From the stories I have read, I would say it is unlikely. Usually in Nakajima-sensei’s works the protagonist does have some existential dilemma, but the source of the conflict is always within the protagonist or how the protagonist is treated by society. So, with that in mind, the orphanage and the director do cause BSD Atsushi’s existential crisis allowing him to follow a similar path to that of his protagonists.

But none of Nakajima-sensei’s works are autobiographical in nature and are all based on figures in history and Confucianism who Nakajima-sensei related to . He most likely dealt with the same thoughts and feelings as he himself struggled to figure out what gave his life meaning, what his purpose was, and if his life had value. So while Nakajima-sensei did not write any semi-autobiographical or autobiographical works we can get a glimpse into how he viewed the world and the difficulties he had through which stories he chose to write and how he writes his protagonists.

I would assume that the reason they chose for BSD Atsushi to be from an orphanage stems from Nakajima-sensei’s childhood:

He had an unhappy childhood full of change and separation. His parents divorced; he went to live with his grandfather who died the following year; and then he moved back with his father who had remarried. His father transferred jobs often, and so the young Atsushi often had to change schools as well. The feelings of isolation from all these events may have prompted his quest to search for meaning in life. He was not close to his father and stepmothers. His first stepmother is said to have tied him to a tree in the yard to punish him.
- Bungo to Alchemist Wiki

I love this section of No Longer Human! It has given me a lot to think about, and I’ve had a lot of amazing conversations with friends about the antonym of crime as a result.

For people who have not read the novel, the novel’s protagonist and his “friend” are playing a game of antonyms. This paragraph about Crime and Punishment comes at the very end of their game. I think I’ll start by referencing the beginning of this section of No Longer Human, because the antonym game is explained a few pages before:

I had invented one other game of a rather similar character, a guessing game of antonyms. The antonym of black is white. But the antonym of white is red. The antonym of red is black.

I asked now, “What’s the antonym of flower?”

Horiki frowned in thought. “Let me see. There used to be a restaurant called the ‘Flower Moon’. It must be moon.”

“That’s not an antonym. It’s more of a synonym. Aren’t star and garter synonymous? It’s not an antonym.”

“I’ve got it. It’s bee.”

“Bee?”

“Aren’t there bees—or is it ants—in peonies?”

“What are you trying to do? No bluffing now.”

“I know! Clustering clouds that cover the flowers …”

“You must be thinking of clouds that cover the moon.”

“That’s right. Wind that destroys the blossoms. It’s the wind. The antonym of flower is wind.”

How I understand it is that as long as you can justify and give enough evidence for why a word is the antonym of the first word then it counts, and just because word B is the antonym of word A doesn’t mean that A is the antonym of B. It’s a fun game for people who enjoy words, and I’m sure as your thoughts and reasoning changes then the antonyms you choose will change as well.

So later the protagonist brings up “crime” and asks for its antonym. In the following section I’ve bolded all of the possible antonyms for crime and underlines the reasons why the characters throw them out as possiblities:

I said, feigning tranquility, “Crime. What’s the antonym of crime? This is a hard one.”

“The law, of course,” Horiki answered flatly. I looked at his face again. Caught in the flashing red light of a neon sign on a nearby building, Horiki’s face had the somber dignity of the relentless prosecutor. I felt shaken to the core.

“Crime belongs in a different category.”

Imagine saying that the law was the antonym of crime! But perhaps everybody in “society” can go on living in self-satisfaction, thanks to just such simple concepts. They think that crime hatches where there are no policemen.

“Well, in that case what would it be? God? That would suit you—there’s something about you that smells a little of a Christian priest. I find it offensive.”

“Let’s not dispose of the problem so lightly. Let’s think about it a bit more together. Isn’t it an interesting theme? I feel you can tell everything about a man just from his answer to this one question.”

“You can’t be serious. The antonym of crime is virtue. A virtuous citizen. In short, someone like myself.”

“Let’s not joke. Virtue is the antonym of vice, not of crime.”

“Are vice and crime different?”

“They are, I think. Virtue and vice are concepts invented by human beings, words for a morality which human beings arbitrarily devised.”

“What a nuisance. Well, I suppose it is God in that case. God. God. You can’t go wrong if you leave everything at God … I’m hungry.”

“Yoshiko is cooking some beans downstairs now.”

“Thanks. I like beans.” He lay down on the floor, his hands tucked under his head.

I said, “You don’t seem to be very interested in crime.”

“That’s right. I’m not a criminal like you. I may indulge myself with a little dissipation, but I don’t cause women to die, and I don’t lift money from them either.”

The voice of a resistance weak but desperate spoke from somewhere in my heart. It said that I had not caused anyone to die, that I had not lifted money from anyone—but once again the ingrained habit of considering myself evil took command.

It is quite impossible for me to contradict anyone to his face. I struggled with all my might to control the feelings which mounted more dangerously in me with each instant, the result of the depressing effects of the gin. Finally I muttered almost to myself, “Actions punishable by jail sentences are not the only crimes. If we knew the antonym of crime, I think we would know its true nature. God … salvation … love … light. But for God there is the antonym Satan, for salvation there is perdition, for love there is hate, for light there is darkness, for good, evil. Crime and prayer? Crime and repentance? Crime and confession? Crime and … no, they’re all synonymous. What is the opposite of crime?”

And this is when the protagonist begins thinking that the antonym of crime could be punishment, because of the novel Crime and Punishment. But unfortunately he is interrupted and never completes his thoughts on the subject.

My own thinking on this is that the antonym of punishment is praise, but that doesn’t rule out that punishment could be the antonym of crime. But then there is a part of this discussion that sticks out to me along with a quote from earlier in the novel:

Imagine saying that the law was the antonym of crime! But perhaps everybody in “society” can go on living in self-satisfaction, thanks to just such simple concepts.

People talk of “social outcasts.” The words apparently denote the miserable losers of the world, the vicious ones, but I feel as though I have been a “social outcast” from the moment I was born. If ever I meet someone society has designated as an outcast, I invariably feel affection for him, an emotion which carries me away in melting tenderness.

I think that the “crime” that Dazai may be referring to here is a crime against society that has branded him an outcast from the day he was born. Because of this, I think that crime and society are synonyms. So then I would think that crime’s antonym is acceptance. If the crime makes you an outcast then the opposite of being cast aside is being accepted.

So that’s my theory, and I hope that my explanation can help you understand the nature of Dazai’s antonym game. And, like I said, as your thoughts and perception change what you think the antonym is can change as well. As long as you have sound reasoning then I think your answer is valid.

I’ve come across a lot of different interpretations of Dazai’s character and you can take it many different ways, but I am sure that there is a real side to Dazai that makes an appearance every once in a while. Yes, I do think he is wearing a mask as a mafia executive and as a member of the ADA. The mask is different for each because he has a different role, goal, and is in a completely different situation. My general view is that Dazai’s blank/unfeeling face would be more of his true self, but that there are a select few who he can relax around and let more of himself show without the different masks.

First I’ll start with a few quotes from Dazai’s writing that make me think that he does hide who he really is, even from the people he is closest to (I’m sorry there are a lot):

“Though I have always made it my practice to be pleasant to everybody, I have not once actually experienced friendship. I have only the most painful recollections of my various acquaintances with the exception of such companions in pleasure as Horiki. I have frantically played the clown in order to disentangle myself from these painful relationships, only to wear myself out as a result. Even now it comes as a shock if by chance I notice in the street a face resembling someone I know however slightly, and I am at once seized by a shivering violent enough to make me dizzy. I know that I am liked by other people, but I seem to be deficient in the faculty to love others. (I should add that I have very strong doubts as to whether even human beings really possess this faculty.) It was hardly to be expected that someone like myself could ever develop any close friendships—besides, I lacked even the ability to pay visits. The front door of another person’s house terrified me more than the gate of Inferno in the Divine Comedy, and I am not exaggerating when I say that I really felt I could detect within the door the presence of a horrible dragon-like monster writhing there with a dank, raw smell” (No Longer Human, pg. 107-8).

“When I’m at home, I’m forever making jokes. Let’s say it’s a case of needing to wear Dante’s ‘mask of merriment’ precisely because there are so many things that trigger the ‘anguish in the heart.’ Actually though, it’s not only when I’m home. Whenever I’m with people, no matter how great my mental or physical suffering, I try desperately to create a happy atmosphere. It’s only when I’m with people. It’s the same when I’m writing. when I’m feeling down, I make an effort to write light, enjoyable stories. My only intention in doing so is to render the greatest possible service to m readers, but there are those who don’t understand this. ‘That Dazai fellow’s awfully frivolous these days,’ they sneer. ‘He tries to garner readers simply by being amusing; he doesn’t put any effort into his writing at all.’ Is there something evil about serving people? Is putting on airs, never cracking a smile, such a virtuous thing?” (”Cherries”)

“I thought, “As long as I can make them laugh, it doesn’t matter how, I’ll be alright. If I succeed in that, the human beings probably won’t mind it too much if I remain outside their lives. The one thing I must avoid is becoming offensive in their eyes: I shall be nothing, the wind, the sky.” My activities as jester, a role born of desperation, were extended even to the servants, whom I feared even more than my family because I found them incomprehensible” (No Longer Human, pg. 28-9)

“When I pretended to be precocious, people started the rumor that I was precocious. When I acted like an idler, rumor had it I was an idler. When I pretended I couldn’t write a novel, people said I couldn’t write. When I acted like a liar, they called me a liar. When I acted like a rich man, they started the rumor I was rich. When I feigned indifference, they classed me as the indifferent type. But when I inadvertently groaned because I was really in pain, they started the rumor that I was faking suffering. The world is out of joint” (The Setting Sun)

“Hey, there’s nothing to worry about,” I told them. “We’ll all go to my family’s place up north. Everything’s going to be fine.”

They fell silent. From the beginning, neither of them had put much stock in any opinions of mine. They were apparently devising plans of their own now and didn’t even deign to reply.

“All right, I know you don’t have any faith in me.” I smiles sourly. “But, listen, trust me just this once. That’s all I’m asking.”

I heard my sister-in-law giggle in the darkness, as if I’d said something totally outlandish. Then she and my wife continued their discussion.

“Fine. Suit yourselves,” I said with a chuckle of my own. “Not much I can do if you won’t trust in me.”

“Well, what do you expect?” my wife suddenly snapped. “You say such preposterous things, we never know if you’re joking or serious. It’s only natural that we don’t rely on you. Even now, with things the way there are, I bet all you can think about is sake.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“But if we had some, you’d drink it, wouldn’t you?”

“Well, I don’t know, maybe I would.”

- Dazai Osamu, “Early Light”

If you read Dazai then you get a sense that he really does take things seriously, too seriously most of the time, but that he doesn’t express those thoughts because he is scared of how people will react. The author was actually very shy. In the anime series Aoi Bungaku there are little segments in the beginning of each episode that give background about the authors and their works, and in episode three the narrator says, “Once, Ibuse Masuji, the writer whom Dazai viewed as his teacher, invited Dazai over. He waited, but Dazai did not show up. Ibuse went outside to see what was happening. There stood a person who was unable to decide whether or not to go in. It was Dazai, fluttering helplessly outside Ibuse’s house.” He was even too scared to go to his mentor’s front door when he had been invited over, and couldn’t muster up the courage to approach the door on his own. Obviously the BSD Dazai isn’t an exact replica of the real Dazai Osamu, but these things need to be considered when trying to understand the BSD Dazai’s character.

So now with that background information, there are a few moments in the manga/anime where I think we do get a glimpse of the real Dazai. These are moments when he is alone or with a person he can let his guard down around. I will list them in chronological order:

1) Episode 13 - The Dark Era and Oda Sakunosuke

Dazai definitely trusts Oda, and that is saying a lot considering that Dazai is a very guarded person who basically trusts no one. Oda is exceptional because he can make Dazai feel safe and relaxed, meaning Dazai doesn’t see Oda as threatening when it comes to opening up and being himself. I don’t think that Dazai ever really lets his mask drop completely when Ango is around, it’s almost like he likes to have fun with Ango but he isn’t someone he will trust with his more personal side the way he does Oda. Even before Ango was proven to be a spy Dazai knew Ango’s role in the mafia and his personality, and that was enough to make him wary of opening up to Ango (even though I believe that Ango truly cares about Dazai and Oda and would have never betrayed or hurt them knowingly, but that doesn’t change how Dazai feels about everything).

