Quotes and Facts Collection

A lowly servant sat beneath the Rashōmon, waiting for the rain to end…but in fact the man had no idea what he was going to do once that happened…Rather than say that the servant was ‘waiting for the rain to end,’ it would have been more appropriate to write that ‘a lowly servant trapped by the rain had  no place to go and no idea what to do.’
- Akutagawa  Ryūnosuke, “Rashōmon” from Rasōmon and Seventeen Other Stories

To the utmost limits will I go on to write. If what I am writing I do not write now, I do not know whether I shall ever write it!
- Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, “Absorbed in Letters”” from The Beautiful and the Grotesque

He read the novel over and over again in the dim glow of the lamp. And even when the book wasn’t open before him, he was imagining scenes from it…Imagining? His imaginings were even realer than reality to him… but he had gone on endlessly laughing and crying over books. Each was a kind of transformation for him… . Shinsuke thus quite naturally learned everything he knew from books - or at least there was nothing he knew that didn’t owe something to books.
- Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, “Daidoji Shinsuke: The Early Years” from Rasōmon and Seventeen Other Stories

Many are the criticism that have been leveled at me, but they fall into three groups. 1. Bookish. A ‘bookish’ person is one who prizes the power of the mind over the power of the flesh. 2. Frivolous. A ‘frivolous’ person is one who prizes the beautiful over the useful. 3. Arrogant. An ‘arrogant’ person is one who refuses to compromise his beliefs in deference to others.
- Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, “Daidoji Shinsuke: The Early Years” from Rasōmon and Seventeen Other Stories

Middle school was a nightmare for him, but it was not necessarily a misfortune. At least it enabled him to develop a personality that could endure loneliness. Otherwise, the course of his life would have been far more painful than it is today. In fulfillment of his long-standing dream, he became the author of several books. But what he got in return was a desolate loneliness. And now that he has made peace with that loneliness - or, rather, now that he has learned that he has no choice but to make peace with that loneliness- he can look back twenty years and see the schoolhouse where he was so tormented standing before him in a rose-colored twilight. Of course, the poplars still harbor the lonely sound of the wind in their thick gloomy branches…
- Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, “Daidoji Shinsuke: The Early Years” from Rasōmon and Seventeen Other Stories

This was his secret - the lifelong secret that he could never tell another soul and that carried with it a certain superstition. He was a weirdly skinny little boy with a huge head. Not only was he also shy, but his heart would start pounding at the slightest provocation - say, at the sight of a sharpened butcher’s knife.
- Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, “Daidouji Shinsuke: The Early Years” from Rasōmon and Seventeen Other Stories

Shinsuke still remembers the stink of varnish from the used desk they bought him. Actually, with its green baize surface and shiny silver-colored drawer pulls, the desk had a nice, neat look to it at first glance, but the cloth was worn thin, and the drawers never opened smoothly. This piece of furniture was not so much a desk as a symbol of the entire household, a symbol of the constant struggle to keep up appearances.
- Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, “Daidouji Shinsuke: The Early Years” from Rasōmon and Seventeen Other Stories

He envied them - sometimes to the point of jealousy. But he would never admit to himself that he harbored such envy and jealousy because he was contemptuous of their abilities.
- Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, “Daidouji Shinsuke: The Early Years” from Rasōmon and Seventeen Other Stories

He kept a “Diary without Self-Deceit” in imitation of the writer Kunikida Doppo; on its lined pages he recorded passages like this: ‘I am unable to love my father and mother. No, this is not true. I do love them, but I am unable to love their outward appearance. A gentleman should be ashamed to judge people by their appearance. How much more so should he be ashamed to find fault with that of his own parents. Still, I am unable to love the outward appearance of my father and mother… . Doppo said he was in love with love. I am trying to hate hatred. I am trying to hate my hatred for poverty, for falsehood, for everything.’
- Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, “Daidouji Shinsuke: The Early Years” from Rasōmon and Seventeen Other Stories

He hated school, of course. He especially hated middle school with all its restrictions. How cruel the gatekeeper’s bugle sounded to him! How melancholy was the color of the thick poplars on the school grounds! There Shinsuke studied only useless minutiae - the dates of Western history, chemical equations for which they did no experiments, the populations of the cities of Europe and America. With a little effort, this could be relatively painless work, but he could not forget the fact that it was all useless minutiae. In The House of the Dead, Dostoevsky says that a prisoner forced to do such useless work as pouring water from bucket number 1 into bucket number 2 and back again would eventually commit suicide. In the rat-gray schoolhouse, amid the rustling of the tall poplars, Shinsuke felt the mental anguish that such a prisoner would experience.
- Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, “Daidouji Shinsuke: The Early Years” from Rasōmon and Seventeen Other Stories

[The middle school teachers] did not hesitate to use any means at their disposal to infect students’ minds with their own prejudices. And in fact one of them, the English teacher they nicknamed ‘Dharma,’ often beat Shinsuke for being what he called a ‘smart aleck.’ What made Shinsuke a ‘smart aleck’ was nothing worse than that he was reading such writers as Doppo and Katai.
- Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, “Daidouji Shinsuke: The Early Years” from Rasōmon and Seventeen Other Stories

And yet, the books he loved most of all, the books he loved most as books irrespective of their contents, were the books he bought. In order to buy books, Shinsuke stayed away from cafes. Still, he never had enough money. And so he taught mathematics (!) to a middle-schooler relative of his three days a week.
- Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, “Daidouji Shinsuke: The Early Years” from Rasōmon and Seventeen Other Stories

For some unknown reason, I feel close to this sister I never knew. If ‘Little Hatsu’ were still living, she would be over forty now. And maybe, at that age, she would look like my mother as I recall her upstairs in the Shiba house, blankly puffing away on her pipe. I often feel as it there is a fortyish woman somewhere - a phantom not exactly my mother nor this dead sister - watching over my life. Could this be the effect of nerves wracked by coffee and tobacco? Or might it be the work of some supernatural power given occasional glimpses of itself to the real world?
- Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, “Death Register” from Rasōmon and Seventeen Other Stories

He tried to recall more beautiful memories to erase the torments of those which gnawed deep into his mind and body. He had lived a dark, abject life. If there were a bright side, it would be the memory of his early childhood when he was inexperienced in the cares of life.
- Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, “Genkaku-Sanbo” from Japanese Short Stories by Akutagawa Ryūnosuke

‘Sleep is a paradise. Sleep is a paradise.’ He wanted only to sleep and forget everything.
- Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, “Genkaku-Sanbo” from Japanese Short Stories by Akutagawa Ryūnosuke

Even if you do not burn in the fires of the inferno, you will have your punishment in this present existence.
- Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, “Gratitude” from The Beautiful and the Grotesque

I plan to write this story in a single sitting tonight in time for the deadline I’m facing tomorrow. No, I don’t ‘plan’ to write it: I absolutely have to write it. So, then, what am I doing to write about? All I can do is ask you to read what follows.
- Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, “Green Onions” from Rasōmon and Seventeen Other Stories

Atop this 'desk' sits a row of books in hard Western bindings, which are also old-looking: The Cuckoo, Collected Poems of Touson, The Life of Matsui Sumako, The New Asagao Diary, Carmen, and High on the Mountain Looking Down in the Valley. Next to these are some women’s magazines. Unfortunately, there is not a single volume of my stories to be seen.
- Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, “Green Onions” from Rasōmon and Seventeen Other Stories

The beautician downstairs knew well that O-Kimi often received love letters, and she assumed that this sheet belonged to one of those. Out of curiosity, she decided to read it, but she was surprised to find that it was addressed to a woman: 'My heart feels ready to burst with tears when I think of the time you parted from your dear Takeo.’ Takeo was the hero of The Cuckoo! So O-Kimi had stayed up practically the whole night writing a letter of condolence to Namiko, the heroine of the novel! I have to admit that as I write this episode I can’t help smiling at O-Kimi’s sentimentalism, but my smile contains not the slightest hint of meanness. ... Ah yes, I imagine O-Kimi all alone at night when the sounds of Tokyo have faded away, raising her tear-moistened eyes toward the dim electric lamp, dreaming dreams of the oleanders of Cordoba and the sea breeze of Namiko’s Zushi, and then - damn it, ‘meanness’ is the least of my sins! If I’m not careful, I could just as easily be swept away by sentimentalism as O-kimi! And this is me talking, the fellow the critics are always blaming for having too little heart and too much intellect.
- Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, “Green Onions” from Rasōmon and Seventeen Other Stories

How much less does she do so when on avenues buried in blooming roses, numberless cultured-pearl rings, and imitation-jade obi clasps . . . the rest of this is the same as in the passage above, so please just reread that.
- Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, “Green Onions” from Rasōmon and Seventeen Other Stories

What did she do until 6:00 p.m. the following day?Unfortunately, not even I know the answer to that. How can the author of the story not know, you ask? Well (tell them the truth now!), I don’t know because I have to finish this thing tonight.
- Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, “Green Onions” from Rasōmon and Seventeen Other Stories

I did it! I finished the story! The sun should be coming up any minute now. I hear the chill-sounding crow of the rooster outside, but why do I feel depressed even though I’ve managed to finish writing this? O-Kimi made it back unscathed to her room over the beauty parlor that night, but unless she stops waiting on tables at the cafe, there’s no saying she won’t go out with Tanaka again. And when I think of what might happen then - no, what happens then will happen then. No amount of worrying on my part now is going to change anything. All right, that’s it, I’m going to stop writing. Goodbye, O-Kimi. Step out again tonight as you did last night - gaily, bravely - to be vanquished by the critics!
- Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, “Green Onions” from Rasōmon and Seventeen Other Stories

Amiable smiles radiate from his rather narrow eyes, so crystal clear that they appear as if they had caught the bright glow of full-blown cherry-blossoms. However, a closer look may bring to light the sober truth that complete happiness does not always dwell therein. For his smiles seem to yearn after something far away and to frown upon everything nearby.
- Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, “Heichu, the Amorous Genius” from Japanese Short Stories by Akutagawa Ryūnosuke

I don’t know why, but being human, we can’t live a minute without hurting one another. The only difference is that [he] gives more trouble than we. This is a fate unavoidable to a man of genius.
- Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, “Heichu, the Amorous Genius” from Japanese Short Stories by Akutagawa Ryūnosuke

…if you want to be happy, you can do nothing better than be an ordinary man.
- Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, “Heichu, the Amorous Genius” from Japanese Short Stories by Akutagawa Ryūnosuke

