, the narrator goes on to relate episodes from his childhood and adolescence in a fashion both piecemeal and informative. The memories come to his mind with apparent spontaneity, evoked by free association and unrelated to any design other than that of a loose chronology. By the time “Memories” is over, a decade and a half has elapsed and the narrator is about to enter college.
In his abrupt style of recollection, even those people intimately involved in the narrator’s early life come and go with alacrity. An aunt occupies the center of attention for several paragraphs, only to be succeeded by a nursemaid. A few characters from the earlier sections of the narrative are recalled later, but most of them never return. Those that remain in the reader’s mind do so by virtue of a striking detail or vivid turn of phrase from their moment in the narrative. Dazai typically subordinates his cast of secondary characters to his autobiographical self; in “Memories” the lesser characters serve mainly as agents of the narrator’s upbringing.
In the final stage of this account, references to a curious affair of the heart coalesce into an ongoing episode. Smitten in mid-adolescence, the hero is bedeviled by two problems. His love, a mere maid in the household, would hardly make a welcome match in the eyes of his prestigious family. And, to complicate matters, his younger brother also seems taken with the same girl.
Readers might wonder why the author, after recounting so many fragmentary recollections, ends his narration with this more sustained episode. In the story, the affair emerges quite naturally; and, in retrospect, it seems to confirm the portrait of the narrator suggested by earlier events. From almost the very beginning, many of the narrator’s important gestures occur only in his imagination. The affair in question is no exception, and thus one might argue that it ends in self-delusion rather than in thwarted love.
The final scene of “Memories” shows Dazai using a photograph for symbolic effect, a tactic more widely employed in his novel No Longer Human. By this stage of the game the loss of the maid Miyo should have taught the narrator a lesson about himself. In the company of his brother and putative rival, however, he seems still imprisoned by the inward nature of his outlook. Dazai concludes on a characteristic note of uncertainty: Will his narrator, that figure who represents in some measure his own youthful self, break free of his confining introspection? Or will he, as the graveyard scene and fortune-telling episode early in the narrative portend, stay trapped in his habit of self-dramatization and in his belief that he is a victim of fate?
I
I was standing by our front gate as twilight fell. My aunt was there too in a quilted wrap, the kind a nursemaid Often wears when carrying an infant strapped on her back. The road before our house had grown dim and everything was hushed. I have never forgotten that moment.
She was speaking of the emperor, and I can still remember bits and snatches of what she said—His Majesty . . . gone into seclusion . . . a true living god. Filled with wonder, I repeated certain words— A . . . true . . . god . . .
Then I must have said the wrong thing. No, my aunt scolded, you should say, Gone into seclusion. I knew exactly where the emperor had gone, but I asked about it anyway. I still remember how she laughed at that.
Emperor Meiji had been on the throne forty-two years when I was born. When he passed away, I was only three years old.
I guess it was about then that my aunt took me to visit some relatives. Their village was about five miles away, near a broad waterfall in the mountains. I remember how white the water looked against the green moss as it cascaded down the cliff. I didn’t know the man who held me on his shoulders to watch. When he showed me the votive pictures in the shrine below the falls, I became very lonely. Eventually I broke into tears and called out, “Auntie! Auntie!”
In a hollow some distance off, my relatives and my aunt had spread rugs on the ground. They were making lots of noise when I cried out, but my aunt heard and jumped up immediately. She must have slipped just then, however, for she stumbled as though making a bow. The others couldn’t resist teasing her. “Look!” they cried, “she’s already drunk.” As I watched these things occurring far down in the hollow, I felt so ashamed that I finally began screaming at the top of my lungs.
While