2) Episode 1

This one is subtle, but I completely missed this and had watched the episode quite a few times before noticing (I know, I can be pretty dense). But there is a moment in the tea shop where Dazai is looking on at Kunikida and Atsushi with a very serious, calculating expression. It is a stark contrast from the other expressions Dazai makes in episode 1 that I couldn’t believe that I had failed to see it! Dazai isn’t hiding anything in this screenshot! I think this is the point (of course, this is my own speculation) when Dazai really gets a sense of how important Atsushi is going to be in defeating Fyodor. The manga says that Dazai knew the moment he met Atsushi that he was going to pair him with up Akutagawa for that purpose, and I think that this moment is when he gets so caught up in his thoughts and planning that he forgets to keep his mask up. Of course it doesn’t really matter because Atsushi is freaking out and Kunikida is occupied with trying to get information out of Atsushi, but that means that Dazai didn’t have an audience while he evaluated Atsushi in minute detail and got so caught up in his thoughts that his mask fell away for a moment.

3) Dazai slacking off in his apartment

Just because Dazai acts lazy and unmotivated in front of Mafia and Agency members doesn’t mean that it is completely an act. The real Dazai was a free spirit as well and never really wanted to put a lot of effort into anything except writing and his hobbies (which were varried all the way from traditional Japanese arts to painting to Communist activities), so there is a correlation between the real Dazai and BSD Dazai in this case. Even when he is by himself he is openly okay with slacking off a little to enjoy a good book, crab, and sake. I think that this is just as much a part of his mask as it is a part of the Dazai underneath the mask.

4) Dazai during the Guild Arch

In the first quote I included above it says, “I have frantically played the clown in order to disentangle myself from these painful relationships, only to wear myself out as a result.” I think that is more of what is going on in this situation. Dazai needs time to recharge away from people because wearing a mask and acting for everyone is really emotionally draining (as I’m sure a lot of people who relate to Dazai understand). When Dazai does drop his mask I think he does have a blank expression and gets lost in his thoughts/memories. He is a very intelligent person and I think most of his alone time is spent in his head.

Another scene where he is lost in thought during this arch is while he is waiting for Ango. He is no doubt remembering everything that happened during the Dark Era arch, but only when he is a lone does he allow himself to not make any facial expression whatsoever and stop putting on a show. The great thing about the animation/manga illustrations is the detail put into the characters’ eyes, especially Dazai’s. Harukawa-sensei did this on purpose, adding more light to Dazai’s eyes when his thoughts are clear, positive, and optimistic. But when he starts having more evil, negative, or pessimistic thoughts/emotions (like when he was a mafia executive) then his eyes have a lot more darkness in them. I think both are definitely a part of Dazai’s real personality underneath the show he puts on for people, and again that this real side of him only comes out when he is alone and doesn’t have an audience to perform for.

5) The Party at the end of the Guild Arch (and the fact that Dazai didn’t attend)

There is a lot to be said about the fact that Dazai is a key player in saving Yokohama from the guild, but then when everyone gets together to celebrate Dazai is strangely absent. He had to work hard and be around people a lot more in order to defeat the guild (and he had to see Mori and Ango again which brought up a lot of painful memories). At that point celebrating with everyone would mean he would have to keep up his act, and I don’t think he had it in him to do that. He needed to be alone, so he went to the Yokohama Museum of Art and chose to look at a painting alone instead (a painting that the real Dazai Osamu painted, I might add). The important thing about this scene is that he was here with Hirotsu, someone he really respected from the Mafia, enough to ask him for his help in getting Akutagawa to team up with Atsushi to defeat Fitzgerald. Obviously Dazai feels open enough with Hirotsu to be more vulnerable and show how emotionally and mentally exhausted he is by not putting on an act or doing anything special when Hirotsu enters the room and they chat about the ending of the war with the Guild. I get the sense that Hirotsu understands that Dazai trusts him and it is important to Hirotsu that he has that kind of relationship with Dazai. In this scene Dazai is very open about explaining his motives and plans in a way he never is with anyone else, and he seems so at ease the whole time because he isn’t making jokes and isn’t animated at all; he just sits there with his hands in his pockets staring at the floor. But at the same time there is a very relaxed, almost familial feel like Hirotsu is like an uncle or grandfather to Dazai.

6) After “defeating” Fyodor

This is one of those moments where Dazai escapes the party to be alone and think by himself. His eyes are lighter in this panel, so I would think that he is contemplating something that is a little more dear to him, like maybe Oda or his friends in the Agency. It’s anybody’s guess, but again he has his guard down because he is by himself and giving himself time to be lost in his own thoughts. And because of this page I think that Atsushi is another person Dazai trusts and feels safe around so he is able to be himself more around Atsushi:

It is rare for Dazai to have that kind of a look in his eyes, and it seems completely natural and not forced in the least (like most of his facial expressions, especially his smiles, so an honest smile from Dazai is a rarity). Plus there is the fact that Dazai is comparing what Atsushi is trying to get Akutagawa to do to the kind of person Oda was, so he is remembering Oda who was another person Dazai was comfortable being himself around. I think that Atsushi reminds Dazai a lot of Oda (see this post for more analysis about that), so it was really easy for Dazai to accept that Atsushi was someone who he was safe around and that Atsushi wasn’t going to judge him and that he would always be honest with Dazai (but then Atsushi is awful at lying, he can’t lie no matter what’s at stake).

And I think that’s all the situations that stand out to me where Dazai is himself. So basically the black mafia side of him and the white Agency side of him are both masks from different sides of the spectrum. The real Dazai is hidden someone in the middle of these two and only comes out when Dazai is alone or with someone he trusts. The real Dazai is emotionally/mentally exhausted from keeping up his act and keeping people from seeing through his mask all the time, but that doesn’t mean that the real Dazai doesn’t sincerely like to joke, slack off, and have a good time. I just don’t think that Dazai really likes crowds and will never be able to open up in a large group, so one-on-one interactions show us a lot more of what Dazai is really like. Even bad one-on-one interactions like the ones with Chuuya, Ango, and Mori give us glimpses of what Dazai is really like, though not as much as when he is with someone he trusts and feels safe around like Atsushi, Oda, and Hirotsu.

I would think that for Dazai to open up to someone all he needs is for them to accept and put forth the effort to understand him. The real Dazai-sensei also made me feel like that was all he wanted, but no one in his life ever seemed to give him the acceptance and understanding he was looking for.

Because I know the real Dazai Osamu better than the BSD character, I’ll try and use his quotes from No Longer Human to explain how he viewed other people and what he may have wanted from them:

How Dazai Viewed People/Society

“Unhappiness. There are all kinds of unhappy people in this world. I suppose it would be no exaggeration to say that the world is composed entirely of unhappy people. But those people can fight their unhappiness with society fairly and squarely, and society for its part easily understands and sympathizes with such struggles.“
- Dazai Osamu, No Longer Human pg. 157

“For someone like myself in whom the ability to trust others is so cracked and broken that I am wretchedly timid and am forever trying to read the expression on people’s faces…“
- Dazai Osamu, No Longer Human pg. 150

“Society. I felt as though even I were beginning at last to acquire some vague notion of what it meant. It is the struggle between one individual and another, a then-and-there struggle, in which the immediate triumph is everything. Human beings never submit to human beings. Even slaves practice their mean retaliations. Human beings cannot conceive of any means of survival except in terms of a single then-and-there contest. They speak of duty to one’s country and suchlike things, but the object of their efforts is invariably the individual, and, even once the individual’s needs have been met, again the individual comes in. The incomprehensibility of society is the incomprehensibility of the individual. The ocean is not society; it is individuals. This was how I managed to gain a modicum of freedom from my terror at the illusion of the ocean called the world. I learned to behave rather aggressively, without the endless anxious worrying I knew before, responding as it were to the needs of the moment.“
- Dazai Osamu, No Longer Human pg. 124-5

“I am congenitally unable to take much interest in other people.”
- Dazai Osamu, No Longer Human pg. 99-100

“I have tried insofar as possible to avoid getting involved in the sordid complications of human beings. I have been afraid of being sucked down into their bottomless whirlpool.“
- Dazai Osamu, No Longer Human pg. 84

“I am convinced that human life is filled with many pure, happy, serene examples of insincerity, truly splendid of their kind—of people deceiving one another without (strangely enough) any wounds being inflicted, of people who seem unaware even that they are deceiving one another… . I find it difficult to understand the kind of human being who lives, or who is sure he can live, purely, happily, serenely while engaged in deceit.“
- Dazai Osamu, No Longer Human (pg. 37)

What Dazai Feared, Lacked, and Wanted From Others

“I felt so grateful, so happy for that gentle smile that I averted my face and wept. I was completely shattered and smothered by that one gentle smile.”
- Dazai Osamu, No Longer Human pg. 166

“Though I have always made it my practice to be pleasant to everybody, I have not once actually experienced friendship. I have only the most painful recollections of my various acquaintances with the exception of such companions in pleasure as Horiki. I have frantically played the clown in order to disentangle myself from these painful relationships, only to wear myself out as a result. Even now it comes as a shock if by chance I notice in the street a face resembling someone I know however slightly, and I am at once seized by a shivering violent enough to make me dizzy. I know that I am liked by other people, but I seem to be deficient in the faculty to love others. (I should add that I have very strong doubts as to whether even human beings really possess this faculty.) It was hardly to be expected that someone like myself could ever develop any close friendships—besides, I lacked even the ability to pay visits. The front door of another person’s house terrified me more than the gate of Inferno in the Divine Comedy, and I am not exaggerating when I say that I really felt I could detect within the door the presence of a horrible dragon-like monster writhing there with a dank, raw smell.”
- Dazai Osamu, No Longer Human pg. 107-8

“People talk of “social outcasts.” The words apparently denote the miserable losers of the world, the vicious ones, but I feel as though I have been a “social outcast” from the moment I was born. If ever I meet someone society has designated as an outcast, I invariably feel affection for him, an emotion which carries me away in melting tenderness.” (source)

Based on the quotes above, Dazai-sensei doesn’t hold other people in high regard. He feels like they are untrustworthy, boring, unempathetic, insincere, and view everything as a competition. To him society is a free for all and people everything people do is motivated by moving up in society, getting more people on their side, and proving how they are better than the next person. Dazai-sensei doesn’t have any reason to go out of his way to build a relationship with someone and he won’t unless his fundamental view of others changes.

Even though Dazai-sensei doesn’t trust others, he still leads a very lonely existence. This puts him in a sad predicament because while he can’t trust others he craves and needs others in order to be happy. In No Longer Human he mourns the fact that while he is polite and follows society’s rules he still hasn’t experienced true friendship. He has played the part of a clown in order to keep others from becoming angry with him; it’s better that they are laughing at him than judging, criticizing, or belittling him. Because of this he will never be comfortable around someone who doesn’t understand and who hasn’t experienced being a “social outcast” the way he has. Dazai wants a friend who accepts him for who he is, is sympathetic of the struggles he goes through because he doesn’t fit the mold, who he doesn’t have to act and put on a show for, and who will be able to truly care about him. Even a simple “gentle smile” at a moment when he is weak and exposed, where most people would look down on him or be stern with him, could reduce him to tears.

Because Dazai-sensei is like that, it is my assumption that BSD Dazai would also need the same consideration, acceptance, and empathy from someone in order to trust and befriend them. Ango remarked a few times that Oda needed to be more stern with Dazai and keep him in line, but Dazai opened up to Oda because he never did that. Oda understood what Dazai was like, listened to him go on about death and suicide, accepted him, relied on him, and gave Dazai the chance to be himself and drop the act he put on for everyone else. Dazai never felt threatened, unwanted, unnecessary, or like Oda was looking down on him. Where others would be shocked or give him disapproving looks, Oda never did that to Dazai. That is why Dazai was able to consider Oda a friend.

In the current plot line Atsushi is filling that role. Atsushi is the only member of the ADA who shows concern for Dazai. The other members accept that Dazai is the way he is, but they don’t go beyond that and try to understand why and even if they do understand they don’t do anything about it. Dazai knows that there are people who understand what he’s like. Mori, Chuuya, Hirotsu, and most likely other members of the Mafia as well fell into this category but Dazai was never friends with them or had much of a relationship with them outside of their roles within the Mafia. So ever since Oda died Dazai had been alone and friendless. But after Atsushi joined the Agency things have changed. Where most people would just let Dazai go try to off himself and not worry about it Atsushi was different and, even though he was starving and on the brink of death himself, he dove into the water to save Dazai’s life (and how many people have ever tried to actually stop Dazai from dying?). Where the rest of the ADA just continued with their normal day after Dazai went missing Atsushi was the only person who wanted to search for him. Even in less life threatening situations, like the party to welcome Kyouka into the Agency, Atsushi is the only person to notice that Dazai isn’t there and wonders where he is. Of course Atsushi isn’t the same as Oda, but there are similarities and Dazai has surely noticed them. Dazai also seems to open up more toward Atsushi than anyone else, and that alone shows how much Atsushi’s concern and acceptance of him has affected Dazai.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the scene, it begins like this:

One day [Takeichi] came to my room to play. He was waving a brightly colored picture which he proudly displayed. “It’s a picture of a ghost,” he explained.