The fire engulfed the entire carriage. The purple roof tassels blew aside, then clouds of smoke swirled aloft, stark white against the blackness of the night, and finally a shower of sparks spurted upward with such terrifying force that in a single instant the blinds, the side panels, and the roof’s metal fittings were ripped off in the blast and sent flying. Still more horrible was the color of the flames that licked the latticed cabin vents before shooting skyward, as though - might I say? - the sun itself had crashed to earth, spewing its heavenly fire in all directions…And the girl in the carriage - ah, I don’t think I have the courage to describe in detail what she looked like then. The pale whiteness of her upturned face as she choked on the smoke; the tangled length of her hair as she tried to shake the flames from it; the beauty of her cherry blossom robe as it burst into flame: it was so cruel, so terrible!…Now in the garden there was only a carriage of fire setting in flames with a terrible roar. No - ‘pillar’ of fire might better describe this horrific conflagration boiling up to the starry heavens. …I could have sworn that the man’s eyes were no longer watching his daughter dying in agony, that instead the gorgeous colors of flames and the sight of a woman suffering in them were giving him joy beyond measure.
- Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, “Hell Screen” from Rasōmon and Seventeen Other Stories

He put a cigarette in his mouth and was striking a match when he collapsed face-down on his desk and died. It was a truly disappointing way to die. Fortunately, however, society rarely offers critical comment regarding the way a person dies. The way a person lives is what evokes criticism.
- Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, “Horse Leg” from Rasōmon and Seventeen Other Stories

In the face of necessity everything becomes serious.
- Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, “Lice” included in Tales Grotesque and Curious

But it is seldom in any country in any age that the precursor’s teaching is accepted in its first form by all the people.
- Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, “Lice” included in Tales Grotesque and Curious

His shoulders felt painfully stiff. His head ached. He could not even apply himself to his reading, normally one of his favorite activities. The mere sound of footsteps in the corridor or of voices in the house was enough to break his concentration. As the symptoms grew more severe, the tiniest stimuli kept preying on his nerves. …. Shuri could do nothing but cower in his room all day, scowling. Anything and everything he did was painful. He often wished that he could end his awareness of his own existence, but his splintered nerves did not permit that . He felt like an ant in a pit, struggling to crawl out of the sand flowing hellishly in on him. Meanwhile, he was surrounded by the family’s ‘hereditary retainers,’ men with no comprehension of what was going on inside him, who wasted their time and energy dreading the worst. 'None of them can understand my suffering.’ Such thoughts seemed to intensify Shuri’s nervous condition. Every little thing sent him into a frenzy. … Shuri feared that he was losing his mind, as of course did those around him. Just as naturally, he resented their fear, but he could not quell his own. When a fit subsided and a greater melancholy weighed down upon him, he would sometimes feel the fear shoot through him like a bold of lightning, along with an ominous suspicion that the fear was itself a sign of impending madness. 'What if I go crazy?’ Everything turned dark at the thought.
- Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, “Loyalty” from Rasōmon and Seventeen Other Stories

Yes, it well could be that Rin'emon was deeply concerned for the House of Itakura. But did ‘loyalty’ mean serving the House to the point of casting one’s present master aside?
- Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, “Loyalty” from Rasōmon and Seventeen Other Stories

We human beings are human beasts, and that is why, in animal fashion, we fear death. What is called élan vital is nothing more than another name for brute strength. Like everyone else, I too am a human beast. But, when I not that I have lost all interest in food and sex, I realize that I am gradually losing my animal vitality. I am living in a sick world of nerves that has become as transparent as ice. Last night, when I talked to a certain prostitute about her wages (!), I felt profoundly the pathos of human beings like ourselves who ‘go on living in the only way they can go on living.’ I am sure that if I am allowed, of my own free will, to drift into an eternal sleep, it will bring me peace, if not happiness. But it remains a question when I shall be able to muster the courage to kill myself. In the meantime, in my present state, nature looks more beautiful than ever. You will doubtless laugh at the contradictions of loving nature and planning at the same time to kill myself. But the beauty of nature is apparent to me only because it is reflected in my eyes during my last hours. I have seen, loved, and understood more than most men. That thought brings some satisfaction, even amid the agonies I have repeatedly endured. Please do not publish this letter for some years after my death. It is quite possible that my suicide may appear like a death from natural causes.
- Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, “Memorandum Sent to an Old Friend” excerpt included in Donald Keene’s Dawn to the West

But of course we could not be expected to understand the feelings of this teacher who, whether he intended to or not, actually appealed against the troubles of life even to us unsophisticated middle school students. Rather, we who saw only the ridiculous side of the fact that he was making the appeal as he went on speaking, all began to snicker.
- Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, “Mōri Sensei” included in Tales Grotesque and Curious

Among those lumped together as scoundrels, filchers are lesser criminals than burglars, and pickpockets than incendiaries. So the world ought to be more lenient toward the lesser than toward greater thieves. But that’s not the case with man. He’s often harsh with a petty gambler but is liable to bow to a notorious scoundrel.
- Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, “Nezumi-Kozo” from Japanese Short Stories by Akutagawa Ryūnosuke

His thoughts wandered the same path again and again, always arriving at the same destination. But no matter how much time passed, the ‘if’ remained an ‘if’. Even as he told himself he was prepared to do anything at all, he could not find the courage for the obvious conclusion of that 'if’: All I can do is become a thief.
- Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, “Rashōmon” from Rasōmon and Seventeen Other Stories

To do something when there was nothing to be done, he would have to be prepared to do anything at all. If he hesitated, he would end up starving to death against an earthen wall or in the roadside dirt. Then he would simply be carried back to this gate and discarded upstairs like a dog. But if he was ready to do anything at all-
- Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, “Rashōmon” from Rasōmon and Seventeen Other Stories

Though oppressed by the challenge, he was prepared to stand unflinching before it, with the dauntless spirit one finds in a child.
- Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, “Saigo Takamori” from The Beautiful and the Grotesque

I am satisfied that we cannot really be sure about anything, even about ourselves.
- Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, “Saigo Takamori” from The Beautiful and the Grotesque

      He was a young man in his early twenties wearing a uniform with gold buttons. I stared at him in silence and noted a mole on the left side of his nose. He had removed his hat and he spoke nervously.
      “You are Mr. A, are you not?”
     “I am.”
      “I thought so.”
      “Is there something I can do for you?”
      “Oh, no, I just wanted to meet you, Sensei. I’m a devoted reader of your works, and…”
      I was already walking on before he could finish; I gave him a quick tip of my hat and left him behind. “Sensei,” “A-Sensei”: such titles of respect were the worst thing that anyone could use for me these days. I believed that I had committed every sin known to man, but they went on calling me “Sensei” whenever they had the chance, as if I were some sort of guru. I couldn’t help but feel in this the presence of something mocking me. “The presence of something”? But my materialism could only reject such mysticism. Just a few months earlier, I had written in a small coterie magazine: “I have no conscience at all - least of all an artistic conscience. All I have is nerves.”
- Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, “Spinning Gears” from Rasōmon and Seventeen Other Stories

I wandered among the bookcases under the electric light, coming to a halt before a case labeled ‘Religion.’ There I looked through a volume with a green cover. The Table of Contents listed one chapter as ‘The Four Fearsome Enemies - Doubt, Fear, Arrogance, Sensual Desire.’ When I saw this, I felt still more defiant: these so-called ‘enemies’ were, at least to my mind, simply different names for sensitivity and intellect.
- Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, “Spinning Gears” from Rasōmon and Seventeen Other Stories

Whenever the work tired me, I would open Taine’s ‘History of English Literature’ and peruse the lives of the poets. Every one of them was unhappy. Even the giants of the Elizabethan age - Ben Jonson, the greatest scholar of his day, had succumbed to such a case of nervous exhaustion that he saw the armies of Rome and Carthage launching a battle on his big toe. I couldn’t suppress my wicked glee at their misfortune.
- Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, “Spinning Gears” from Rasōmon and Seventeen Other Stories

‘The complete works of Dostoevsky. Have you read ‘Crime and Punishment’?’ I had of course become familiar with four or five Dostoevsky novels some ten years earlier. But I found myself moved by the title ‘Crime and Punishment’ which he had just happened (?) to mention, and so I asked him to lend it to me as I was leaving for my hotel… Thinking of Raskolnikov, I felt the desire to confess everything I had done…
- Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, “Spinning Gears” from Rasōmon and Seventeen Other Stories

      To me he said, ‘You can be strangely detached from all things human one minute and the next thing I know you have these incredibly intense human desires, and …’
      'Well sure, I can be good and the next thing you know I’m bad.’
      'No, it’s not so much good and bad as that you’ve got these opposites in you that are … I can’t put it very well, but … maybe it’s like the two poles of electricity. Sort of like having the two opposites in one.’
- Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, “Spinning Gears” from Rasōmon and Seventeen Other Stories

I don’t have the strength to keep writing this. To go on living with these feelings is painful beyond description. Isn’t there someone kind enough to strangle me in my sleep?
- Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, “Spinning Gears” from Rasōmon and Seventeen Other Stories

But how much difference is there after all between being bewitched and believing that one is bewitched?
- Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, “The Badger” included in Tales Grotesque and Curious

[He] knew he was a different person when drunk. Told that he had behaved wildly the night before, he would become embarrassed and fall back upon a commonplace lie: he had been so drunk last night it seemed only a dream. In fact he clearly remembered whether he had danced or had napped. Still, last night was not today, and that [self] was different from this one. But which of them was the real one he wasn’t at all certain. … The Roman god Janus had two faces, and no one knew which was real. [His] was a similar case.
- Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, “The Clown’s Mask” from Akutagawa and Dazai: Instances of Literary Adaptation

I have battled against various hazards. In moments, when I saw my body blacker than soot, feelings of shame for my cowardice have been aroused in me. To put an end to this black body of mine I have jumped into fire and even fought with a wolf. Yet, strangely, whatsoever the odds, my life was not taken. Even death has fled from me when I have looked it in the face. At last, full of bitterness, I have decided to take my own life.
- Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, “The Dog, Shiro” from The Beautiful and the Grotesque

Day and night, at random, I live a life that is apt to be desultory and dreamy, awaiting the coming of something inconceivable;… I seem to live awaiting always a beloved who never comes… .
- Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, “The Faith of Wei Sheng” from The Beautiful and the Grotesque

There was, so to speak, not much difference between him and a middle school English teacher who read Bernard Shaw’s dramas to hunt for idioms. But interest is interest anyhow.
- Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, “The Handkerchief” included in Tales Grotesque and Curious

Life is painful, and that’s why we know pleasure, too. People die, making us aware of life. To be free of pain and death would be tiresome. Better to be an ordinary mortal, knowing pain and death, than to be an immortal.
- Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, “The Immortal” from Akutagawa and Dazai: Instances of Literary Adaptation

I am living now in the unhappiest happiness imaginable. Yet, strangely, I have no regrets. I just feel sorry for anyone unfortunate enough to have had a bad husband, a bad son, a bad father like me. So goodbye, then, I have not tried - consciously, at least - to vindicate myself here.
- Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, “The Life of a Stupid Man” from Rasōmon and Seventeen Other Stories

He studied the cadaver. He needed to do this to finish writing a story - a piece set against a Heian Period background - but he hated the stink of the corpses, which was like the smell of rotting apricots. Meanwhile, with wrinkled brow, his friend went on working his scalpel. ‘You know, we’re running out of cadavers these days,’ his friend said. His reply was ready: ‘If I needed a corpse, I’d kill someone without the slightest malice.’ Of course the reply stayed where it was - inside his heart.
- Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, “The Life of a Stupid Man” from Rasōmon and Seventeen Other Stories