I was startled. That instant, as I could not help feeling in later years, determined my path of escape. I knew what Takeichi was showing me. I knew that it was only the familiar self-portrait of van Gogh. When we were children the French Impressionist School was very popular in Japan, and our first introduction to an appreciation of Western painting most often began with such works. The paintings of van Gogh, Gauguin, Cezanne and Renoir were familiar even to students at country schools, mainly through photographic reproductions. I myself had seen quite a few colored photographs of van Gogh’s paintings. His brushwork and the vividness of his colors had intrigued me, but I had never imagined his pictures to be of ghosts.

Dazai explains how why he interprets the painting as a ghost a few paragraphs after:

There are some people whose dread of human beings is so morbid that they reach a point where they yearn to see with their own eyes monsters of ever more horrible shapes. And the more nervous they are —the quicker to take fright—the more violent they pray that every storm will be … Painters who have had this mentality, after repeated wounds and intimidations at the hands of the apparitions called human beings, have often come to believe in phantasms—they plainly saw monsters in broad daylight, in the midst of nature. And they did not fob people off with clowning; they did their best to depict these monsters just as they had appeared. Takeichi was right: they had dared to paint pictures of devils. These, I thought, would be my friends in the future. I was so excited I could have wept.

In No Longer Human Yōzō says this about how his art style changed as a result of Takeichi’s “ghost” comment:

What superficiality—and what stupidity—there is in trying to depict in a pretty manner things which one has thought pretty. The masters through their subjective perceptions created beauty out of trivialities. They did not hide their interest even in things which were nauseatingly ugly, but soaked themselves in the pleasure of depicting them. In other words, they seemed not to rely in the least on the misconceptions of others…. The pictures I drew were so heart-rending as to stupefy even myself. Here was the true self I had so desperately hidden. I had smiled cheerfully; I had made others laugh; but this was the harrowing reality. I secretly affirmed this self, was sure that there was no escape from it,…In school drawing classes I also kept secret my “ghost-style” techniques and continued to paint as before in the conventional idiom of pretty things.

By “ghost” Dazai is meaning a sort of ghost of the inner horrors we see and that painters have created physical manifestations of in their works. In a way you could say that No Longer Human’s protagonist Yōzō is a ghost because his thoughts and experiences are a reflection of the horrors and monsters within Dazai. In Yōzō’s case he is like an alternate identity that Dazai created in his writing, but in the painting’s the “ghosts” could be a kind of hidden identity for the authors themselves or the artists perception of a person or object in their lives.

All of Dazai’s works are “ghosts”: ghosts of the nurse Take-san who raised him, ghosts of his failed first marriage, ghosts of his childhood self, ghosts of his writing mentor Ibuse Masuji, ghosts of his friendship with Oda Sakunosuke, ghosts of his failed suicides, and many more. Dazai chooses to “not hide his interest even in things which were nauseatingly ugly, but soaked himself in the pleasure of depicting them” in his writing. Through his writing he depicted his true self and perceptions rather than hiding behind a smile to appease social norms and make a good impression. In The Saga of Dazai Osamu the author actually makes a distinction between three “incarnations” of the author Dazai Osamu in his writings:

In all of these Tsugaru stories three characters, in a paradoxical way all equally real and equally fictional, exist simultaneously superimposed: the Tokyo writer Dazai, the Tsugaru son Shūji, and a very young, emotionally unstable Osamu. The pure literary creation, this “Osamu” is the repository of all the unmet needs, demands, and hopes of the actual man. Although his names change - to Dazai, to Shūji, finally in No Longer Human to Ōba Yōzō - it is recognizably the same Osamu character that forms the equation between Dazai the writer and his literary works.

The three sides of Dazai in his writing (the Tokyo author Dazai, his childhood self Shūji, and the “Osamu” character that is represented by Yōzō) are the “ghosts” that he creates in his writing.

This is an abstract concept, but when reading Dazai it’s normal to have most of the story and symbolism represented in abstract ways. It takes a lot of thinking, but Dazai usually gives a lot of hints throughout his writing to help understand, or at least understand his own confusion, about the themes and intricacies of his writing. There are times when he will pose a question to the reader of a symbolic or philosophical along with his musings on the topic, but he never really answers his own question. But then there are other times, like the “ghost” painting, that are very deliberate and are monumental moment of clarity for the character, but the true nature of the “ghost” can be hazy if you do not notice all the subtle explanations and hints Dazai leaves throughout No Longer Human. The “ghost” within No Longer Human represents Yōzō’s true self which he manages to catch a glimpse of, but as the novel progresses he slowly loses sight of that self and cannot regain it despite all his efforts to do so. Toward the end of the novel Yōzō is reminded of his “ghost” self portrait he painted as a high school student:

“Your comic strips are getting quite a reputation, aren’t they? There’s no competing with amateurs—they’re so foolhardy they don’t know when to be afraid. But don’t get overconfident. Your composition is still not worth a damn.”

He dared to act the part of the master to me! felt my usual empty tremor of anguish at the thought, “I can imagine the expression on his face if I showed him my ‘ghost pictures’.” But I protested instead, “Don’t say such things. You’ll make me cry.”

The "ghost pictures" Yōzō painted were what he considered to be his greatest masterpieces, but after high school he somehow lost those paintings and was never able to recreate them. He spent the rest of his life searching for that clarity and understanding he had of himself when he was looking at “ghost pictures” with Takeichi, but he was never able to find it.

So I guess to answer your question more concisely, by “ghost” Dazai is meaning the ghosts of themselves that artists depict in their works and the identity of himself and through his main character Yōzō. Both represent the darkness that we keep hidden inside us that are real and at the same time fabrications, but the only physical form they can take is through art or writing. So really any painting, music, literature, or anything else that resonates with us is in a way ourselves connecting with a “ghost” left by the person who created it. Through them we can catch a glimpse of the horrors and monsters the artist experienced. And Dazai Osamu sure left a lot of “ghosts” for his readers to find.

This is one of the first things I explain to people who don’t know about Dazai or Bungou Stray Dogs, and a lot of people worry or are confused about this. In Western culture this is a very odd joke and it seems very disrespectful or offensive, but it is different in Japan.

Suicide, while not encouraged or promoted in Japan, is not as taboo to talk about or even to joke about. While it is a problem and should never be encouraged, the general attitude toward suicide in Japan is also different from Western culture. European and North American society were built on Christian values (don’t murder, steal, etc.) and one of those is the value of a human life. Suicide is considered a sin in Western religions and so it has always been seen as wrong or taboo. Japan is different because the Shinto religion is ambivalent toward suicide so it is not considered a sin or taboo the same way. I wanted to include this piece of the Wikipedia article Suicide in Japan because it can explain how suicide is generally viewed in Japan far better than I can:

Japanese society considers suicide to be problematic as is common in most cultures of the world, and the government has invested substantial amounts of resources to control the suicide rate. However, there is substantial “cultural sanction” for suicide, which has been “elevated to the level of an esthetic experience” through cultural and social experiences common to many Japanese.

The general attitude toward suicide has been termed “tolerant”, and in many occasions suicide is seen as a morally responsible action. This cultural tolerance may stem from the historical function of suicide in the military. In feudal Japan, honorable suicide (seppuku) among Samurai (Japanese warrior) was considered a justified response to failure or inevitable defeat in battle. Traditionally, seppuku involved the slashing open of one’s stomach with a sword. The purpose of this was to release the Samurai’s spirit upon the enemy and thus avoid dishonorable execution at the hand of an enemy. Today, honor suicides are also referred to as hara-kiri.

Cultural tolerance of suicide in Japan may also be explained by the concept of amae, or the need to be dependent on and accepted by others. For the Japanese, acceptance and conformity are valued above one’s individuality. As a result of this perspective, one’s worth is associated with how one is perceived by others. Ultimately, this can lead to fragile self-concept and an increased likelihood of considering dying by suicide when one feels alienated….

One phenomenon that has been particularly concerning is that of Shinjū (suicide pacts) that are formed among individuals, typically strangers, via Internet forums and messageboards. These pacts, which are popularly referred to as “Internet group suicide”, are formed with the intention of all individuals meeting to die by suicide at the same time, by the same method.

I think that in the YouTube video Bungo Stray Dogs - Ep 1 | Anime Uncovered: Fortune Is Unpredictable and Mutable | Crunchyroll hosted by Dallas Middaugh does a great job of explaining it in regard to Bungo Stray Dogs and anime/manga.

Then there is the fact that Dazai himself seems to joke about suicide in his own works. Here are a couple examples:

“The thought of dying has never bothered me, but getting hurt, losing blood, becoming crippled and the like—no thanks.”

Dazai Osamu, No Longer Human pg. 130

“I hate the idea of getting old and ugly, you know. I’m not so afraid of dying, but the ravages of age just don’t match my aesthetic.”

Dazai Osamu, “Urashima-san”

“It was difficult to die in the sea, since I could swim. I chose hanging, which, I had heard, was certain. But it was another miserable failure. I came back to consciousness. Maybe my neck was abnormally thick.”

Dazai Osamu, “Eight Views of Tokyo”

I hope that explains it a little better. It is basically a cultural thing and the suicide jokes aren’t aimed at people who have committed suicide or people who are suicidal but at the life and works of Dazai Osamu himself, and he himself even joked a little about his many suicide attempts. I’m not trying to advocate that you agree that it is okay or that it isn’t disrespectful, but maybe knowing this will help to bring an understanding of why BSD treated the character and his suicidal tendencies the way it does.

If we use the protagonist of No Longer Human as a model, then BSD Dazai would be playing the part of the clown to hide all the emotions, confusion, and doubt that is constantly raging inside him. Dazai isn’t just acting suicidal, he really does want to die, but by making his suicidal tendencies into a kind of a joke makes it so people don’t take it as seriously.

Here are some quotes from No Longer Human that might help illustrate why BSD Dazai acts the part of the clown in the series:

I have always shook with fright before human beings. Unable as I was to feel the least particle of confidence in my ability to speak and act like a human being, I kept my solitary agonies locked in my breast. I kept my melancholy and my agitation hidden, careful lest any trace should be left exposed. I feigned an innocent optimism; I gradually perfected myself in the role of the farcical eccentric. I thought, ‘As long as I can make them laugh, it doesn’t matter how, I’ll be all right. If I succeed in that, the human beings probably won’t mind it too much if I remain outside their lives. The one thing I must avoid is becoming offensive in their eyes: I shall be nothing, the wind, the sky.’”
- Dazai Osamu, No Longer Human, pages 28-29

“The least word of reproof struck me with the force of a thunderbolt and drove me almost out of my head. Answer back! Far from it, I felt convinced that their reprimands were without doubt voices of human truth speaking to me from eternities past; I was obsessed with the idea that since I lacked the strength to act in accordance with this truth, I might already have been disqualified from living among human beings. This belief made me incapable of arguments or self-justification. Whenever anyone criticized me I felt certain that I had been living under the most dreadful misapprehension. I always accepted the attack in silence, though inwardly so terrified as almost to be out of my mind.”
- Dazai Osamu, No Longer Human (pg. 27)

I have always shook with fright before human beings. Unable as I was to feel the least particle of confidence in my ability to speak and act like a human being, I kept my solitary agonies locked in my breast. I kept my melancholy and my agitation hidden, careful lest any trace should be left exposed. I feigned an innocent optimism; I gradually perfected myself in the role of the farcical eccentric.
- Dazai Osamu, No Longer Human (pg. 28)

I have frantically played the clown in order to disentangle myself from these painful relationships, only to wear myself out as a result. Even now it comes as a shock if by chance I notice in the street a face resembling someone I know however slightly, and I am at once seized by a shivering violent enough to make me dizzy. I know that I am liked by other people, but I seem to be deficient in the faculty to love others. (I should add that I have very strong doubts as to whether even human beings really possess this faculty.)
- Dazai Osamu, No Longer Human pg. 107-8

There is also this quote from The Setting Sun by Dazai that can give some insight on why BSD Dazai might intentionally act the way he does:

“When I pretended to be precocious, people started the rumor that I was precocious. When I acted like an idler, rumor had it I was an idler. When I pretended I couldn’t write a novel, people said I couldn’t write. When I acted like a liar, they called me a liar. When I acted like a rich man, they started the rumor I was rich. When I feigned indifference, they classed me as the indifferent type. But when I inadvertently groaned because I was really in pain, they started the rumor that I was faking suffering. The world is out of joint.”
- Dazai Osamu, The Setting Sun

I think that Dazai’s silliness is a survival mechanism that he has developed because he is terrified of other people. BSD Dazai is known to have an amazing intellect, and he feels very alone and misunderstood because of that. Very few characters could even hope to keep up with Dazai in that category. And, as Oda said, “Nothing in this world can fill that lonely hole he has.” Because no one can truly understand him and help him understand other people and how to feel and care about them. Dazai is very distant and is not comfortable opening up to others, so in order to have any kind of true relationship he needs someone who is willing and able to get close to him. But because of how differently he thinks and views the world it seems impossible for him to find what he is looking for in anybody.