He lit a cigarette and ambled into the market. Just then a lean black dog started barking at him, but he was not afraid. Indeed, even loved this dog.
- Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, “The Life of a Stupid Man” from Rasōmon and Seventeen Other Stories

Why did this one have to be born - to come into the world like all the others, this world so full of suffering? Why did this one have to bear the destiny of having a father like me?
- Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, “The Life of a Stupid Man” from Rasōmon and Seventeen Other Stories

The odor was something close to overripe apricots. Catching a hint of it as he walked through the charred ruins, he found himself thinking such thoughts as these: The smell of corpses rotting in the sun is not as bad as I would have expected. When he stood before a pond where bodies were piled upon bodies, however, he discovered that the old Chinese expression, ‘burning the nose,’ was no mere sensory exaggeration of grief and horror. What especially moved him was the corpse of a child of twelve or thirteen. He felt something like envy as he looked at it, recalling such expressions as ‘Those whom the gods love die young.’ Both his sister and his half-brother had lost their houses to fir. His sister’s husband, though, was on a suspended sentence for perjury. Too bad we didn’t all die. Standing in the charred ruins, he could hardly keep from feeling this way.
- Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, “The Life of a Stupid Man” from Rasōmon and Seventeen Other Stories

He wanted to live life so intensely that he could die at any moment without regrets. But still, out of deference to his adoptive parents and his aunt, he kept himself in check. This created both light and dark sides of his life. Seeing a comic puppet in a Western tailor’s shop made him wonder how close he himself was to such a figure.
- Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, “The Life of a Stupid Man” from Rasōmon and Seventeen Other Stories

   He walked through a field of plume grass with a university student. “You fellows still have a strong will to live, I suppose?”
  “Yes, of course, but you, too…”
  “Not any more,” he said. He was telling the truth. At some point he had lost interest in life. “I do have the will to create though.”
  “But surely the will to create is a form of the will to live…?”
  To this he did not reply. Above the field’s red plumes rose the sharp outline of an active volcano. He viewed the peak with something close to envy, though he had no idea why this was so… .
- Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, “The Life of a Stupid Man” from Rasōmon and Seventeen Other Stories

He suffered an onslaught of insomnia. His physical strength began to fade as well. The doctors gave him various diagnoses - gastric hyperacidity, gastric atony, dry pleurisy, neurasthenia, chronic conjunctivitis, brain fatigue … But he knew well enough what was wrong with him: he was ashamed of himself and afraid of them - afraid of the society he so despised.
- Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, “The Life of a Stupid Man” from Rasōmon and Seventeen Other Stories

At thirty-five, he was walking through a pinewood with the spring sun beating down on it. He was recalling, too, the words he had written a few years earlier: ‘It is unfortunate for the gods that, unlike us, they cannot commit suicide.’
- Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, “The Life of a Stupid Man” from Rasōmon and Seventeen Other Stories

       She had a radiant face, like the morning sun on a thin sheet of ice. He was fond of her, but he did not lover her, nor had he even laid a finger on her.
      “I’ve heard you want to die,” she said.
      “Yes - or rather, it’s not so much that I want to die as that I’m tired of living.”
      This dialogue led to a vow to die together.
      “It would be a Platonic suicide, I suppose,” she said.
      “A Platonic double suicide.”
      He was amazed at his own sangfroid.
      Donald Keene wrote this about Akutagawa in Dawn to the West: “The suicide memorandum passed next to the debates he had with himself over the manner and place of suicide, ending with his decision on aesthetic grounds not to hang himself, though he believed it was the least painful way out. He revealed also that a certain woman wished to join him in suicide, but he had decided against this, both out of consideration for his wife and because dying alone would be easier to arrange.”
- Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, “The Life of a Stupid Man” from Rasōmon and Seventeen Other Stories

Thinking how Gogol, too, had gone mad, he could not help feeling that there was a force governing all of them.
- Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, “The Life of a Stupid Man” from Rasōmon and Seventeen Other Stories

In the human heart there are two feelings mutually contradictory. Of course, there is no one who does not sympathize at the misfortune of another. But if that other somehow manages to escape from that misfortune, then he who has sympathized somehow feels unsatisfied. To exaggerate a little, he is even disposed to cast the sufferer back into the same misfortune once more. And before he is aware of it, he unconsciously comes to harbor a certain hostility against him.
- Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, “The Nose” included in Tales Grotesque and Curious

From that time I burned, I murdered. There are no evil deeds that I have not done, though, at first, of course, I acted unwillingly; but after I had committed such acts there was no longer any inhibition. I began to believe the doing of evil is natural for human beings… .
- Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, “The Robbers” from The Beautiful and the Grotesque

That Self of old times - looking at this Self as I see myself now, I did not know how happy I was then.
- Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, “The Robbers” from The Beautiful and the Grotesque

His brow unconsciously clouding, [he] halted his footsteps on the pavement and muttered painfully: ‘After all - everybody is a beast.’
- Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, “The Robbers” from The Beautiful and the Grotesque

They were beautiful and pathetic dreams that none could dream without the agony of years, yet they were dreams that forgot the agony of mankind. All evils were dispelled. But the sadness of human loneliness was the moonlight filling the window, the extent of human grief still more lonely and solemn, was left behind… .
- Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, “The Robbers” from The Beautiful and the Grotesque

He was threatened by fearful phantoms which, born of darkness, disappeared into darkness; his body writhed; he groaned.
- Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, “The Robbers” from The Beautiful and the Grotesque

[She] remains standing, an odd feeling slowly dawning in her. She senses someone behind, gazing at her. But no one else could possibly be in the room. If anyone… but no, the door is locked. But his odd feeling… well, it’s just her nerves, nothing more. Or so she reasons, again and again, while gazing down and the glimmering bamboo grove. But the more she tries to suppress it, the stronger grows this odd feeling that someone is watching her. Finally she decides to turn around. Despite her fears, nothing is in the room, not even her pet cat. Her nerves have merely played a trick on her. But the very next moment she feels once again an unseen presence in the dark. And what is worse than before, now it looks directly at her as she stands with her back to the window.
- Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, “The Shadow” from Akutagawa and Dazai: Instances of Literary Adaptation

As you can imagine, those who had fallen this far had been so worn down by their tortures in the seven other hells that they no longer had the strength to cry out.
- Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, “The Spider’s Thread” from Rasōmon and Seventeen Other Stories

‘It is important - even necessary - for us to become acutely aware of the fact that we can’t trust ourselves. The only ones you can trust to some extent are people who really know that.
- Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, “The Story of a Head that Fell Off” from Rasōmon and Seventeen Other Stories

At that point Xiao-er was overcome by a mysterious loneliness such as he had never experienced before. The vast blue sky hung above him in silence. People had no choice but to go on living their pitiful lives beneath that sky, buffeted by the winds that blow down from above. What loneliness! And how strange, he thought, that he had never known this loneliness until now.
- Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, “The Story of that Head that Fell Off” from Rasōmon and Seventeen Other Stories

I felt as if I had heard the sound of the samisen with my right ear and the flowing of the Sumida river with my left. I felt as if they were both playing the same tune.
- Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, “The Story of Yonosuke” from Japanese Short Stories by Akutagawa Ryūnosuke

Fatigue and ennui enshrouded me with their dull and heavy shadows, like a gray and shadowy sky.
- Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, “The Tangerines” from Japanese Short Stories by Akutagawa Ryūnosuke

The train, the tunnel, the girl, the evening paper full of commonplace events - they were nothing but the symbols of an unintelligible and wearisome life. Everything was absurd.
- Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, “The Tangerines” from Japanese Short Stories by Akutagawa Ryūnosuke

No one except the mountain priest knew what a wine worm was, or what would happen when it was no longer in the stomach, or what the jar by Liu’s head was for. Then you may think that Liu lying out in the burning heat naked without knowing what he was doing was a stupid fellow, but ordinary people receiving a school education are really doing very much the same sort of thing.
- Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, “The Wine Worm”  included in Tales Grotesque and Curious

But there was one thing that troubled [the Devil]. Even he did not know what to do about that one thing. St. Francis Xavier having just reached Japan and it being necessary for him to preach widely before he could make any converts to Christianity, there was not a single all-important believer for him to temp. With all his being the Devil, the perplexed him not a little. In the first pace, for the time being, he did not know how to while away his tedious leisure hours.
- Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, “Tobacco and the Devil” included in Tales Grotesque and Curious

Supposing I have thought of some particular theme and decided to write a story about it. In order to to express this theme as artistically and strikingly as possible, I must include unusual incidents. The more unusual the incidents, the harder it will be to describe them convincingly as events of present-day Japan. If an author nevertheless insists on making a modern story out of such events, it generally seems unnatural to readers, and the result is that his carefully chosen theme drops by the wayside. A short story, unlike a fairy tale, has certain requirements peculiar to the genre; the author simply cannot write ‘once upon a time’ and let the background go at that. In practice this means that something akin to restrictions of period are established, and it becomes necessary therefore to introduce social conditions of the time, at least to the degree of satisfying the requirement that the story seem natural and plausible. Stories of this kind can be distinguished from ‘historical novels’ in that they in no sense aim at re-creation of the past. I might mention in this connection that - as the reader will easily guess from the above - I feel no great yearning for the past even when I write about distant times. I am far luckier to have been born in the present-day Japan than in the Heian or Edo periods.
- Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, found in Donald Keene’s Dawn to the West, page 559-60

I suppose, when you’ve weighed up all the pros and cons, these fried eggs are far more health-giving and hygienic than any love affair.
- Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, Kappa

Surely you realize they’re all a pack of lies. However, everyone realizes that they are lies, so, in the end, it no doubt boils down to the same thing as the truth.
- Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, Kappa

Everything seemed so terribly gloomy that I thought I’d have a go at looking at the world the other way up. But it tuns out to be just the same, after all.
- Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, Kappa

The fool always believes that everyone but himself is a fool.
- Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, Kappa

The reason for our love of Nature may well be not unconnected with the fact that Nature neither detests nor envies us.
- Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, Kappa

The shrewdest way go live is to despise the conventions of the age while yet managing to act in such a way as not to violate these conventions at any point.
- Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, Kappa

To act as the self’s advocate is far more difficult than to act as another’s.
- Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, Kappa

The various theories built round our life span are so confused and contradictory that it is hard to put any credence in any of them.
- Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, Kappa

Truly human life is as evanescent as the morning dew or a flash of lightning.
- Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, “In a Bamboo Grove”, The Oxford Book of Japanese Short Stories

In killing, I use the sword I wear at my side. Am I the only one who kills people? You, you don’t use your swords. You kill people with your power, with your money. Sometimes you kill them on the pretext of working for their good. It’s true they don’t bleed. They are in the best of health, but all the same you’ve killed them. It’s hard to say who is a greater sinner, you or me. (An ironic smile.)
- Akutagawa Ryūnosuke,“In a Bamboo Grove”, The Oxford Book of Japanese Short Stories