So because he doesn’t want anyone to know about or even catch a glimpse of what he is really thinking and feeling he diverts their attention by turning everything into a joke. He acts the way he thinks the situation requires while emotionally keeping everyone at a distance. When he is dealing with enemies then his skills in deception are very useful, but even when he is with other Agency members or Ango in the Dark Era arc he still puts on the show to deceive them.

And this is really just my opinion, but I think that the reason Dazai keeps everyone at a distance is because he is so close to breaking and is scared that if he hopes too much or if the people he tries to open up to reject the real him that he will break and the reason to live that he is searching for will forever be out of his reach. He is not going to go out on a limb or risk anything unnecessarily in order to protect himself. It’s only when people like Oda or Atsushi, who seem naturally drawn to Dazai and have an uncanny knack for seeing through him, that he feels it is safe for him to open up a little at a time.

Part 1: Was Dazai sexist?

Women in Dazai’s Life

Dazai Osamu was very attached to his aunt and a nurse maid who helped raise him, Take-san, and actually considered both of those women to be more like a mother to him than his own mother. His real mother was in very poor health and was regularly away relaxing at onsens for health reasons.

After his idol Akutagawa’s suicide in 1927 Dazai turned to spending money on clothes, alcohol, and prostitutes. As Dazai grew up he fell in love with a geisha, Hatsuyo, and ran away with her only to be disowned by his family because of it.

Nine days after being disowned he attempted suicide by drowning with a waitress, Shimeko, who died while he survived. His family intervened so he wouldn’t cause trouble with police investigations regarding the incident.

Then Dazai basically forced his family into paying off Hatsuyo’s debts so he could marry her. He believed that she was still a virgin when he married her and was devastated when he learned that wasn’t the case. On top of that, while he was in the mental institution recovering from drug addiction, from when he was taking a morphine-based painkiller at the hospital being treated for acute appendicitis, Hatsuyo committed adultery with his best friend, an artist by the name of Zenshirou Kodate. Dazai and Hatsuyo then attempted a double suicide by taking sleeping pills, but it didn’t work. Instead they divorced.

Shortly after that his writing mentor Ibuse Masuji helped him to marry a middle school teacher named Michiko. After marrying Michiko his women troubles consisted of him getting another woman, Shizuko, pregnant and a year long relationship with a hairdresser, Tomie, who he later succeeded in a double suicide with.

Women in No Longer Human

In No Longer Human, the female characters all seem to have some connection to the women in his life, and why wouldn’t they in a semi-autobiographical novel? Yozo’s mother is practically non-existent, very much like Dazai’s own mother. His female cousins he kind of looks down on for being immature and too emotional, but what he takes from this situation is simply that he doesn’t understand women’s emotions and realizes that giving a crying woman something sweet to eat helps her feel better.

After moving to Tokyo, Yozo meets Horiki who shows him the wonders of alcohol, tobacco, and prostitutes. Yozo says this about that time, “I never could think of prostitutes as human being or even as women. They seemed more like imbeciles or lunatics. But in their arms I felt absolute security. I could sleep soundly.” So how he feels about prostitutes is not a reflection on women because he can only see them for the job they perform rather than as people. But even then he has tender, friendly feelings toward them.

Tsuneko, the waitress from a bar on the Ginza, Yozo saw as another person who, “seemed to be weary beyond endurance of the task of being a human being.” She was like a kindred spirit to him and that is why he felt so drawn to her. He says after their suicide attempt where Tsuneko died and he survived, “I thought instead of the dead Tsuneko, and, longing for her, I wept. Of all the people I had ever known, that miserable Tsuneko really was the only one I loved.” Yozo had never met anyone else who felt the same way about life and society he did, and in losing Tsuneko he lost the only kindred spirit he ever met.

The next woman, Shizuko, works for a magazine and lets Yozo live with her and her daughter in their apartment. He drew comics for the magazine Shizuko worked for, would tend Shizuko’s daughter while she was at work, the daughter called Yozo “daddy,” and he felt like they were like a family in a way. But at the same time he felt like he didn’t deserve that and that he was using Shizuko too much. Yozo says when he leaves them, “They were happy, the two of them. I’d been a fool to come between them. I might destroy them both if I were not careful. A humble happiness. A good mother and child.”

The final woman who influenced Yozo’s life was his wife, Yoshiko. When he first met her he told her that if he stopped drinking then he would marry her to which she easily agreed to. Later he met her while he was incredibly drunk but she trusted his word so much that she assumed he was acting. He was taken aback by how pure and uncorrected she was and he married her, to put it bluntly, to take her virginity. Yoshiko had absolute faith in Yozo and never said anything about his drinking, drug addiction, or his pawning her clothes and belongings for money. He saw her as being too trusting, and that came to haunt him later. In one particularly distressing scene Yozo’s friend was just leaving when he comes back to tell Yozo that something is happening downstairs he should see. Yozo investigates and finds that a man is raping Yoshiko downstairs. Yozo cannot handle the situation and simply turns around and leaves.

Now, I wanted to analyze this scene a little bit because never in Dazai’s life was his wife raped in front of him, but No Longer Human is heavily based on Dazai’s life. I view this “rape” as a symbolic representation of what he did to his second wife, Michiko. She was essentially innocent to his decadent lifestyle with alcohol, drugs, and prostitutes. At first he was a model husband and really wanted to make the marriage work. But he gradually slipped until he was back to his old ways. It was because he felt he forced her to loose her innocence and have to deal with a world where her husband slept and had a child with another woman, would sell off their stuff for drinking money, was addicted to drugs, and had tried to die with other women that he in a sense felt like he had ‘raped’ her by making her be introduced to that side of his life against her will. I just wanted to include my ideas about the nature of this scene as a way of helping to understand Dazai and his nature so people don’t think that he was the kind of man who would stand by as his wife was raped in front of him.

Women in Early- to Mid-1900′s Japan

Just so you know that all of this isn’t just my speculations I wanted to include a piece of the Wikipedia article (I know it’s not the best source, but it’s easy to understand and isn’t too lengthy) Women in Japan:

In interviews with Japanese housewives in 1985, researchers found that socialized feminine behavior in Japan followed several patterns of modesty, tidiness, courtesy, compliance, and self-reliance. Modesty extended to the effective use of silence in both daily conversations and activities. Tidiness included personal appearance and a clean home. Courtesy, another trait, was called upon from women in domestic roles and in entertaining guests, extended to activities such as preparing and serving tea.

Lebra’s traits for internal comportment of femininity included compliance; for example, children were expected not to refuse their parents. Self-reliance of women was encouraged because needy women were seen as a burden on others. In these interviews with Japanese families, Lebra found that girls were assigned helping tasks while boys were more inclined to be left to schoolwork. Lebra’s work has been critiqued for focusing specifically on a single economic segment of Japanese women.

Although Japan remains a socially conservative society, with relatively pronounced gender roles, Japanese women and Japanese society are quite different from the strong stereotypes that exist in foreign media or travel guides, which paint the women in Japan as ‘submissive’ and devoid of any self-determination.[16] Another strong stereotype about Japan is that women always stay in the home as housewives and that they do not participate in public life: in reality most women are employed – the employment rate of women (age 15–64) is 64.6% (data from OECD 2015).

Dazai lived in a time when women were expected to be submissive, did not get the same education as men, and were not known to have jobs or lives outside their homes. This influenced how he wrote women a great deal because that’s the world and experiences he knew. The fact that he wrote about a woman working for a magazine and raising a child on her own to me shows that he was actually ahead of his time in this regard. He actually wrote very strong, dynamic female characters compared to the social norm of the time.

Yozo’s Views on Women/Males/People in General

When you look at Yozo’s relationships he actually seems to relate more to the women in his life rather than the men.

He is afraid of his father because of his father’s authority. He wants to gain acceptance and his father’s good graces to the point he will lie about the fact he wants a book from Tokyo because he knows his father wants to get him a mask that is popular with the children in Tokyo. Even as a child he would pretend to be someone he wasn’t in order to be in his father’s favor.

The character Flatfish, a family friend who takes care of him after his failed double suicide with Tsuneko, is seen more as a jailer and a selfish man out to make himself look better rather than a charitable family friend. Flatfish won’t even let him eat meals with him and his son. In fact, Yozo is confined to his room and seen as being a crazy person who shouldn’t be allowed out for fear of what he might do. When Yozo’s family offers to pay for Yozo’s schooling Flatfish doesn’t tell him that this is the case; he instead asks Yozo what he wants to do at that point without saying that there would be funding for schooling. Yozo naturally assumes that continuing his education isn’t an option and says he wants to get a job because that seems more realistic. After learning that Flatfish kept information from him he feels, understandably, that Flatfish has cheated him of his future.

The final male character I wanted to talk about is the one I constantly want to punch in the face, Horiki. He’s the college friend who introduced Yozo to the decadent lifestyle in Tokyo. Horiki never once paid for their outings so Yozo always footed the bill. Essentially, Horiki introduced drinking, smoking, and women to Yozo as a way of mooching off him so he would have company and money to do those things without actually spending anything himself. After Yozo’s suicide attempt he visits Horiki who is put off by the fact Yozo would come to his house and even yells at him for nervously picking at some tassels on a pillow. Horiki doesn’t have any sympathy or helps in any way when he finds out that Yozo was trying to run away from Flatfish’s house and basically tells him to get lost. Later Horiki shows up at Shizuko’s house and all he really does there is make some comments about how close he’s gotten to Shizuko and her daughter and degrades the comics that Yozo draws for the magazine. The last time we see Horiki is when he and Yozo are playing some word games and when Horiki goes to leave he comes back to tell Yozo that he should see what is going on downstairs. He doesn’t tell Yozo that his wife is being raped, and he most certainly doesn’t do anything about the fact that he saw his friend’s wife being raped in his friend’s house! Literally every horrible thing that happens to Yozo Horiki is there and in some way he is making Yozo’s life worse!

So if anything Dazai views women as being kinder and better company than men. He puts up with Horiki, never really truly liking him as a friend but never sending him away either, and hates Flatfish. In the end of the book the statement “It’s his father’s fault,” alludes to the fact that all of Yozo’s suffering ultimately stems from his father. The only relief he ever experienced was from women.

But at the same time he feels like he isn’t worthy of the women around him. There are so many quotes in No Longer Human that deal with Yozo/Dazai’s feelings of inadequacy. I’ll include a few here:

“Whenever I was asked what I wanted my first impulse was to answer “Nothing.” The thought went through my mind that it didn’t make any difference, that nothing was going to make me happy.”

“People talk of “social outcasts.” The words apparently denote the miserable losers of the world, the vicious ones, but I feel as though I have been a “social outcast” from the moment I was born. If ever I meet someone society has designated as an outcast, I invariably feel affection for him, an emotion which carries me away in melting tenderness.”

“I have always shook with fright before human beings. Unable as I was to feel the least particle of confidence in my ability to speak and act like a human being, I kept my solitary agonies locked in my breast. I kept my melancholy and my agitation hidden, careful lest any trace should be left exposed. I feigned an innocent optimism; I gradually perfected myself in the role of the farcical eccentric.”

“I thought, “I want to die. I want to die more than ever before. There’s no chance now of a recovery. No matter what sort of thing I do, no matter what I do, it’s sure to be a failure, just a final coating applied to my shame. That dream of going on bicycles to see a waterfall framed in summer leaves—it was not for the likes of me. All that can happen now is that one foul, humiliating sin will be piled on another, and my sufferings will become only the more acute. I want to die. I must die. Living itself is the source of sin.”

Ultimately Dazai/Yozo believed that they did not qualify to be a human being and were below everyone, regardless of gender. The main theme of No Longer Human is the struggle between a single person and society.

Part 2: Dazai and Michiko

From Self Portraits, a collection of semi- and autobiographical short stories Dazai wrote that tell the story of his life through his eyes, there is this quote from Dazai added in before one of the stories:

Thinking back on my life till now, the only period when I enjoyed even a small amount of comfort and repose was when I was thirty and Mr. Ibuse helped arrange for me to marry my present wife. We rented the smallest conceivable house on the outskirts of Kofu for six yen, fifty sen a month, and I had two hundred yen in royalties saved up. I didn’t meet with anyone; each afternoon at about four o’clock I would begin leisurely drinking sake and eating boiled tofu.

In his short story “Thinking of Zenzo” he writes about a short interaction with his wife after a woman conned him into buying some rose bushes:

“That woman was an imposter,” I told my wife. I could fel my face turning brigh red. I felt hot down to my earlobes.

“I knew that from the beginning,” she said calmly. “I was going to go out and turn her down, but you stepped on the veranda nad asked to have a look. I wan’t about to play the evil witch to your Prince Charming.”

“I hate to ose the money, though. Four yen - it’s outrageous. talk about being burned. It’s fraud, that’s what it is. I feel like throwing up.”

“Oh, well. At least we have the roses.”

In his short story “Early Light” he writes:

This was in early April of 1945. Allied planes passed frequently enough through the skies over Kofu but hardly ever dropped any bombs. Nor was the war zone atmosphere as intense as it was in Tokyo. We were able to sleep without our air raid gear for the first time in months. I was thirty-seven. My wife was thirty-four, my daughter five, and my son two, technically, though he’d just been born in august of the previous year. Our life up to that point had not been easy by any means, but we had at least remained alive and free of serious illness or injuries. Having survived so much adversity, even I felt a desire to go on living a bit longer, if only to see how things would turn out with the world. Stronger than that, however, was the fear that my wife and children would be killed before I was, leaving me alone. Just thinking about that possibility was unbearable. I had to see to it that they survived, and that meant adopting the most prudent measures…

Also from “Early Light”:

“Hey, there’s nothing to worry about,” I told them. “We’ll all go to my family’s place up north. Everything’s going to be fine.”

They fell silent. From the beginning, neither of them had put much stock in any opinions of mine. They were apparently devising plans of their own now and didn’t even deign to reply.

“All right, I know you don’t have any faith in me.” I smiled sourly. “But, listen, trust me jsut this once. That’s all I’m asking.”

…”well, what do you expect?” my wife suddenly snapped. “You say such preposterous things, we never know if you’re joking or serious. It’s only natural that we don’t rely on you. Even now, with things the way they are, I bet all you can think about is sake.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“But if we had some, you’d drink it, wouldn’t you?”

“Well, I don’t know, maybe I would.”

Another addition before a the story “Handsome Devils and Cigarettes” in Self Portraits says:

The Setting Sun, published in the fall of 1947, had become a bestseller, and Dazai was now something of a celebrity… His personal life was a shambles - though he now had three small children at home and a baby daughter by Ota Shizuko, he spent most of his time with his mistress/nurse/secretary, Yamazaki Tomie. He was in ill health, drinking heavily, and writing at a fairly furious pace. In spite of his popular acceptance, he was acutely sensitive to criticism…

A fun little interaction Dazai writes about with his wife at the end of “Handsome Devils and Cigarettes” is written as follows:

“These are pictures of the bums in Ueno.”

She studied one of the photos and said, “Bums? Is that what a bum looks like?”

I got a shock when I happened to notice which face she was peering at.

“What’s the matter with you? That’s me. It’s your husband, for God’s sake. The bums are over here.”

My wife, whose character is, if anything, excessively serious, is quite incapable of making a joke. She honest mistook me for a bum.

In the short story “Cherries,” Dazai says this about his marriage:

…contrary to what some of my readers and critics imagine, the tatami mats in my house are new, the desk is in order, the husband and wife treat each other with kindness and respect and our never engaged in a single reckless argument of the “Get out!” “I’m leaving!” variety, much less physical violence, neither dotes on the children less than the other, and the children, for their part, are cheerful and thoroughly attached to their parents.

But that’s merely the surface of things. The mother bears her breast and reveals a valley of tears; the father’s night sweats grow steadily worse. Each is well aware of the other’s anguish but takes pains not to touch upon it. The father makes a joke and the mother laughs.

I realize that these are all from Dazai’s perspective, but I don’t really know of anything that Michiko wrote about Dazai. From his perspective their marriage was a lot of Michiko putting up with him and his irresponsibility and decadence, but the whole time he loved her and his children.

I did find this source that gave a little information on their marriage and how Dazai felt about it:

By 1938, Dazai was twenty-nine years old, and after the failed double suicide and subsequent divorce from Hatsuyo, he began to write with a newfound passion. In June of 1938, Dazai was remarried to Ishihara Michiko, who was twenty-six at the time. He had struggled to secure a place in the literary world, and that effort seem had paid off, with guest lectures at universities around Japan and his literature being published in numerous literary magazines. Even as the war in the Pacific escalated from the beginning of the 1940s (though Japan had been at war with China since 1937), Dazai avoided the writers’ draft due to weak lungs and continued writing through the war period. His reinvigorated of enthusiasm is often attributed to his new bride. According to Lyons, Dazai “seems to have been at pains to reassure his wife and her family, who of course knew of his checkered past.”

I’ll leave this for you to look through and decide why you think Michiko would have stayed with Dazai, but I also wanted to end with a quote from No Longer Human that might shed a little light on the subject:

Most women have only to lay eyes on you to want to be doing something for you so badly they can’t stand it … You’re always so timid and yet you’re funny … Sometimes you get terribly lonesome and depressed, but that only makes a woman’s heart itch all the more for you.

I don’t know if this exactly answers your question, but that’s the best I could come up with with what I’ve got. I don’t want to sway you one way or the other too much. But based on this I really do think that Dazai cared for Michiko and that she must have cared for him despite his faults because she stayed with him. Plus, she seems like a woman with a good head on her shoulders and she would have been a real trooper and done the best she could with any situation. But that’s just what I see after reading these quotes.

Dazai’s Life vs. No Longer Human

I’ll begin by listing some of the similarities between Dazai’s life and Yozo’s life in No Longer Human:

• Raised in a wealthy, political family

• Put on a good face and hid his insecurities within his family

• Excelled in school

• Moved away for middle and high schools

• Dropped out of college in Tokyo

• Joined the Communist Party

• Did a double suicide with a waitress who he loved and survived while the woman did not

• Suffered from drug addition and aloholism

• Spent time in a mental institute recovering from addictions

• Had a wife cheat on him

• Felt very self conscious and as though he were not even worthy of being a human and a normal member of society

The character Yozo is like Dazai’s portrayal of who he is. It’s not 100% accurate, the book is semi-autobiographical not an autobiography, but that is mostly in regards to life events and relationships that are not included or portrayed accurately. All the emotions, views, questions, and insecurities are very much what the author lived with and had to go through.

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Dazai’s Personality

Dazai-sensei may come across as “mean” and “cruel” in his works at times, and especially in regards to the crazy situation with Yozo and his wife in the end. Dazai wrote mostly in the genre of the I-novel, which was a very popular genre in Japan at the time. Here is a definition of this genre: “I-Novel (私小説 Shishōsetsu, Watakushi shōsetsu) is a literary genre in Japanese literature used to describe a type of confessional literature where the events in the story correspond to events in the author’s life.” So through reading Dazai’s works we can get a sense of who he was and what his personality was like.

From reading Dazai’s semi-autobiographical and autobiographical stories (mostly found in Self Portraits of Dazai Osamu) it is clear that the real Dazai was too timid. He didn’t do cruel things to others because he was afraid of being ridiculed, put down, or ignored. He joked a lot and tried to make others like him to the point where his second wife had a hard time taking him seriously even when bombs were falling around them and they were trying to figure out where they could go to escape from the effects of WWII. Dazai was very sensitive to any kind of comment about his writing or even clothing. He says in many short stories how he thought of killing himself merely because what he was wearing was out of fashion or too old. He also tells in one story about a time when a handful of literary critics criticized his works to his face and he couldn’t stand up to them so instead he kept it bottled up inside until he made it home then openly cried and pounded the table while telling his wife about what happened and how hurt he was by it all.

There are some examples of real life events from sources other than Dazai that show what his personality was like:

“Once, Ibuse Masuji, the writer whom Dazai viewed as his teacher, invited Dazai over. He waited, but Dazai did not show up. Ibuse went outside to see what was happening. There stood a person who was unable to decide whether or not to go in. It was Dazai, fluttering helplessly outside Ibuse’s house.”

- Aoi Bungaku, episode 3 intorduction

The way Dazai initially met Ibuse is interesting as well, and it shows how desperate Dazai was when it came to writing:

Ibuse was thirty-two and Dazai twenty-one when they first met. An aspiring writer, newly arrived in Tokyo, Dazai had been impressed with Ibuse ever since reading “Confinement” as a middle school student in Aomori in northern Japan. It was precisely the sort of story that would have appealed to Dazai’s loneliness and isolation as a youth with artistic potential, trapped both by his position as the son of a prominent family and by his domicile in a far province. Nearly as soon as he freed himself by entering the French Department of Literature at Tokyo Imperial University in 1930, he wrote Ibuse a desperate letter demanding that the consent to meet with him or he would kill himself. In one of Ibuse’s many memoirs of Dazai, recalls that such an ultimatum left him no choice but to see the fellow. Had it not been for this unusual first encounter, after which Dazai apprenticed himself to Ibuse for many years, Togo Katsumi speculates that the reading public would have never known quite the same Dazai, and that, indeed, without Ibuse’s frequent intercessions, of which this was only the first, Dazai would have ended his life even earlier.

- Pools of Water, Pillars of Fire: the Literature of Ibuse Masuji by John Wittier Treat

Dazai’s wife Michiko wrote about a couple of incidents about Dazai and his fear of dogs as a response to Dazai’s short story “Canis familiaris”:

At that time most people in Kofu let their dogs run loose, and they were everywhere. Once when I was out walking with Dazai, he suddenly scrembled up on top of a pile of dirty, unmelted snow - about fifty centimeters high. He had sensed that a dogfight was about to begin on the street ahead of us and was seeking refuge. That’s how much he feared and hated dogs. But one day he arrived home with a puppy following behind and said, ‘Give it an egg.’

- Self Portraits of Dazai Osamu, introduction to Canis familiaris

Another short story Dazai wrote that Michiko commented on was “Thinking of Zenzo:”

Many of the things Dazai wrote seem to me to have been gross exaggerations or pure inventions that give the impression of being true, but the circumstances of the gathering of Tsugaru artists appear to have been more or less as depicted in “Thinking of Zenzo”… . I remember him coming back by rickshaw that night and telling me how he’d blundered.”

- Self Portraits of Dazai Osamu, introduction to “Thinking of Zenzo”

“Thinking of Zenzo” was written by Dazai after attending a gathering to celebrate artists from around his home town in Tsugaru (a peninsula in Northern Japan). Dazai was very nervous and fussed a lot about what to wear, how he should act, and what people might think of him. Because he was so nervous he drank way too much and made a complete fool of himself when it came time for him to speak at the gathering.

The amount of accounts about Dazai from people he knew are very rare in English. The accounts that I have included here are the best that I am aware of. They help us understand how the people closest to him viewed him as well as what he really acted like, not just his perceptions in his stories.

Overall Dazai was a very shy, introspective, self-conscious person. But at the same time he was very passionate, dedicated, and dependent on writing and the people who supported him in his efforts. If he was ever “mean” or “cruel” toward the people he knew it was in retaliation to injustices he felt they were doing to him or out of weakness, either trying to cover up his weakness with false bravado or lashing out because of embarrassment and confusion. How he reacted and treated people was influenced by the people around him, if his writing was going well, and how much addiction and alcoholism affected his life.

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Dazai and Women

I have a series of posts about Dazai and Women, that you can check out if you would like. I wanted to include some of the key points here that deal with No Longer Human:

Women in No Longer Human

In No Longer Human, the female characters all seem to have some connection to the women in his life, and why wouldn’t they in a semi-autobiographical novel? Yozo’s mother is practically non-existent, very much like Dazai’s own mother. His female cousins he kind of looks down on for being immature and too emotional, but what he takes from this situation is simply that he doesn’t understand women’s emotions and realizes that giving a crying woman something sweet to eat helps her feel better.

After moving to Tokyo, Yozo meets Horiki who shows him the wonders of alcohol, tobacco, and prostitutes. Yozo says this about that time, “I never could think of prostitutes as human being or even as women. They seemed more like imbeciles or lunatics. But in their arms I felt absolute security. I could sleep soundly.” So how he feels about prostitutes is not a reflection on women because he can only see them for the job they perform rather than as people. But even then he has tender, friendly feelings toward them.

Tsuneko, the waitress from a bar on the Ginza, Yozo saw as another person who, “seemed to be weary beyond endurance of the task of being a human being.” She was like a kindred spirit to him and that is why he felt so drawn to her. He says after their suicide attempt where Tsuneko died and he survived, “I thought instead of the dead Tsuneko, and, longing for her, I wept. Of all the people I had ever known, that miserable Tsuneko really was the only one I loved.” Yozo had never met anyone else who felt the same way about life and society he did, and in losing Tsuneko he lost the only kindred spirit he ever met.