Ah, what is the life of a human being - a drop of dew, a flash of lightning? This is so sad, so sad. What can I say?
- Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, “In a Bamboo Grove”, The Oxford Book of Japanese Short Stories

Akutagawa’s dispute in 1917 with Tanizaki Jun'ichirou, surely one of the least heated and least focused of literary disputes, arose from Akutagawa’s stated doubts about the aesthetic value of plot in a work of fiction, and his subsequent attempts to justify stories that lack a clear-cut plot or structure. “Literary, Excessively Literary” opens: ‘I do not consider that a work of fiction without a recognizable plot is the finest variety; consequently, I do not urge others to write nothing but plotless stories. I might mention that mot of my own stories have plots. A picture cannot be composed without a dessin. In precisely the same way, a work of fiction stands or fails on its plot… . To put it more exactly, without a plot there can be no work of fiction.“ With this conclusion Akutagawa tried to disarm critics like Tanizaki who believed that a plot was essential to any story…
- Donald Keene, Dawn to the West

The most striking literary figure of the fifteen years of the Taishō era was Akutagawa Ryūnosuke (1892-1927). He established his reputation early in his brief career, and even when his style and manner had greatly changed he retained his hold on the mass of readers. His short stories, especially those of the early period, have acquired the status of classics, and are read in the schools and frequently reprinted. He was also the first modern Japanese writer to attract wide attention abroad, and most of his important works have been translated. His writings, together with those of Natsume Sōseki and Mori Ōgai, ‘constitute the basic elements in the literary background of modern Japanese.’
- Donald Keene, Dawn to the West, page 556

About seven months after Akutagawa was born his mother went insane, and she remained in this condition until her death in 1902 [when Akutagawa was ten years old]. In the autobiographical stories written toward the end of his life Akutagawa often referred to his mother. ‘Tenkibo’ (Death Register, 1926), the most revealing account, opens in this fashion: ‘My mother was a madwoman. I never once experienced anything resembling maternal affection from her. She would always be sitting by herself in the family house in Shiba, her hair twisted around a comb, puffing away at a long-stemmed pipe. Her face and body were both very small. Her face - I can’t even explain this - was always an ashen color, with no suggestion of living vitality… . My mother never looked after me in any way. I remember that once when I went upstairs to her room with my foster mother to say a word of greeting, if nothing else, she suddenly hit my head with her pipe. But most of the time my mother was an extremely well-behaved lunatic.’ … Akutagawa’s references to his mother in his most personal works reveal how deeply he was affected by his loss, and how constrained he felt whenever he recalled the circumstances of his adoption [by his aunt]. The fear of insanity, which at the time was believed to be directly attributable to heredity, constantly haunted him; he alluded to his insane mother in a suicide note.
- Donald Keene, Dawn to the West, page 556-7

An unhappy love affair in 1914-1915 led Akutagawa to neglect his university studies in favor of unrelated readings, in the effort to find distraction from his woes. He later described the genesis of his first two successful stories in these terms: ‘The stories I wrote at the time, in my study which [with its clutter of books] was like a symbol of my mind, were ‘Rashōmon’ and ‘The Nose.’ As the result of a love affair that had dragged on unhappily for six months, I felt depressed whenever I was alone so, by way of reaction, I wanted to write stories that would be as remote as possible from my circumstances at the time and as cheerful as possible. That is how I happened to write these two stories, borrowing materials from Konjaku Monogatari. I only published one, ‘Rashōmon’; the other, ‘The Nose,’ I broke off half-way through and did not finish for some time.’ If ‘Rashōmon’ really seemed like a ‘cheerful’ story to Akutagawa, it is not hard to imagine the depths of his depression!
- Donald Keene, Dawn to the West, page 558

[Akutagawa’s] ‘The Nose’ was also derived from Konjaku Monogatari, and there may have been influence from Gogol’s story ‘The Nose’ (1835). But the composition as a whole owns much to Akutagawa’s ability to combine the grotesque and the humorous without being too obvious. Natsume Sōseki read the work in Shinshichō and was so impressed the he wrote Akutagawa a letter expressing his admiration. The story was subsequently reprinted in the major literature review Shinsōsetsu (New Fiction), marking the beginning of Akutagawa’s fame. Praise from Sōseki was undoubtedly more welcome than from any other source. Sōseki, the commanding figure in the literary world, had gathered around him a circle of disciples, some whom later became well-known writers and critics. Akutagawa had admired Sōseki ever since he was a middle-school student, and early in December 1915 he and his friend, the novelist Kume Masao (1891-1952), finally mustered the courage to attend one of Sōseki’s regular Thursday afternoon sessions with his disciples. From then on Akutagawa went fairly often, though he confessed that he was so hypnotized by Sōseki’s presence that he was almost incapable relaxing and enjoying the experience. Sōseki’s letter, written in February 1916, praised the novelty of the materials, the skill of his terse style, and Akutagawa’s ability to be humorous without forcing. He urged Akutagawa to write more stories in the same vein, cautioning him that he must not worry even if ‘The Nose’ failed at first to attract much attention. Sōseki predicted that if Akutagawa could write twenty or thirty such stories he would establish an absolutely unique reputation. He urged Akutagawa to follow his own path without taking into account the possible reactions of the mass of readers.
- Donald Keene, Dawn to the West, page 561-2

Akutagawa was more conspicuously influenced by Mori Ōgai. The style of his early works is so indebted to Ōgai’s that one critic believed it would be more accurate to speak of imitation, rather than influence. This critic, the novelist Nakamura Shin’ichirō, went on to state: ‘Akutagawa Ryūnosuke’s special virtue as a new writer lay, more than in anything else, in his dry, intellectual manner of dealing with his subjects. The strongest influence Mori Ōgai exerted on Akutagawa, in fact, was embedded in the very foundations of Akutagawa’s creative formation as an author. It may be detected, for example, in the way he preserved his distance from his subjects. If this analysis is correct, it means that Ōgai handed over to Akutagawa the key for unlocking the secrets of modern literature, and that Ōgai created Akutagawa. In that case, this event brought about an important advance in the stages of Japanese absorption of Western literature.’
- Donald Keene, Dawn to the West, page 563-4

[Akutagawa] describes [in ‘Daidōji Shinsuke’] his school and the useless information with which he had to fill he his head. A tyrannical teacher beat him because he read Kunikida Doppo and Tayama Katai, but he continued to receive good marks despite his rebelliousness. The most affecting part of ‘Daidōji Shinsuke’ discusses the books he read. ‘There was not one single thing which he had not learned from books.’ He learned from late nineteenth-century European novels and plays but also from Genroku haikai poetry. He confesses, ‘During the early part of his life he fell in love with any number of women, but none taught him anything about the beauty of women; at any rate, he was taught nothing about feminine beauty that he had not already learned from books.’
- Donald Keene, Dawn to the West, page 581-2

…Akutagawa killed himself on July 27, 1927, by taking a lethal dose of sleeping medicine. His suicide came as a profound shock but not as a surprise to his family and friends. He had spoken of suicide often, and he seemed to be at the end of his strength. A photograph taken on June 1927, his last, shows a gaunt face, hollow eyes, a wrinkled forehead, and an expression of despair accentuated by the mouth twisted around a cigarette.
- Donald Keene, Dawn to the West, page 583

[Akutgawa’s] last composition, “Aru Kyuyu e okuru Shuki” (Memorandum Sent to an Old Friend), was his final testament. It was addressed to Kume Masao and described the circumstances leading up to his suicide. One phrase became famous: ‘bon’yari shita fuan’ (a vague uneasiness), the direct cause of his death. Akutagawa related that for the previous two years he had thought of nothing but killing himself. … The suicide memorandum passed next to the debates he had with himself over the manner and place of suicide, ending with his decision on aesthetic grounds not to hang himself, though he believed it was the least painful way out. He revealed also that a certain woman wished to join him in suicide, but he had decided against this, both out of consideration for his wife and because dying alone would be easier to arrange.
- Donald Keene, Dawn to the West, page 586

The keynotes of Akutagawa’s works are lucid intellect and refined humor. The author always stands outside life, calmly observing the maelstrom.
- Eguchi Kiyoshi, found in the introduction to Kappa

In July of [1927], Akutagawa Ryūnosuke committed suicide, and this is said to have had a tremendous affect on [Dazai], who idolized the great write and whose behavior subsequently underwent radical changes. He began to neglect his studies, devoting himself instead to writing and making use of his princely allowance to dress foppishly and to hire the services of geisha at expensive restaurants in Aomori and Asamushi Hot Springs.
- Exerpt from Osamu Dazai: Self Portraits Introduction.  The introduction was written by Ralph. F. McCarthy

Ryūnosuke continued to devour books. He read Kunikida Doppo and Tayama Katai, Tokutomi Roka and Takayama Chugyuu, Izumi Kyōka and Natsume Sōseki. He particularly admired Doppo, a novelist deeply influenced by Western Culture. Doppo was a Christian who regarded literature as a medium of instruction, a tool to be used in the ‘criticism of human life’. He was one of the leaders of the Naturalist movment in Japanese literature, which reached its peak during the years when Ryūnosuke was in Middle School.
- G.H. Healey, the introduction to Akutagawa Ryūnosuke’s Kappa

Although Ryūnosuke often wrote at great speed, he was an exacting stylist; his stories are finely wrought and highly polished. He believed that the highest goal of art was perfection of form. This concept of art sprang from his pessimistic view of human life. He had come to regard life as a shabby and despicable affair that could only achieve any sort of beauty when refined and polished by art.
- G.H. Healey, the introduction to Akutagawa Ryūnosuke’s Kappa

The first ‘real novel’ [Akutagawa Ryūnosuke] read when he graduated from storybooks was probably, he later recalled, Izumi Kyōka’s Bake Ichou.
- G.H. Healey, the Introuction to Akutagawa  Ryūnosuke ‘s Kappa

Separated by almost a generation, Akutagawa and Dazai were never associated with one another as members of a school or literary current; nor did they ever come close to creating the master-disciple bond so common in the history of modern Japanese letters. However, Dazai was keenly interested in Akutagawa, especially during those formative years of late adolescence and early manhood; indeed, several of his youthful writings make indirect references to the older writer. Looking at both lives in retrospect, one can detect a number of striking resemblances. Each writer occupied a peculiar and ambiguous position in his family, giving rise to a troubled childhood and adolescence in each case; each entered his maturity deeply alienated from society; and finally, each committed suicide on the threshold of middle age. Not surprisingly, both Akutagawa and Dazai wrote out of desperation and with a degree of moral passion. Both excelled in the short tale, Akutagawa never attempting anything longer than a novelette, and Dazai, except for his two postwar novels, appearing to best advantage in the short tale and the vignette.
- James O’Brien, from the introduction to Akutagawa and Dazai: Instances of Literary Adaptation