The next woman, Shizuko, works for a magazine and lets Yozo live with her and her daughter in their apartment. He drew comics for the magazine Shizuko worked for, would tend Shizuko’s daughter while she was at work, the daughter called Yozo “daddy,” and he felt like they were like a family in a way. But at the same time he felt like he didn’t deserve that and that he was using Shizuko too much. Yozo says when he leaves them, “They were happy, the two of them. I’d been a fool to come between them. I might destroy them both if I were not careful. A humble happiness. A good mother and child.”

The final woman who influenced Yozo’s life was his wife, Yoshiko. When he first met her he told her that if he stopped drinking then he would marry her to which she easily agreed to. Later he met her while he was incredibly drunk but she trusted his word so much that she assumed he was acting. He was taken aback by how pure and uncorrected she was and he married her, to put it bluntly, to take her virginity. Yoshiko had absolute faith in Yozo and never said anything about his drinking, drug addiction, or his pawning her clothes and belongings for money. He saw her as being too trusting, and that came to haunt him later. In one particularly distressing scene Yozo’s friend was just leaving when he comes back to tell Yozo that something is happening downstairs he should see. Yozo investigates and finds that a man is raping Yoshiko downstairs. Yozo cannot handle the situation and simply turns around and leaves.

Now, I wanted to analyze this scene a little bit because never in Dazai’s life was his wife raped in front of him, but No Longer Human is heavily based on Dazai’s life. I view this “rape” as a symbolic representation of what he did to his second wife, Michiko. She was essentially innocent to his decadent lifestyle with alcohol, drugs, and prostitutes. At first he was a model husband and really wanted to make the marriage work. But he gradually slipped until he was back to his old ways. It was because he felt he forced her to loose her innocence and have to deal with a world where her husband slept and had a child with another woman, would sell off their stuff for drinking money, was addicted to drugs, and had tried to die with other women that he in a sense felt like he had ‘raped’ her by making her be introduced to that side of his life against her will. I just wanted to include my ideas about the nature of this scene as a way of helping to understand Dazai and his nature so people don’t think that he was the kind of man who would stand by as his wife was raped in front of him.

Women in Early- to Mid-1900′s Japan

Just so you know that all of this isn’t just my speculations I wanted to include a piece of the Wikipedia article (I know it’s not the best source, but it’s easy to understand and isn’t too lengthy) Women in Japan:

In interviews with Japanese housewives in 1985, researchers found that socialized feminine behavior in Japan followed several patterns of modesty, tidiness, courtesy, compliance, and self-reliance. Modesty extended to the effective use of silence in both daily conversations and activities. Tidiness included personal appearance and a clean home. Courtesy, another trait, was called upon from women in domestic roles and in entertaining guests, extended to activities such as preparing and serving tea.

Lebra’s traits for internal comportment of femininity included compliance; for example, children were expected not to refuse their parents. Self-reliance of women was encouraged because needy women were seen as a burden on others. In these interviews with Japanese families, Lebra found that girls were assigned helping tasks while boys were more inclined to be left to schoolwork. Lebra’s work has been critiqued for focusing specifically on a single economic segment of Japanese women.

Although Japan remains a socially conservative society, with relatively pronounced gender roles, Japanese women and Japanese society are quite different from the strong stereotypes that exist in foreign media or travel guides, which paint the women in Japan as ‘submissive’ and devoid of any self-determination.[16] Another strong stereotype about Japan is that women always stay in the home as housewives and that they do not participate in public life: in reality most women are employed – the employment rate of women (age 15–64) is 64.6% (data from OECD 2015).

Dazai lived in a time when women were expected to be submissive, did not get the same education as men, and were not known to have jobs or lives outside their homes. This influenced how he wrote women a great deal because that’s the world and experiences he knew. The fact that he wrote about a woman working for a magazine and raising a child on her own to me shows that he was actually ahead of his time in this regard. He actually wrote very strong, dynamic female characters compared to the social norm of the time.

Yozo’s Views on Women/Males/People in General

When you look at Yozo’s relationships he actually seems to relate more to the women in his life rather than the men.

He is afraid of his father because of his father’s authority. He wants to gain acceptance and his father’s good graces to the point he will lie about the fact he wants a book from Tokyo because he knows his father wants to get him a mask that is popular with the children in Tokyo. Even as a child he would pretend to be someone he wasn’t in order to be in his father’s favor.

The character Flatfish, a family friend who takes care of him after his failed double suicide with Tsuneko, is seen more as a jailer and a selfish man out to make himself look better rather than a charitable family friend. Flatfish won’t even let him eat meals with him and his son. In fact, Yozo is confined to his room and seen as being a crazy person who shouldn’t be allowed out for fear of what he might do. When Yozo’s family offers to pay for Yozo’s schooling Flatfish doesn’t tell him that this is the case; he instead asks Yozo what he wants to do at that point without saying that there would be funding for schooling. Yozo naturally assumes that continuing his education isn’t an option and says he wants to get a job because that seems more realistic. After learning that Flatfish kept information from him he feels, understandably, that Flatfish has cheated him of his future.

The final male character I wanted to talk about is the one I constantly want to punch in the face, Horiki. He’s the college friend who introduced Yozo to the decadent lifestyle in Tokyo. Horiki never once paid for their outings so Yozo always footed the bill. Essentially, Horiki introduced drinking, smoking, and women to Yozo as a way of mooching off him so he would have company and money to do those things without actually spending anything himself. After Yozo’s suicide attempt he visits Horiki who is put off by the fact Yozo would come to his house and even yells at him for nervously picking at some tassels on a pillow. Horiki doesn’t have any sympathy or helps in any way when he finds out that Yozo was trying to run away from Flatfish’s house and basically tells him to get lost. Later Horiki shows up at Shizuko’s house and all he really does there is make some comments about how close he’s gotten to Shizuko and her daughter and degrades the comics that Yozo draws for the magazine. The last time we see Horiki is when he and Yozo are playing some word games and when Horiki goes to leave he comes back to tell Yozo that he should see what is going on downstairs. He doesn’t tell Yozo that his wife is being raped, and he most certainly doesn’t do anything about the fact that he saw his friend’s wife being raped in his friend’s house! Literally every horrible thing that happens to Yozo Horiki is there and in some way he is making Yozo’s life worse!

So if anything Dazai views women as being kinder and better company than men. He puts up with Horiki, never really truly liking him as a friend but never sending him away either, and hates Flatfish. In the end of the book the statement “It’s his father’s fault,” alludes to the fact that all of Yozo’s suffering ultimately stems from his father. The only relief he ever experienced was from women.

━━━━

Dazai-sensei is easy to misunderstand. He wrote about the darkest aspects of a person’s thoughts and emotions so it is easy to forget that in reality those are things that he would have kept hidden and not wanted people to see. Everyone puts on a mask when they have to in order to come across as a successful, confident individual.

But Dazai didn’t want to write about the parts of himself or his relationships he showed the world. No Longer Human is regarded as his suicide note to the world and was written as a kind of confession. All the darkness in himself that he couldn’t let out normally is contained in this book; all of his regrets, short comings, fears, and failures take center stage. Not only that, but because Dazai was a talented writer he used various writing techniques, such as symbolism and rhetoric, to convey events and people in a different light than what they were in reality. All the anger, sadness, frustrations, and regrets are written so the magnitude of how Dazai felt about them could be conveyed to the reader. He didn’t want to set his life down in writing as it had happened. So while reading Dazai it is important to keep in mind that he is depicting everything to be more grand, heart wrenching, and catastrophic than the average onlooker would have seen in his life.

In my opinion after reading the light novel and watching the anime, I do not think that Dazai necessarily wants to die more than he wants to find a reason to live. However, if he has no reason to live then he would much rather die. I think that his suicide attempts are all done so that there is a chance of survival. Maybe he takes that as a sign that he has to keep trying and that the reason is still out there? Your guess is as good as mine on that one. He is not a religious or superstitious person, but that does not mean that he doesn’t believe in fate to some extent.

I do think he was serious about trying to provoke the sniper to shoot him. Being alive is monotonous and unbearable for Dazai, with very rare exceptions like his meetings at the bar Lupin with Ango and Oda, but even then it is clear that he knows how fragile and temporary those meetings are. There is nothing lasting in his future to live for, and as Oda explains in the light novel:

In the mafia, no one will look at what’s in their colleagues. This is an unspoken rule. They will not open up the lid over one’s chest to look at their heart and comment at the darkness stuffed within. This is a merit of the mafia. But maybe that is wrong. At least it is for the man sitting beside me. Perhaps someone should persistently tie Dazai up, open the lid over his chest and stuff the head of a vacuum cleaner in. They have to let Dazai, who should be screaming in pain and resisting, settle down. Following which, the difficult things in his heart must all be dragged out under the sun and stepped on mercilessly.

No one knows where all the dark, difficult things in Dazai’s heart came from, but it is clear that he had them before and that the mafia only made them more dark and difficult. Living in a world like that, the world that Dazai’s mind is constantly in and he cannot run away from no matter how long or hard he tries, it is no wonder that Dazai would want a way to escape it. And if the easiest way is getting shot by the sniper standing in front of him then he is completely fine with that.

However, when the sniper fails then Dazai has to deal with this new reality. He is still stuck in the dark world of the mafia and his mind, but on the other hand he also has a chance to try again to find his reason to keep living but he has no idea if that reason even exists let alone where to find it. Oda’s thoughts in the light novel about how Dazai reacts to this predicament are as follows:

I look at Dazai. There is something invisible within that can’t be seen with the naked eye, like a breeding ground for spirits that will raze everything to the ground.

“Sorry, you must have gotten a shock.” Dazai notices my gaze, checking the wound on the side of his head.

“My acting was pretty realistic, huh? I knew that he would miss from the start. The marks from the sniper rifle was imprinted on the left of his face, right? That means he places the sniper rifle on his left. He’s a left-hander. But he was holding the gun in his right. He wasn’t using his dominant hand and wasn’t standing steadily. Considering that he could only take one shot with that old pistol, unless he rests it against his body, there would be no way he could have hit the mark.”

I do not reply, simply staring at Dazai smiling as he explains.

“After that, I talked to stall for time, waiting for his arm to get tired. As long as I approached him slowly, he wouldn’t shoot immediately. After that, I waited for Odasaku to think of something. That’s what I was thinking. Logical, no?”

“Makes sense.”

That’s all I say. I cannot bring myself to continue replying him.

If the circumstances were different, if I had a different relationship with Dazai, it would not be surprising if I’d punched Dazai right there and then in such a situation. But me being me, I cannot do anything as such to Dazai.

I put my gun back in my holster, walking away with my back turned to Dazai.

With every step I take, I feel as though the earth has opened up into a bottomless pit as I fall endlessly.

As Dazai pointed to his forehead and approached the muzzle, the look on his face – like that of a child about to burst into tears – had already been branded upon my eyes.

It’s clear that Odasaku isn’t buying Dazai’s act after the sniper is dead. He knows that Dazai’s true intent was to die. The comment that the look on Dazai’s face as he approached the muzzle was “like that of a child about the burst into tears” shows just how much emotion Dazai feels when he is facing death. On the one hand there would be a sense of relief that his suffering would be over, but on the other hand that would also mean that he never found what he so desperately wanted (even if he doesn’t know what exactly that is) and that he would never be able to truly be happy. I think that losing the chance to find happiness is something that really affects Dazai, but he is also scared that happiness couldn’t possibly exist in his future and that he is not qualified for that basic human right.

Now for the real life Dazai and how his writing influenced this scene. The most obvious influence is from No Longer Human because Dazai writes frequent comments about dying and life being meaningless:

“Now I have neither happiness nor unhappiness. Everything passes. That is the one and only thing I have thought resembled a truth in the society of human beings where I have dwelled up to now as in a burning hell. Everything passes.”

“Inferno. I decided as a last resort, my last hope of escaping the inferno…. If it failed I had no choice but to hang myself, a resolve which was tantamount to a bet on the existence of God.”

“I want to die. I want to die more than ever before. There’s no chance now of a recovery. No matter what sort of thing I do, no matter what I do, it’s sure to be a failure, just a final coating applied to my shame. That dream of going on bicycles to see a waterfall framed in summer leaves—it was not for the likes of me. All that can happen now is that one foul, humiliating sin will be piled on another, and my sufferings will become only the more acute. I want to die. I must die. Living itself is the source of sin.”

There are many others (I have a tag for the novel’s quotes here), but there are also other books and short stories where Dazai talks about his desire to die:

The Setting Sun: “Oh, life is too painful, the reality that confirms the universal belief that it is best not to be born.” and “They say that people who like summer flowers die in the summer. I wonder if it’s true…I like roses best. But they bloom in all four seasons. I wonder if people who like roses best have to die four times over again.”

“Eight Views of Tokyo”: “It was difficult to die in the sea, since I could swim. I chose hanging, which, I had heard, was certain. But it was another miserable failure. I came back to consciousness. Maybe my neck was abnormally thick.”

And perhaps the most simple reason for his suicidal tendencies to be activated comes from the short story “No Kidding”: “It was an evening in mid-September. My white yukata was already out of season, and I felt horribly conspicuous, as if I glowed in the dark, and so full of sorrow I no longer wanted to live.”

Dazai-sensei first attempted suicide when he was twenty (after his literary hero Akutagawa’s suicide, which affected him greatly) and attempted at least three more suicides before the final attempt succeeded in 1948 (when he was 39, and his body was found a couple days later on his 40th birthday). He never tried to kill himself in front of anyone though (except the women he attempted double suicides with: the first died and he survived, next his he and his wife both survived, and finally he and his mistress both died), so he never tried to die in front of Oda or Ango. However, they were familiar with each other’s writing and Dazai definitely included enough about his depression and desire to die that it would have been impossible for his friends to not know about it. I am not aware of any instance where Oda wrote his views of Dazai’s suicidal tendencies, but then it is a very personal topic and I wouldn’t expect Oda to write something to be published that would discuss his friend or his feelings on the subject. I do know from Dazai’s eulogy he wrote for Oda that the two did understand each other and that both suffered from depression and wanted to escape life.

My conclusion would be that the scene is realistic because Oda would be able to see through Dazai and understand that Dazai really was trying to die, not being killed forced Dazai to deal with the mess of emotions inside him and the reality that he has to live another day, and that Dazai really wishes to live deep down and doesn’t know how to do that or if it is even possible. Oda probably did know better than anyone, in BSD and in real life, the pain that Dazai was dealing with. But he was not in a position to save his friend because he was dealing with the same inner conflicts, which gave both of them a friend to trust and rely on but no way to really help each other. In the eulogy Dazai wrote he says, “[Oda] wanted to die. But there was nothing I could do. A big-brotherly warning - what hateful hypocrisy. There was nothing to do but watch.” I think that Oda would have felt something similar toward Dazai. So the fact that in BSD all Oda could do was barely make a reply and turn and walk away, all the while having the image of Dazai’s devastated expression branded into his memory, is a very profound portrayal of their relationship and Oda’s helplessness to save Dazai (and then the end of the Dark Era is a representation of how Dazai was helpless to save Oda).

1) Neither Atsushi no Oda will kill anyone

This one I think is pretty self explanatory. Of course Atsushi wouldn’t kill anyone. And of course Oda was the weirdo in the mafia who refused to kill anyone. In the anime one of my favorite scenes goes like this:

Dazai: You’re Oda Sakunosuke. A member of the mafia who never kills, you have no interest in moving up, and you take care of orphans. You sure are strange.

Oda: Not as strange as you.

2) They dedicate their lives to saving people and and giving them a place to belong

Oda Sakunosuke, as Dazai said in the line I included above, took in five orphans and is helping to give them a good home. And the fact that he is a member of the mafia makes it stand out even more that he cares so much about other’s lives. Atsushi does the same thing when he does everything he can to save Kyouka and make her a member of the agency, and later when he wants to rescue Lucy (even though he forgot everything about promising to rescue her after leaving Anne’s room he still remembered their talk before Lucy activated her ability about their shared experiences in abusive orphanages and he is genuinely happy that she gets away from the guild in the later manga chapters).

3) Both will disregard their own personal safety to save a friend (or friend of a friend)

Both Atsushi and Oda are very strong, brave individuals, but to be honest I think they are a little dumb at times because they will just jump into dangerous situations to save someone without thinking about what they are doing first (like Atsushi rushing to save Kyouka or Oda rushing to save Akutagawa). Of course with Oda’s ability he doesn’t really need to as much, and I guess Atsushi can heal, but they still scare me to death with how reckless they are. But they are only reckless when it comes to saving someone else. Atsushi saves Kyouka multiple times (on the train from the bomb, from Akutagawa, and at least tries to protect her from Kouyou and Fitzgerald), and Oda saves a very reluctant Akutagawa as well as Ango, and he rushes in to save the kids (though I hate watching the outcome of that one).

4) Both have a knack for understanding/wanting to understand Dazai

Oda: You told me that you might find a reason to live if you lived in a world of violence and bloodshed.

Dazai: Yeah, I did. But who cares what I said now?

Oda: You won’t find it. You must know that already. Whether you’re on the side who kills people or the side who saves people, nothing beyond what you would expect will appear. Nothing in this world can fill that lonely hole you have.

Oda is the only one who was ever paying enough attention to Dazai and cared enough about him as a friend to understand not only what Dazai was looking for but that he would never be able to find it (especially not in the mafia). That was definitely the most impactful moment in Dazai’s life and he did a complete 180 after that. Then after joining the Agency there still wasn’t anyone who ever really made the same effort to try and figure out Dazai. But then Atsushi comes along and he’s the one who notices that Dazai isn’t at the celebration after defeating the guild, and finds Dazai alone at the celebration after “deafeating” Fyodor, and then there is this little scene in the light novel 55 Minutes:

While looking at Dazai’s back, Atsushi trudged along. He didn’t know what to say. The thought of how undependable he was made Atsushi’s steps heavy. The truth that even after tens of thousands of year, Atsushi would never become a perfect being like Dazai was weighed on his shoulders.

A perfect being?

Dazai is not perfect. Realising it now that he thought about it, Atsushi stopped in his steps. Dazai is the complete opposite of perfect. He always neglects his work and is yelled at by Kunikida, is always exploring painless ways to commit suicide and failing and causing trouble to everyone. Everyone is used to his eccentric and unpredictable behaviour, and no longer even find it eccentric.

“Dazai-san,” Atsushi said towards Dazai’s back. “Why does Dazai-san want to commit suicide?”

Dazai turned around and looked at Atsushi. He had the same smile as always. The smile from which nobody can tell what he’s thinking.

Dazai’s eyes widened lightly, like he was saying ‘now that you mention it, have I not said it?’ Then he smiled and answered -

“ , is yeah?”

At that time - what did Dazai say?

The more he tried to remember, the further the indistinct memory went from him, sinking and vanishing into the deep light of the sunset.

No matter who it is, nobody understands Dazai. Even if it seems like he’s next to you, the distance between him and others is like the distance of tens of thousands of light years.

If he had to tell the truth, Atsushi also didn’t know if he should save Dazai. Because nobody knows what Dazai truly wants. Or, perhaps this fell into the category of self-satisfaction. Perhaps this was a selfish action.

No one else ever shows any intention to try and understand Dazai, and I am sure that is part of Dazai’s intention. He puts on masks and builds up walls to keep people from finding out who he really is and what he is really thinking. Most people just accept that about Dazai and move on, but Oda was able to see through everything and Atsushi keeps trying to understand (even though Atsushi isn’t the brightest character in BSD, but then again he is up against people like Dazai, Ranpo, and Fyodor). Even though Atsushi is definitely not as quick as Oda with picking up on Dazai’s thoughts and feelings, I am sure that Dazai notices how much Atsushi really does care and want to understand and that it is making a difference for Dazai.

Dazai himself compares Atsushi to Oda

I don’t know how much explanation this page needs, but for Dazai to compare Atsushi’s ideals to Oda’s makes it obvious that Asagiri-sensei and Harukawa-sensei are meaning for us to make this connection.

Bonus: 5) They like food

It wasn’t lost on me that both characters have a favorite meal they absolutely love! Oda loves spicy curry from Jiyuken (The Freedom House) restaurant and Atsushi loves Ochazuke! (I don’t know any real life references for Atsushi loving Ochazuke so much… Actually I think it was Ango who loved the dish in real life). But I have been to the restaurant in Osaka where Oda ate curry and it is really good! It’s a really homey, old fashioned restaurant (my guide said they probably hadn’t changed anything about the place since Oda ate there) and the curry tastes home cooked as well. And one thing I missed about the end of the Dark Era arch in the anime was Oda’s final words from the light novel:

“‘Humans live to save themselves. They will understand this before they die.’… Well… said…”

Odasaku’s expression is quickly losing colour. He smiles, face pale.

“I really want to eat curry…”

The authors in the Mafia were generally writing before the Agency authors, with the exception of Fukuzawa, and their writing styles and themes were much more traditional to Japanese literature. Akutagawa wrote stories based on traditional tales and revamped them, adding more depth and detail, and became known as the Father of the Japanese Short Story. He even tried to write more modern genres and stories that fit in with the way Japanese literature was changing, but he never really got the hang of it or really enjoyed it. Mori also had a very traditional writing style, and even though he broke the mold with Vita Sexualis, he generally stayed to themes and subject matter that were acceptable. Kajii, Kouyou, Hirotsu, and Higuchi were all trying to preserve the traditional style while adding their own voice and trying to make the stories and characters fit a more modern Japan without making it less Japanese. Chuuya is kind of an exception to this in my mind because he did incorporate a lot of what he learned from French poetry, the bohemian lifestyle that Rimbaud lived, and was very decadent, quite unlike the other authors in the Mafia. But even though he had his own way of doing things, it was more that he was just Chuuya and not that he was particularly Western in his poetry style and ideas. I’m not sure he really fits into either category, but his poems have a particular rhythm in Japanese that doesn’t translate so that could be why he was included with the mafia (plus, he and Dazai really didn’t get along at all so the BSD creators probably just wanted them in opposite organizations and Dazai was definitely not traditional).

The authors in the Agency, with Fukuzawa in the lead, had a much different take on how to move Japanese literature forward. They grew up with more Western influences and reading materials. Their writing is heavily influenced by Western authors, and it was them who really inspired a change in the way Japanese literature was written and viewed. They fought the censors and wrote what they wanted to despite the opposing opinions and in the end they won, though none of them had it easy (Am I romanticizing this too much? I don’t want to come off as melodramatic…). Fukuzawa dedicated his life to Westernizing Japan so the country could compete with other world powers and not be trampled over by larger countries with more influence. He wrote a lot about civilizations, reforming education, and modern government systems in regards to how Japan could benefit from adopting the best ideas from other countries. He was so important to Japanese history that he is on their 10,000 yen note now! It was because of his influence that the other Agency authors had the education and exposure to world literature that they did. Ranpo wrote stories that were heavily influenced by Edgar Allan Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle. Atsushi’s stories, though set in a classic Chinese setting much like Akutagawa’s, were full of Western existentialism and had many similarities to Franz Kafka’s style and themes. Tanizaki’s protagonists in Naomi are a man who is well-educated and works in electrical engineering (something very new and modern) and was infatuated with a young waitress, Naomi, who he wants to forge into a glamorous Western girl like Mary Pickford. Kunikida never really settled on a style, but he was heavily influenced by Romantic poets and writers like Lord Byron. Kunikida actually ahd a lot of censorship done to his works (Oda refers to his writing in one of his own stories by saying that his protagonist had his sexual desires awakened by reading one of Kunikida’s stories). And Dazai definitely did not write in a traditional style or about traditional subjects; the critics and censors were always upset and harping on Dazai, not only his writing but also his life style and how his writing reflected it. Even though his works were generally well received and best sellers he had a lot of enemies and people who did not approve of his writing style and ideas.

All of the Agency authors did a lot to push the limits of Japanese literature and incorporate new ideas while the Mafia authors tried to keep the traditional style and themes of Japanese literature alive. It is because of both ideals and the talented, dedicated authors who worked to marry the two ideas that Japanese literature is still alive and well while also maintaining it’s own unique style and influence.

My thoughts are that BSD isn’t really referencing any political or physical war, but rather a war of ideologies and styles in literature. I don’t think that the Western authors really had the intention of causing all of the struggles and taking sides in the Japanese literary world. And to be honest I think that Japanese authors and critics would have done all this anyway at some point because literature is always changing and evolving. But this is all conjecture on my part, and I do think the theory that the Guild coming alludes to the bombings in 1853 and WWII. I am not aware of any official statements about the historical origins of the different organizations and conflicts in BSD, but I really hope there is one because I want to know for sure!

If you have only watched episode 31 of Bungou Stray Dogs and have not read chapter 39 of the manga, this is definitely worth reading. If you only watch the anime you are missing out.

If you’re not convinced check out my analysis under the cut.

Bungou Stray Dogs is more than just an anime series full of supernatural powers, action scenes, and tension between a detective agency and the mafia. The series is based on world famous literary figures, and by doing so invites its readers to compare BSD to the beloved authors and literary masterpieces it features. You are supposed to look closely at the characters, their backgrounds, development, and compare them to the authors and literary characters who inspired them. You are supposed to look closely at the plot, dissect it, notice foreshadowing, and analyze how events are sequenced and presented. Asagiri Kafka, the author of BSD, has obviously written the series in a way that gives bibliophiles a chance to compare, analyze, and dissect the series to their heart’s content.