Akutagawa usually took a basic idea from another work as the starting point for his own composition. And the debt - if that is actually the word for the process - seldom went beyond. … While Akutagawa often alludes in significant ways to brief, anecdotal materials, Dazai customarily has recourse to more substantial works as source materials. More to the point, he incorporates large swatches of detail, his own retelling of an earlier tale usually ending up as an amalgam of sorts. It must also be said, however, the Dazai virtually obliterates the tone and effect of the originals. … Dazai [has an] uncanny ability to turn almost any material to his own purpose … And yet, Dazai succeeds in preserving much that is recognizable from the originals even as he totally transforms them.
- James O’Brien, from the introduction to Akutagawa and Dazai: Instances of Literary Adaptation

Akutagawa’s more fastidious use of this sources seems consistent with hsi normal narrative strategies. He composed in a spare, deliberate vein; … In Akutagawa a dialectic often takes place between such opposed concepts as reality and appearance, truth and falsehood, art and power. The author’s scheme of thesis and antithesis is seldom obscured by descriptive details, nor is it substantially altered in the interests of achieving a resolution. … Dazai, on the other hand, seldom shapes his stories so entirely around a thematic statement. Measured against Akutagawa’s orderly procedures, many Dazai works have a random, even wayward, character about them. Rather than limit himself to an idea or theme from an earlier work, or hone a plot from a classic story, Dazai habitually augments the received materials. The plot takes new twists and turns, with added dialogue and idiosyncratic authorial commentary casting the old tale in a totally different light. At the end Dazai tries to sum up the meaning of the tale: a character will confess to his real motives or the author/persona deliver a verdict on the events that have just transpired. Nonetheless, such comments usually seem interpolations more than integral parts of the narrative. … Did Dazai merely find a story which he could manipulate and expand in multiple ways, then throw himself into the business of generating out of this genius for language an essentially different narrative? Or was there more deliberation and planning than this description implies? There is, to be sure, an organizing intelligence behind much of Dazai’s fiction. One sees this, among other things, in the ironies and reversals that permeate much of his writing. As with Akutagawa, things often turn out to be the opposite of what they seem. And, despite the bizarre character of the above-mentioned final comments by the author/persona in Dazai, the relation of these comments to the finished narrative is less tenuous than it might seem.
- James O’Brien, from the introduction to Akutagawa and Dazai: Instances of Literary Adaptation

With Akutagawa, the heart of the tale is in the sequence of events; with Dazai, it lies in the rhetoric that is generated by the unfolding situation. Although Akutagawa has been praised as a stylist of great virtuosity, especially by a few Western scholars, certain comments by Japanese scholars - the references to the awkwardness of his dialogue, to mention just one example - tend to bolster my own sense that style indeed was not Akutagawa’s forte. Akutagawa seems mainly interested in thematic arrangement - in setting events, personalities, and ideas in a certain relationship to one another. … Dazai, on the other hand, would take over the plot outline as he found it in the earlier narrative. Or … stitch together his own plot with lots of material quoted … Dazai transformed these works, either by retelling in a wholesale fashion, or unique use of language - whether in retelling or adding - that makes Dazai’s work an intriguing transformation.
- James O’Brien, from the introduction to Akutagawa and Dazai: Instances of Literary Adaptation

Like Dazai, however, thought not quite so often, Akutagawa will intrude into his work with an authorial comment. Yet … Akutagawa limited himself to authorial comment that was brief and often cryptic. When he - or his persona - does make a more substantial appearance, his role seems problematic. One senses, however, a deliberate decision on the author’s part to implicate himself, and thereby give an added complication to the basic narrative. Dazai’s presence too, whether as author or character, whether directly or through the indirect method of his telltale language, is always a complicating factor. But one senses that he, unlike Akutagawa, was acting on instinct or from habit. One can hardly imagine Dazai being anything other than forthright about his presence in a story, even one partially borrowed from other sources.
- James O’Brien, from the introduction to Akutagawa and Dazai: Instances of Literary Adaptation

Akutagawa … gives the impression of pursuing a more organized program of reading than Dazai does. Perhaps, then, Akutagawa might be labelled catholic, with the term eclectic reserved for Dazai alone. In any event Akutagawa is assuredly more cultivated and scholarly, his reading experience and general literary knowledge far surpassing that of Dazai. Akutagawa’s ability to read English gave him a considerable advantage, especially when Dazai made no discernible progress in French, his chosen field of study at the university. In contrast to Dazai, who appears for the most part to have read whatever came to hand, Akutagawa, while hardly confining himself to specific authors and certain kinds of literature, seems to have intensively explored special dominant interests, the ghostly and the absurd prominent among them. In the final analysis, however, Akutagawa and Dazai both emboy the sort of unrestrained curiosity and interest that one readily identifies with modern Japan in many areas of endeavor.
- James O’Brien, from the introduction to Akutagawa and Dazai: Instances of Literary Adaptation

This volume of translations introduces a special genre of writings by two modern Japanese authors, each of whom achieved considerable renown during his lifetime. One of them, Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, seemed likely during the 1920s to succeed Natsume Sōseki as Japan’s foremost writer of prose fiction. Only thirty-five years old when he committed suicide in 1927, Akutagawa never achieved the status of Sōseki; nonetheless, the intellectual play and superb craft of his numerous tales guarantee him a permanent place in the history of modern Japanese letters. Dazai Osamu, who made his debut in the early 1930s, was also quickly recognized for his unique gifts. Like other Japanese writers, Dazai was subject to the scrutiny of government censors during World War II. While almost every other major writer either collaborated with the military or remained silent, Dazai wrote genuine works of fiction and got them published. He survived the war’s end by less than three years, but his final stories and novels are often cited as the most telling depictions of those troubled times by a Japanese writer.
- James O’Brien, from the introduction to Akutagawa and Dazai: Instances of Literary Adaptation

…Akutagawa indicates that man’s own will triumphs over destiny to determine the degree of a man’s happiness, a doctrine that was bitterly criticized by many of his contemporary writers who, attempting to advance the struggle for ‘worker’s rights,’ contended that the proletariat was subject to ‘the whims of social injustice.’ Akutagawa’s evident disapproval of workers’ union-conspiracy was apparent from his ignoring of it, as he was free in conscience to do if he wished; but he naturally stirred the wrath of the militant social writers when his bewitching style revived the romance of the feudal institutions which they despised.
- John McVittie, the Introduction to Japanese Short Stories by Akutagawa Ryūnosuke

The doctrine of sokuten kyoshi - self-detachment in pursuit of heaven - was taught by the famous writer, Natsume Sōseki, to his student’s at the Imperial University of Tokyo in the early years of the Taisho era (in the years of World War I). Happiness exists only in the contemplation and imagination, suggested Sōseki, a contention which fascinated his brilliant and extremely sensitive young student, Akutagawa Ryūnosuke…
- John McVittie, the Introduction to Japanese Short Stories by Akutagawa Ryūnosuke

Akutagawa’s photographs, in which keen eyes, high broad cheekbones, and sensitive lips predominate, testify to the truth of the assurance of his literary colleagues that his moods - like his numerous stories - were many and often paradoxical, ranging from periods of brilliant wit to nervous dilemma.
- John McVittie, the Introduction to Japanese Short Stories by Akutagawa Ryūnosuke

Akutagawa mentions in his reminiscences that he tried to find in historical data and escape from the gloom of his love-affairs, and, having escaped from the snares of desire, to attain to enlightenment. ‘I simply wanted to write novels divorced from reality,’ he wrote…
- John McVittie, the Introduction to Japanese Short Stories by Akutagawa Ryūnosuke

[Akutagawa] put up a fence round himself, and no one he disliked was allowed inside it. But to those he trusted, and in whom he saw something to like, he was very kind. He would go to any trouble for them. And once he admitted someone to his intimacy he was most reluctant to break with him, no matter how much of a nuisance he might be.
- Kikuchi Kan, a close friend of Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, found in the introduction to Kappa (This was written after Akutagawa-sensei passed away, and was printed in a collection of Akutagawa’s works called Akutagawa no Kotodomo.)

We who choose suicide welcome know what our true reasons are … The decision to take one’s life (like the decision to commit any act) is bound to stem from complex motives. Yet, in my case, I can pinpoint the cause as a feeling of vague uneasiness. A vague uneasiness over what the future may hold in store for me.
- Letter to an Old Friend by Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, included in The Oxford Book of Japanese Short Stories

Existing on the periphery of literary traditions on an almost universal scale is an element belonging to the grotesque and perverse. This manifests itself in numerous ways, from the sensational to the sublime; yet, despite whatever literary quality such writings might demonstrate, they are generally barred from serious academic consideration by virtue of their very nature. Only the most exceptional of these writers have managed to break the constraints of convention and achieve a degree of respect within scholarly circles, but even these are generally considered as anomalies, rather than as members of the literary mainstream. Within the Japanese literary tradition, Akutagawa Ryūnosuke (1892-1927) is perhaps the most noteworthy example of this type of macabre artist. His tales, writes Donald Keene, ‘have acquired the status of classics, and are read in the schools and frequently reprinted;’ however, although esteemed as one of the principal figures of modern Japanese literature, the strangeness of his works, as well as his enigmatic life and suicide, have cast Akutagawa in a weird, abstruse light.
- Lori Dianne Hitchcock, “The Works of Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, Lectures on Poe, and Their Applications”

Among the Occidental writers whose works Akutagawa is known to have admired and emulated, those of the American short story stylist, Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849), are of particular interest. At first glance, the tales of Akutagawa are thematically reminiscent of Poe’s, both sharing a fascination with the morbid and grotesque, as well as exhibiting a certain dark, almost cynical humor. Yet, such similarities between the works of Akutagawa and Poe are comparatively superficial when contrast to the more fundamental technical and ideological parallels demonstrated between these two bodies of fiction. The importance of Poe’s influence on the works of Akutagawa Ryūnosuke should not be underestimated, as it constitutes not only an additional literary source for his tales, but also one of the essential elements of Akutagawa’s development as a writer of short stories.
- Lori Dianne Hitchcock, “The Works of Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, Lectures on Poe, and Their Applications”

The works of Edgar Allan Poe were among the first examples of American literature to be introduced into Japan. By as early as 1888, only twenty years after the ‘reopening’ of Japan to the West, two of Poe’s tales, ‘The Black Cat’ and ‘Murders in the Rue Morgue,’ had been translated into Japanese; and this at the time when the American short story was eclipsed in Japan by the ‘more enlightened writings’ of such men as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Benjamin Franklin. Supported in the English literature classrooms of Tokyo Imperial University by admirers of the caliber of Lafcadio Hearn, who described [Poe] to student’s as ‘a most consummate artist,’ and Hearn’s successor, Natsume Sōseki, Poe’s fame and popularity spread among both Japanese student’s and writers.
- Lori Dianne Hitchcock, “The Works of Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, Lectures on Poe, and Their Applications”

As a youth, Akutagawa read Japanese and Western authors known for their often darkly imaginative works, such as Mori Ōgai, Izumi Kyōka, Anatole France (whose Japanese introduction Akutagawa is credited with), Baudelaire, and Poe. Knowledge of such works he affixed to his already comprehensive understanding of Japanese and Chinese classic literature to form the basis of his literary vocabulary. In particular, the young Akutagawa, as evidenced in a passage from a 1928 ‘special edition’ of his semi-autobiographical work, ‘Daidouji Shinsuke no hansei,’ exhibited an early interest in the short stories of Poe: ‘[Akutagawa] would translate one page a day of Poe’s short stories. His primary intention of doing this was, more than perfectly translating Poe, to first study the composition of a story, and, secondly, to study the construction of his sentences in this hidden manner.’
- Lori Dianne Hitchcock, “The Works of Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, Lectures on Poe, and Their Applications”

Akutagawa’s habit of literary borrowing was, at its worst, little more than plagiarism; however, such instances were not only relatively scarce, but gradually diminished as his career progressed. Of more interest is the manner in which Akutagawa adopted not only the stories, but also themes and literary techniques, of other writers to augment and illustrate his own ideas. As [Donald] Keene writes, ‘Even when a scholar has identified to his own satisfaction the origins of some section of an Akutagawa story, there is generally no question of direct imitation.’ In the case of Akutagawa’s emulation of Poe, this holds particularly true; despite technical, stylistic, and thematic parallels between the works of both authors, the undeniably unique ideas of Akutagawa are apparent throughout his tales.
- Lori Dianne Hitchcock, “The Works of Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, Lectures on Poe, and Their Applications”

Akutagawa, referring to ideas proposed in ‘Letters to Mr. ___,’ [by Edgar Allan Poe] clarifies the nature of Poe’s sense of poetic beauty as being ‘that which brings tears, which is, moreover, melancholic.’ He defines this melancholy as a mixture of ‘beauty and strangeness.’ This is determined as characteristic of not only Poe himself, but of his works as well. Contrasting Poe’s theories concerning poetry and the short story, Akutagawa observes that, for Poe, ‘Truth interferes with the rhyme of a poem; terror, passion, sarcasm, and humor are all the intention of the short story,’ and that ‘beauty cannot be the only aim’ of the short story, ideals reflected in both Poe’s and Akutagawa’s works of prose fiction.
- Lori Dianne Hitchcock, “The Works of Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, Lectures on Poe, and Their Applications”

Many of the things Dazai wrote seem to me to have been gross exaggerations or pure inventions that give the impression of being true…
- Michiko, Dazai’s Wife, found in Self Portraits of Dazai Osamu, page 125

Dazai Osamu, the son of a wealthy and powerful family from north-east Japan, had to go out and [leave everything to find a place in literature]. This he did by engaging in a life of rebellious dissolution that included a number of suicide attempts, three of the suicide pacts with women. The third, in 1948, was a success, if you can call it that. For several years, I lived not far from where this took place. An unthreatening, tree-lined channel called the Tamagawa Canal. It seemed hard to believe that Dazai, Japan’s most popular writer at the time, could have drowned in what amounted to a large drainage ditch. His readers understood the darkness that sucked him down, though, for it was everywhere - in his self-mocking literature, in the charred ruins of the cities, and in the straggling lines of returning, defeated soldiers. The challenge was no to rebuild, but for the weary Dazai, who had carried the burden of hopelessness so jauntily for so long, even the thought of rebuilding must have been overwhelming. The storms had passed, but for the wanderers the physical and spiritual damage remained.
- Theodore W. Goossen, the Introduction to The Oxford Book of Japanese Short Stories

Dazai Osamu’s Suicide Attempts and Success:

• “Several of Dazai’s friends at school, heavily involved in political activities, were suspended or arrested. Dazai later wrote that his own commitment was tarnished by his ‘aristocratic’ background, which made him unqualified to be a communist. This realization, he maintains, led him to attempt suicide by taking drugs in December 1929 [at age 20], his first of at least five such tries, this one not even requiring hospitalization.”

• “It was at this juncture [after his brother Bunji’s death and the Communist Party losing its top leadership to arrests and defections] that Dazai met Tanabe Shimeko, a barmaid at the Hollywood, a Ginza cafe. A week after they met, on November 28 [1930 at age 21], they spent a drunken night at the Teikoku Hotel, and on the evening of the twenty-ninth, they attempted double suicide by drowning near Kamakura. She succeeded, and he did not. He was questioned but released immediately because of his family’s prominence, and with the implicit understanding that he, as a young male of high birth, could not be blamed for the death of a woman, especially a barmaid. Dazai himself said that the most immediate cause for this attempted suicide was his alienation from his family due to the Hatsuyo affair.”

• “On March 15, 1935 [at age 25], after failing an employment exam for a city newspaper, Dazai returned to Kamakura, the scene of his double suicide fiasco in 1930, and, according to his own account, tried to hang himself. With a rope burn to show for it, he returned to Tokyo where he dropped out of the university for good, only to suffer a severe attack of appendicitis two weeks later and to be diagnosed as having symptoms of tuberculosis.”

• “In the spring of 1937 [at age 27], Dazai discovered that during his hospitalization Hatsuyo had been having an affair with an acquaintance of his. A fourth abortive suicide, this time together with Hatsuyo, whose lover had disappeared, too place in March and was followed by a final separation.”

• “Dazai also began seeing Yamazaki Tomie, a war widow who worked in a beauty salon. While with her, he wrote another novel, ‘No Longer Human,’ began his last unfinished work, ‘Good-bye,’ and entertained thoughts of double suicide, which led to both of them dying on June 16, 1948 [three days before Dazai’s thirty-ninth birthday].”
  - Alan Stephen Wolfe, Suicidal Narrative in Modern Japan: The Case of Dazai Osamu

Appropriately enough, given Dazai’s history of suicide attempts, [his] final act is subject to some doubt. There were rumors that Dazai was the victim of a homicide carried out by his lover Tomie. The basis for this theory consisted of unconfirmed reports, denied by the police, that signs of the corpse indicated possible strangulation. There were also said to be traces of geta (wooden clogs) in the sand, indicating that Dazai might have been dragged into the water. The homicide theory is reinforced by the realization that Dazai’s unfinished work, ominously titled in English ‘Good-bye,’ was not a farewell to life, as might lend credence to the suicide theory, but rather a farewell to ‘women.’ Accordingly, it is proposed that Tomie, sensing a separation, might have lured Dazai to his death. He may have gone along unsuspectingly, or he may have let himself be led, and then resisted, only to be subdued by her determination. Presumably, though, he was in a state of health and mind that would not have discouraged compliance. He may also have been drinking. A writer of similar tendencies, Sakaguchi Ango, invoking Dazia’s tendency toward alcoholic depression, called it a ‘hangover suicide.’
- Alan Stephen Wolfe, Suicidal Narrative in Modern Japan: The Case of Dazai Osamu

The impact of Dazai’s death was immediate and profound (the body was discovered on June 19, his thirty-ninth birthday), the news of it precipitating a flood of public eulogies of a most intimate variety. There were few who failed to attach significance to the fact of Dazai’s death coming at this juncture of the postwar period. There were many, especially among the young, whose identification with Dazai was intensified with his death, some to the point of considering or actually committing suicide themselves. For them there was little doubt that Dazai’s death being a deliberate suicide. It seemed reasonable enough, and it was esthetically irresistible, that Dazai should have completed his lifework with his own death. Coming as it did at the peak of his life and career, and at the time of national trauma, Dazai’s apparent suicide provided Japan with a human symbol of despair that set into bold relief the shadow lurking behind the optimism of postwar reconstruction.
- Alan Stephen Wolfe, Suicidal Narrative in Modern Japan: The Case of Dazai Osamu

Another type of critic, reflecting on a sense of futility, yields a transcendent, apostolic Dazai as ‘saint of negativity.’ In sum, the critic invariably relies on a psychological analysis derived from Dazai’s quasi-autobiographical writings… Tracing Dazia’s literary endeavors from his high school days of socialist realism through to his nihilistic novels of the late 1940s, the critical process erects a model of negative sensitivity, a refined esthetic turned against whatever the dominant trend happens to be. Dazai the man, like the historical Buddha, becomes an overdetermined sign, laden with past, future, and transcendent incarnations. Like the cosmic Buddha, Dazai is both extrinsic, as a guide to a wayward, youthful flock, and immanent, within the negativity in each and all of us. As such, he comes to have meaning beyond his actual life and writing, becoming an allegorical hero of revolt, part of a modern myth of negativity. The myth is complex and has important ramifications in contemporary images of Japan, not the least of which is the privileged status of the ‘alienated writer’ as paradigmatic of the modernization process.
- Alan Stephen Wolfe, Suicidal Narrative in Modern Japan: The Case of Dazai Osamu

Akutagawa’s suicide evoked a strong sense of the end of an era among critics of very different persuasions. None were as powerful, however, as Miyamoto Kenji, who explained the universalist nature of Akutagawa’s artistic desperation in Marxist terms. Miyamoto carefully identified the class roots of Akutagawa’s pessimism, although it was his analysis of the bourgeois subject and it totalizing tendency that allowed him to explain the impact of Akutagawa in Japan. To Miyamoto, the petty bourgeoisie’s self-despair had to be ‘the despair of society as a whole… . Akutagawa view[ed] the agony of being born and defined by his physiology and his social class as an eternal agony of humanity.’
- Alan Stephen Wolfe, Suicidal Narrative in Modern Japan: The Case of Dazai Osamu

Let us here juxtapose the two postwar suicides of Dazai and Mishima in order to elicit a problematics of reading postwar Japanese literature and history. Beyond the relational similarity that has suggested this analysis (i.e., that both men were writers, that police dossiers designated them as suicides, and that the reports of their deaths elicited intense emotional reaction throughout Japan), there are also suggestive differences between these two events. First, in terms of public response, although with dissenting minorities on each side, it is possible to discern a predominantly tearful empathy for Dazai in 1948 as against an outraged antipathy for Mishima in 1970. The polarization here is all the more striking when it is seen as a reversal of an idealized system of feudal values, whereby a ‘proper’ samurai death would put to shame a trivial sordid affair involving a lower-class woman. Yet, there can be no question that Dazai’s anguished self-destructive decadence sparked a warm current of sympathy and a sense of loss, whereas Mishima’s ‘theatrical suicide’ elicited an indignant outcry of consternation, emblematized by then Prime Minister of Defense Nakasone’s labeling of him as an ‘enemy of democracy and order’ and Prime Minister Satō’s remark that Mishima had to be ‘mad.’ Second, there is the stark contrast in the approaches to and methods of suicide: Dazai’s death by drowning while drunk coming as an almost anticlimactic denouement to a series of failed suicide attempts, whereas Mishima’s, from all accounts, was planned years in advance to the day and hours with a precision as razor-sharp as the dagger used to perform the seppuku. But above all, what may be said to define the locus of difference here is the nature of the respective life-narratives generating and generated by these two suicides. Mishima’s textualization of death in his writing, no less than the honing of his body through disciplined exercise, is, as it were, authenticated by the obsessive punctuality of his life and death, a punctuality testified to by his manuscripts and letters, as by the already famous anecdote to the effect that he delivered the last installment of his final tetralogy, ‘The Sea of Fertility,’ to his publisher on the very day of his death. The apparent clarity of intent in Mishima renders all the more ambiguous the murky circumstances surrounding Dazai’s death, whose very status as a suicide… was itself subject to doubt. Pair the loose ends of this narrative of suicide with Dazai’s unfinished manuscripts and fragmentary style and we can begin to consider the implications of this polarity for reading the postwar period.
- Alan Stephen Wolfe, Suicidal Narrative in Modern Japan: The Case of Dazai Osamu