The anime does a great job of making the characters Harukawa35 created move and interact in a beautifully animated world. The voice actors put everything they had into their performances and as a result the characters have very distinct voices that reflect the characters’ personalities and traits and draws audiences deeper into the world and story of BSD. The action scenes and moments of suspense are amazing to watch with a heart pounding soundtrack to match. Visually and audibly the series is superb.

However, if you only watch the anime then you are missing out on a lot of the details that make BSD so intricate and adds all the depth to the series. The anime has only so much time, and as a result various moments, scenes, and characters get cut. The anime also has a tendency to prioritize certain characters above others, so anime viewers see a lot of a handful of characters but don’t get to see the other characters’ scenes, backstories, and character development in their entirety. As scenes and characters are changed or left out in the anime the world of BSD gradually drifts away from the manga until ensuring the continuity of the anime means the series becomes more of its own entity and less connected to the manga. Of course the anime has not moved so far away from the manga that it has become its own entity, but there are distinct differences and unique atmospheres that are not shared between the anime and manga.

And that brings me to how the material in chapter 39 was presented in episode 31. There are three important facts in the chapter that makes it so powerful and memorable to readers:

1. Atsushi’s experiences at the orphanage: In season 1 on the anime there are various short flashbacks to when Atsushi was living at the orphanage. All are very brief, focus on Atsushi sitting helplessly as verbal abuse is heaped on him, and they are shown repeatedly to emphasize how deeply these experiences have affected Atsushi. Because of that when you see a new moment from Atsushi’s past you instinctively pay attention and notice how it is different from the flashbacks you had seen before. In chapter 39 the flashbacks are more than a mere few seconds where a few words are spoken and we see a helpless Atsushi; these flashbacks are complete stories about very specific instances where Atsushi was blamed, ridiculed, beaten, publicly humiliated, forced to have his foot nailed to the floor, had an unknown liquid injected into his system, was locked up, and taught some very important lessons that he didn’t understand at the time but would make him into the amazing protagonist he turned out to be. Episode 31 did not show any of these scenes in their entirety, condensing them into eight seconds of minute representations of the horrors Atsushi experienced, and only showed one part of an exchange between the young Atsushi and the Headmaster. Considering that Atsushi is the series protagonist it is strange that so much information that is vital to understanding Atsushi’s character was condensed into one third of an anime episode (while Kyouka’s backstory took up two thirds of the same episode).

2. The way Atsushi views his relationship to the Headmaster compared to how Akutagawa and Dazai view it: Chapter 39 shows Atsushi’s initial reaction the the Headmaster’s death as a kind of manic joy, which is also accurately portrayed in episode 31. Tanizaki, in both the manga and anime, is obviously concerned that Atsushi would be so overjoyed at someone’s death, even if it is the Headmaster who caused Atsushi to suffer so much. However, it is only in chapter 39 that Atsushi admits that he knew very little about the Headmaster and only knew “that he was the king of that small, small country,” the orphanage. That is the first hint that the way Atsushi remembers the Headmaster is skewed because he was so young and ignorant at the time. To Atsushi it is only natural to hate the man who he believed disliked him and tortured him because of it, but to outside parties like Akutagawa and Dazai the situation looks different. It is only in the manga that Dazai helps with the case by contacting an informant and sending Atsushi to meet them. The informant turns out to be Akutagawa. Atsushi and Akutagawa are foils, so while they are opposites they also complement each other which makes Akutagawa the perfect person to throw a wrench in Atsushi’s way of thinking. Akutagawa proves through the information he gathered that the Headmaster was not in Yokohama to do any harm to Atsushi, but to sell a gun in order to buy something and that there was no foul play that lead to his death. Akutagawa is also the only person to point out that while Dazai taught him, the Headmaster taught Atsushi and says he will let Atsushi off the hook today because it is “the anniversary of [his] mentor’s death.” Later when Atsushi doesn’t know how to feel after learning that the Headmaster had come to Yokohama to give him flowers and congratulate him on the person he had become, Dazai is the one to refer to the Headmaster as Atsushi’s father. It is only after this that Atsushi understands the role the Headmaster played in his life and he is finally able to cry and face his emotions and confusion surrounding the Headmaster’s death.

3. How the Headmaster’s past influenced the way he raised Atsushi: If you only watched the anime then you would have absolutely no idea how amazing and complex a character the Headmaster is! He didn’t just happen to become the Headmaster of an orphanage. When he was a child he grew up in an orphanage, “experienced a hellish life” that made the orphanage Atsushi grew up in “seem like heaven,” graduated from the orphanage only to join the criminal underworld, and he watched as all his friends from the orphanage died and he was the lone survivor. After becoming the Headmaster he, because of his past experience, recognized Atsushi had an ability and hid it from the rest of the orphanage until Atsushi was 18 in order to protect him. He knew how Atsushi would be hunted down and mistreated because of his ability and did the best he could, considering the horrible upbringing he had himself, to teach Atsushi to hate those who would hurt him and do everything he could to survive. The Headmaster taught Atsushi to be who he is and enabled him to have the will and determination to become the person who would save a drowning man while he himself is nearly dead from hunger, throw himself over a bomb to try and protect people in a detective agency he doesn’t know, risk his place in the Agency in order to save Kyouka and rescue her from a hopeless situation, and risk his own life to stop the Guild and become the hero who saved Yokohama. Can you imagine how proud and relieved the Headmaster must have been to learn that Atsushi was not only alive but had saved countless lives? How comforted he must have been knowing that his worst fears of Atsushi being killed, resorting to crime and living in a worse hell than the orphanage, or being tortured or used because of his ability had not become a reality! How could he be considered anything other than a proud father who wants to find and congratulate the son he raised? In my opinion, the absolute worst thing the anime has done is deprive its viewers the Headmaster’s complex and incredible character. Without knowing him there is no way of understanding what Atsushi truly felt and how much he grew to understand himself and his place in the world as a result of learning about the Headmaster’s past and what he had risked and sacrificed for him.

To me the anime’s biggest disappointment is how they treat the protagonist. The most important chapter for understanding Atsushi’s character and what makes him protagonist material has been squeezed into 7 minutes and 43 seconds of an anime episode (about 1/3 of an episode). As the protagonist he at least deserves his own episode explaining his backstory, or the two thirds of an episode that Kyouka got for her backstory. Asagiri Kafka and Harukawa35 took the time to create a vivid portrayal of Atsushi’s childhood and him learning what role the Headmaster really played in raising Atsushi. The writing in this chapter was superb. The characters were deep and fleshed out. The plot and the way evidence and memories were presented were so powerful people were dreading seeing it play out in the anime because it had that big of an effect on them. After getting ready for the most emotional chapter in the series to be animated, actually watching the episode was a major let down in so many ways.

I will always remember chapter 39 and what it taught me about humanity, perspective, and the influence one person can have on another. Reading it changed me as much as reading No Longer Human has, and I am just as fond of it as I am of Dazai Osamu’s works. What Atsushi and his battle to overcome his past represents has already helped me overcome some of my own demons. I hope more BSD fans will read the manga, and I mean really read it the way you would a work of literature, and allow the characters and writing to really sink in as they read. The manga is just that powerful and that relatable, because all of us have felt like the outcast, all of us have had our own demons from out past that haunt us even after they are dead, and all of us are looking for a place to belong and the power to conquer ourselves.

The only aspect of the ADA filling the loneliness theory is that not even Oda and Ango could fill that hole, so I don’t think the ADA can do it either because they play a similar role in Dazai’s life.

If we use the real Dazai as a guide, his life had its ups and downs but ultimately he never really found the thing he was missing. After four failed attempts at suicide the fifth was the one to succeed (and there is evidence to show that the woman he died with helped him ensure that it would work that time). It’s safe to assume that if that attempt had failed then Dazai-sensei would have gotten to that point in his life again and tried again. There are a lot of theories as to what it was that Dazai-sensei was looking for and what decisions he could have made to set his life down a different path. Although Dazai-sensei did say in his suicide note that he had lost the inspiration to write and that feeling of inadequacy is definitely one of the main factors in his suicide.

So if we take the “ability” to write and make it synonymous with “abilities” in BSD then one theory could be that BSD Dazai’s ability No Longer Human is the reason Dazai is incomplete and that “nothing in this world can fill that lonely hole [he] has,” to use BSD Oda’s words. Even among ability users he doesn’t belong, so it doesn’t matter if he’s on the right or wrong side he will always be a social outcast. And even if he has friends like Oda, Ango, and the Agency he himself can never feel like he truly fits into them and/or that the happiness can last. Oda understood Dazai well enough to know that nothing could ever give him the reason to live he is searching for (my personal theory is that Dazai has to make that for himself, but that’s only because ultimately the only person any of us can change is ourselves; but that also doesn’t mean we can’t influence others to change themselves). So Oda, Ango, and the Agency have helped influence Dazai in a direction where he is more likely to give himself what he needs to feel complete and want to live.

For most BSD fans I am assuming it is obvious after reading The Scarlet Letter why Nathaniel Hawthorne is depicted as extremely religious. The Scarlet Letter’s central themes of sin, knowledge of right and wrong, and the nature of evil are based in Christianity. Akutagawa’s connection to Christianity is more obscure. Take a look at this scene from episode 18:

Akutagawa: This sea breeze is suffocating. Let’s get this over with quickly.

Hawthorne: Are you a Port Mafia assassin?

Akutagawa: How are you feeling, irmão of the Guild?

Hawthorne: Pretty awful. A bit like I’ve had a run-in with diablo spoken of in the Bible. May I ask your name?

Akutagawa: Diablo.

Hawthorne: Then this must be Mount Hermon. Are you a trial sent to test this humble servant’s faith in God?

Akutagawa: Is it a trial you want? Then I’ll give you one!

Hawthorne: Do not call me “irmão.” I am a minister, not some relic of ancient Rome! Do not think that will be enough to test my faith, you trash! Repent, little guy of the Port Mafia!

Akutagawa: Interesting!

Irmão: Portuguese word for “brother” which is a member of a Christian religious institute or religious order who commits himself to following Christ

Diablo: Spanish for “devil”

Mount Hermon: also called the Mount of Transfiguration, the the location in the Bible where Satan tempts Christ

So basically Hawthorn views Akutagawa as the devil coming to tempt him, and Akutagawa is more than happy to go along with that view. From Akutagawa-sensei’s stories about Christianity in Japan, I think it would be safe to assume that Akutagawa would view Christians almost as a different species. In “Dr. Ogata Ryousai: Memorandum” it says:

They told me that *the red-hair **Bateren Rodrigue had come to Shino’s house from the neighboring village that morning, bringing with him a number of his iruman. After he had heard Shino’s ***kohisan, the group performed incantations to their Buddha, they sent up clouds of their alien incense, they scattered their sacred water, and did other such things, whereupon Shino’s derangement quieted down, and soon afterward - the men told me fearfully - Sato came back to life. Since ancient times, there have been not a few examples of people dying and coming back to life, but most of these have been cases of alcohol poisoning or of contact with natural miasmas. I have never heard of a case like Sato’s, in which a person who has died from cold damage disorder regains his soul.

The account, then, should serve to illustrate the heterodox practices of the ****Kirishitan sect. In addition, let me not that the spring shower produces intense thunder just as the bateren was entering this village. I take this to mean that Heaven was showing its abhorrence for him.

*the red hair: a foreigner (probably Dutch or Portuguese) with red hair

**bataren: brotheren ***kohisan: confession ****Kirishitan: Christian

In Rashoumon and Seventeen Other Stories two of the short stories are written about Christians in Japan. The Translators Note in the book explains:

Warfare dominated Japan’s history between the end of the Heian Period and the imposition of peace under the Tokugawa Shouguns, the warrior-bureaucrats who ruled from 1600 to 1868. Once they had established their power base in Edo (modern Tokyo), the Tokugawas were afraid of change and did everything the ycould to remain at the pinnacle of a frozen social order….

One threat the Tokugawas dealt with early on was Christianity, which had been introduced by Portuguese missionaries in the sixteenth century, largely through Nagasaki, in the west of Japan. The foreign religion was perceived as a precursor of foreign invasion, partly because it threatened to undermine the absolute loyalty that the Tokugawas demanded of their retainers.

“Dr. Ogata Ryousai: Memorandum” and “O-Gin” depict ordinary people trapped between an uncompromising faith and an intractable government. As in “Dragon,” Akutagawa straddles the line between miracle and hysteria. By using the vocabulary of Edo Christianity, with its error-filled Portuguese and Latin and its mixing of Christian and Buddhist terms, Akutagawa suggests again that human being create their own objects of veneration. No direct source has been determined for either story.

The “error-filled Portuguese and Latin and its mixing of Christian and Buddhist terms” does make the stories a little hard to understand at times for a Western reader, but it did clear up a lot of the conversation in BSD between Akutagawa and Nathaniel Hawthorne for me.