Okuno Takeo, perhaps the most eminent of Dazai critics, expresses the complicity of critic with writer when he states that ‘Dazai was for us Jesus bearing the cross of negativity.’ In his classic study ‘Dazai Osamu ron,’ Okuno writes, ‘Dazai resolved to lead a tragic life… . He plotted his own self-destruction, and it was because he was thus in a profound sense so faithful to his time that his life came to seem symbolic of this most unhappy period - the present.’
- Alan Stephen Wolfe, Suicidal Narrative in Modern Japan: The Case of Dazai Osamu

King: It seems, Hamlet, that you are quite unhappy these days. Would like to go to France as well?
Hamlet: Me? Are you kidding? I'm going to Hell. Dazai Osamu, "A New Hamlet"
King: Do you hate me? I'm now your father. Do you despise such a father as myself? Do you detest me? Answer me! In a word is fine. Tell me what you think.
Hamlet: "A little more than kin, and less than kind."
King: What? I couldn't hear you. Don't jet with me. I am asking you a serious question. Please don't give me some silly pun as an answer.
- Dazai Osamu, "A New Hamlet"

Laertes: Instead of napping all of the time, why don't you try to keep in touch with your dear brother while he's in France?
Ophelia: Dost thou doubt my intent to do so?
Laertes: That's an odd way of speaking. Where did you learn to talk like that? It's actually quite irritating.
Ophelia: But my Tsubouchi translation of Shakespeare says...
Laertes: Ah, yes, Tsubouchi - the leading academic of Shakespeare in all of Asia. But sometimes he gets too caught up in fancy words in his translations. 'Dost thou doubt my intent to do so?' Who talks like that? Way over the top.
- Dazai Osamu, "A New Hamlet"

Horatio: You don't mind if I tell you the severest of truths?
Hamlet: Now you're making this out to be something incredibly important. I told you from the beginning that this place is completely safe. That's why I brought you here in the first place.
Horatio: Then I will tell you. Don't be shocked, Lord Hamlet...Our friends at university are spreading rumors about your mental health.
Hamlet: My mental health? Well that's absurd. I thought maybe they would be spreading rumors about me and a girl. But this is ridiculous.
- Dazai Osamu, "A New Hamlet"

I have the misfortune of being by nature incapable of making small talk with strangers, and I was so afraid that this elderly gentleman was going to try to engage me in conversation that I wanted only to get out of there as quickly as possible.
- Dazai Osamu, “A Little Beauty” from Self Portraits

From the dressing room where I was hurriedly putting on my kimono, I could hear the amiable chatter that now commenced in the bath. No doubt the oldsters had felt somewhat ill at ease with a queer fellow like me sitting there…as soon as I was gone they all felt released from the awkward constraint I’d occasioned them, and the conversation began to flow…
- Dazai Osamu, “A Little Beauty” from Self Portraits

I was a hopeless case, incapable of fitting in. Never mind me, I thought bitterly to myself, I’m just weird.
- Dazai Osamu, “A Little Beauty” from Self Portraits

Cats and women - leave them alone and they’ll cry for you; try to get close and they’ll run away.
- Dazai Osamu, “A Little Beauty” from Self Portraits

I suppose you feel secure in your relationship, and trusting your loving bond, are free to say such things to him. But to young people, open affection is more important than unrevealed love.
- Dazai Osamu, “A New Hamlet”

It’d be sinful to try and force his emotions to fit our worldview. we must be delicate with him. It may be that we, especially, must learn from this boy’s sense of purity. We believe that we understand life, but there may be times when we have unknowingly lost something very important.
- Dazai Osamu, “A New Hamlet”

It’s been known to happen that, no matter how much two people love each other, they’ll never know of that love unless they express it with words. I think I understand the opinion of the philosopher who said that men are creatures of words.
- Dazai Osamu, “A New Hamlet”

You must always speak to me with this kind of clarity. I will never be angered by truthful words.
- Dazai Osamu, “A New Hamlet”

All of us say such things when we’re at our wit’s end! We’re all doing our best to survive. Perhaps to you it seems as if we have an abundance of energy and are glowing with confidence, but we feel the same as you!
- Dazai Osamu, “A New Hamlet”

I still believe that one can transform one’s destiny through force of will.
- Dazai Osamu, “A New Hamlet”

Arrogant wings of youth - they seek to flutter with no purpose at all. One struggles excessively, to no end. I think it’s some kind of animal instinct. One howls and groans as various ideals and logic of justice become tied up with this animal instinct.
- Dazai Osamu, “A New Hamlet”

As long as you have the desire to be somebody, you will not fall into decadence. And you don’t have that kind of goal. You are passionate about wanting to see what it is like to fail.
- Dazai Osamu, “A New Hamlet”

Insidious men have some kind of sixth sense.
- Dazai Osamu, “A New Hamlet”

I have a lot of pride. When I think about my recent shameful acts, I want to tear myself apart. I’ve become a man who can’t say a single bad thing about anybody. I’m a coward -
- Dazai Osamu, “A New Hamlet”

I never knew that so many painful things could happen one after another. Suffering breeds suffering, and sighs draw only more sighs from within. Suicide. That’s the only way out. Yes, the only way…
- Dazai Osamu, “A New Hamlet”

I simply don’t like him. I hate him! He’s a nihilist. A libertine. Since we were kids, it was my obligation to play with him, so I know what he’s like. He was a cleaver boy. So precocious! No matter what activity, he mastered it in no time at all - archery, swordplay, riding, and on top of that poetry and theater. It boggled my mind at how adept he was at anything he tried. But he has no true passion. As soon as he masters something, he abandons it. He gets bored with things. I hate people like that. They’re quick to spy out the hearts of others, and then they sit there grinning to themselves with a knowing look. Abominable filth. They’re laughing at how hard the rest of us try. Do you know what we call someone like that? ‘A man of glass talent.’ All pretension.
- Dazai Osamu, “A New Hamlet”

Don’t fail. I don’t mind if you cheat, but just do not fail. If you fail, it will be a blemish upon your name for your entire life. Even when you’re older, and you’ve taken some respectable and important position, people may forget the time you cheated long ago, but they won’t forget that you failed… . A school is, after all, designed for students not to fail. If a student manages to fail at such a place, it means he is being unreasonable and wishes to fail himself. He’s just trying to get attention. He’s rebelling against the teacher. It is vanity. And it is a ridiculous sense of self-righteousness.
- Dazai Osamu, “A New Hamlet”

If one is praised too easily, one will be quickly satisfied.
- Dazai Osamu, “A New Hamlet”

When a person has secrets locked inside, he can’t help but feel that there are ears imbedded in the walls.
- Dazai Osamu, “A New Hamlet”

This sorrow within me feels like it’s rising up to release a massive groan.
- Dazai Osamu, “A New Hamlet”

Something pains me so much now that I would probably be very happy if I were crazy.
- Dazai Osamu, “A New Hamlet”

It’s not as if the world will move according to what I love and detest anyway. You see, there’s nothing I can do other than leave their affairs to themselves.
- Dazai Osamu, “A New Hamlet”

Horatio: Well it's just as silly as a mouse. It's simply...preposterous. Inexcusable. The shame of Denmark. Lord Hamlet, let me tell you. This rumor - it is truly contumelious, weird beyond words, vulgar in its absurdity!
Hamlet: Okay, enough. Lining up all poorly chosen adjectives only serves to annoy me. Did you also join the theater department at Wittenberg?
Horatio: You might say so. I wanted to play the role of a patriotic poet.
- Dazai Osamu, “A New Hamlet”

Which is more frustrating - to have rumors spread about you when there is absolutely no foundation for them, or when maybe there is some reason for them?
- Dazai Osamu, “A New Hamlet”

I’m just as moody as I always was. I would rather be carefree… I just don’t have the self control to do that. I’m not man enough to just sit there and grin while other people make a fool of me.
- Dazai Osamu, “A New Hamlet”

I don’t know what to say. I shall no longer respond.
- Dazai Osamu, “A New Hamlet”

There is no one who knows the true character of a child - no, perhaps his weaknesses - better than the [parent who raised] him. That is because his weaknesses are the exact weaknesses of the [parent].
- Dazai Osamu, “A New Hamlet”

What an unfortunate role you are required to play.
- Dazai Osamu, “A New Hamlet”

Everyone is crowding in on me from all sides, trying to make me a real madman.
- Dazai Osamu, “A New Hamlet”

Some special effort is necessary. I just can’t figure it out. No matter how hard I try I can’t open up to those people about my painful secret. I agonize alone and I can’t sleep at night.
- Dazai Osamu, “A New Hamlet”

I am afraid of them. I have very dark, horrible feelings around them. When I face them, I become a cowering mess. I can’t even speak. It’s not as if they are bad people, necessarily. They are always concerned about me. I understand that. Perhaps they love me very deeply, but I can’t do it. I don’t want to talk to them.
- Dazai Osamu, “A New Hamlet”

I suffered last night. I was saddened. I was so depressed. I could hardly stand it. I cried in bed. I thought that anything and everything was stupid, infuriating, and unbearable. Two problems were entangled in a bizarre way and I could not even begin to deal with them.
- Dazai Osamu, “A New Hamlet”

I’m not allowed to say I suffer at times that suffer? Why is that? All I’m doing all the time is saying what I feel just as I feel it. I’m being honest. I’m really sad, and so I say I’m sad. I’ve gained courage, and so I say I’ve gained courage. there isn’t any trick or gap with the truth. I’m putting everything into my own words.
- Dazai Osamu, “A New Hamlet”

Hamlet: Horatio, stop saying just whatever comes to mind. This is not a problem of old or new. People with a worldly view are always like that. My uncle believes that the real world will bring him fortune. Of course a man like him would have that kind of opinion. I knew that from the very beginning. That’s what causes me suffering. Submission or escape; to keep up the fair-and-square fight or compromise with lies; deception or placation; to be or not to be - which one is better? I don’t know. I don’t know, so it causes me suffering.
Polonius: Twice! You used the word “suffering” twice! You always go right off spouting this philosophical hyperbole and sighing without meaning - all the while maintaining an expression almost like a bad actor - it’s unbecoming.
- Dazai Osamu, “A New Hamlet”

It seems that the unpredictable happens in life all the time.
- Dazai Osamu, “A New Hamlet”

Humans are sorry, pitiful beings. No matter whether we succeed or fail, are intelligent or dimwitted, win or lose: we will harden our expressions and exert our strength, running around sweating from morning to evening, and meanwhile only grow older. I wonder if that is all we were put on this earth to do. What separates us from insects? It’s so stupid. I have lived and worked all my life… but now I realize I am a fool. I have been deceived… They all have deceived me.
- Dazai Osamu, “A New Hamlet”

Starting today I’m going to be a man with courage in his heart. When a person falls to the very depths of suffering - where he can find no escape - he is somehow able to find new courage.
- Dazai Osamu, “A New Hamlet”

What can a weak soul like I accomplish? The people around me pay no attention to my quiet, earnest resolution, and they instead worry incessantly about who won this and who lost that, darting around spending their days with pathetic, small concerns… It seems that I alone have fought for Denmark’s sake and for the sake of the House of Hamlet, only to be pushed downstream like a clump of straw floating in a muddied stream. It’s really ridiculous.
- Dazai Osamu, “A New Hamlet”

He works frivolously all the time to gain the applause of the moment.
- Dazai Osamu, “A New Hamlet”

I am anxious to say exactly what I feel as I feel it, with nothing left out, but my desire to reveal all rushes ahead while my words hesitate, and being so laggard, they cannot accurately express the feelings I have in my heart.
- Dazai Osamu, “A New Hamlet”

The more naked a person’s words are, the more comical, broken, and made-up they sound. When I think about that it makes me extremely sad. My words come out in a sputtering fashion and they may not have any logic to them, but there is true reasoning to what lies within my heart. This fuzzy feeling within my heart is rather complicated and words cannot easily explain it. That is why what I say comes out in fragments, and I am anxious to piece together those fragments so that you can get a sense of the whole, but the more I speak the more I blunder and get myself in trouble.
- Dazai Osamu, “A New Hamlet”

I feel as if the words ‘I’m sorry’ are written in blue ink over every inch of my body, but mysteriously I cannot say those words…
- Dazai Osamu, “A New Hamlet”

Stupid! Stupid, stupid. I am a stupid idiot. For what purpose do I live my life? I get up in the morning, eat, roam about, and then at night I go to sleep. And the whole time all I think about is having a good time. I’ve mastered three foreign languages, but only so that I can read lewd and erotic poems from various countries! My lust for fantasy is five times that of a normal person, and I am ten times as greedy. I’m never satisfied. I need stronger and stronger stimulation. But I’m a coward and a lazybones, so for the most part nothing happens beyond my imagining some excitement. I’m a speculator of the metaphysical. An adventurer only in my mind. A navigator within the reading room. In other words, I’m an insignificant dream-weaver.
- Dazai Osamu, “A New Hamlet”

I am endlessly afraid of people. I am continually awed by them. When people bow to me only out of formality, I think to myself that it is a bow from the heart, and immediately become ecstatic, even with a touch of madness. I feel like I have to pay them back for their expectations, so I act like a hero even though I don’t truly feel anything, and I can’t get things back to normal, and the end result is that everyone thinks me a fool for it.
- Dazai Osamu, “A New Hamlet”

Even if someone says nasty things about me, I don’t recognize their ill will toward me. I feel thankful that they are forcing themselves to say such difficult things for my sake.
- Dazai Osamu, “A New Hamlet”

I can’t even decipher which people are admirable and which are evil. I can’t help thinking that the ones with the sad faces look very admirable. Ah, we’re all so lamentable. Humans are a sorry lot.
- Dazai Osamu, “A New Hamlet”

All my life I’ve never known what scorn or hate or anger or jealousy feel like. I just copy other people and make a show out of hating or despising certain things. In reality, I don’t understand any of it. I have no idea what it feels like to hate someone, to detest someone, to feel jealousy.
- Dazai Osamu, “A New Hamlet”

Of late, human beings seem increasingly pitiful to me and I can hardly stand it anymore. People try to squeeze every drop out of nonexistent wisdom, and yet they only get worse.
- Dazai Osamu, “A New Hamlet”

There are times when one man’s sense of justice may tear apart the peaceful domestic lives of other people. It’s not a matter of who’s wrong in what way. It’s just that humans are made imperfect from the very beginning.
- Dazai Osamu, “A New Hamlet”

Come,
    let us go now.
As I promised so long ago,
    I will protect you, my precious one.
Your place of sleep awaits you,.
    a fine bed for a sweet sleep form which you will never awake.
Now come to my new home,
    in the environs six feet below.
Walk earnestly and with a single mind and you will find it at the end of the road.
Now let us go
    and fulfill our past promises.
- Dazai Osamu, “A New Hamlet”

A person’s fate cannot be predicted for even a moment into the future. One does not have a clue what will happen to oneself. Until now I had believed that one could steer one’s destiny using force of will, but I see that there is in fact something called the Whimsy of God.
- Dazai Osamu, “A New Hamlet”

I can forgive the evil in a human being, but I cannot pardon the foolishness in him. Stupidity is the greatest sin.
- Dazai Osamu, “A New Hamlet”

These guys are pretty slick characters. When I say ‘slick’ I mean shallow, dull men who are pitiful, vulgar and always making stingy calculations. Even if we see through them, but just look on despising them and sitting there with self-satisfaction, we’ll be in real trouble. If we aren’t prepared, we’ll truly be done in. They are such a despicable bunch that we’d like to simply ignore them or look down on what they do, but we can’t let up our guard.
- Dazai Osamu, “A New Hamlet”

Do they have to go to these lengths in order to fool us? On our end, we trust them and feel close to them, and even respect them, and so all the time we’re letting our guard down and smiling for them, but for their part they don’t open their hearts to us, and they’re constantly on guard plotting one thing or another…
- Dazai Osamu, “A New Hamlet”

People’s hearts are really so trivial. they bend easily to the left and right like grass that is blown by the wind.
- Dazai Osamu, “A New Hamlet”

I know, you’re suffering, but you’re not the only one in agony. I also understand the deep sadness of a sunset. Let’s both bear our pain and keep on living. At least keep on living a little while longer, even if for only my sake. There are tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people who entertain thoughts about wanting to die, who instead decide to hide away and live their lives.
- Dazai Osamu, “A New Hamlet”

You are so fickle with your thoughts. Even if you speak so horribly about him today, tomorrow you may praise him to the skies.
- Dazai Osamu, “A New Hamlet”

It seems you’re not satisfied unless you always make yourself the protagonist in some tragedy.
- Dazai Osamu, “A New Hamlet”

There are no enemies but those you create in your own imagination.
- Dazai Osamu, “A New Hamlet”

I know far too well my own corruption and imperfections, so I have no place to position myself.
- Dazai Osamu, “A New Hamlet”

They said that it takes one to know one. The reason I can point out a person's evil nature is because I have that same evil nature within me.
- Dazai Osamu, “A New Hamlet”

The reason…is not because I disdain or hate them. I don’t have the right to do that. But I do always regret being betrayed and abandoned by them. I trust and with all of my heart respect them, but they incomprehensibly put their guard up against me and deal with me in an attitude of strained and nervous laughter - as if they were touching something filthy.
- Dazai Osamu, “A New Hamlet”

Why is it that they hate me so? I have always loved them. Loved, loved, loved them. I have offered my life to them. But they avoid me, and in the shadows they hiss their criticisms of me: ‘What a troublemaker, a spoiled brat,’ they sigh and moan as if they are so above it all.
- Dazai Osamu, “A New Hamlet”

You really are good at evading the issue. If I say one thing, then you say another. If I say you’re conceited, then this time you say there is no man who lives as wretchedly as you do - the exact opposite. If you really do so clearly know what parts of you are bad, then instead of just ridiculing yourself and putting yourself down, why don’t you keep silent and dedicate yourself to improving those bad parts of your character? There is no point in simply sneering at your own qualities.
- Dazai Osamu, “A New Hamlet”

When people really love someone, they end up not wanting to force themselves to say words of love. They feel confident that their love will be transmitted bit by bit to the person they love. The one who loves has the humble pride that the beloved will one day realize that they are loved, even if no words are uttered.
- Dazai Osamu, “A New Hamlet”

…a ne’er-do-well such as [him] will bungle things up whenever good fortune smiles upon him. People like him become fidgety and sheepish at the sudden appearance of fortune. They quibble over this and that, then get angry and drive off the luck that has befallen them. ‘Good luck brings bad,’ [he] declared, a somber look on his face.
- Dazai Osamu, “A Poor Man’s Got His Pride” from Crackling Mountain and Other Stories

When he stands to gain, even if it’s only a trifle, the fainthearted man becomes so perplexed that he cringes and sweats. But he seems transformed when threatened with a loss, mustering fine-sounding arguments and striving to deprive himself. He won’t listen to reason, either; he just keeps on quibbling.
- Dazai Osamu, “A Poor Man’s Got His Pride” from Crackling Mountain and Other Stories

One night, in the course of riding a bicycle through the streets of the town, drunk, I suffered an injury. The skin above my right ankle was split open. The wound wasn’t deep, but, because I’d been drinking, the bleeding was frightful, and I made a frantic dash to the doctor’s. The town doctor was a portly man of thirty-two…He was very drunk. When he wobbled into the consultation room in a condition that clearly rivaled mine, it struck me as terribly funny, and as he treated my wound I began to giggle. The doctor soon joined in, and before long we were laughing uncontrollably.
- Dazai Osamu, “A Promise Fulfilled” from Self Portraits

I have many other vivid memories of Mishima, but I’ll save them for another time. “Romanesque,” the piece I wrote that summer, was praised by a few people, and it has been my fate ever since, in spite of utter lack of belief in myself, to carry on with my clumsy attempts at writing. Mishima is a place I’ll never forget. The impact that summer had on my life was such that it would scarcely be an exaggeration to say that all the work I’ve done since has been the result of what I learned there.
- Dazai Osamu, “Alt Heidelberg” from Blue Bamboo and Other Stories

Ah, what is this world but a realm of meaningless suffering?
- Dazai Osamu, “Blue Bamboo” from Blue Bamboo and Other Stories

Inscrutable are the ways of heaven. Bestir yourself and leap back into the fray. In our seventy years of life, no one knows what might occur. Every ebb has its flow. The heart of a man is as changeable as the storm tossed waves…
- Dazai Osamu, “Blue Bamboo” from Blue Bamboo and Other Stories

People born to misery are destined to remain forever in misery.
- Dazai Osamu, “Blue Bamboo” from Blue Bamboo and Other Stories

Human beings must suffer through their entire lives amid the love and hate that rule their world. There is no escape. All you can do is endure. Endure and struggle, struggle and endure.
- Dazai Osamu, “Blue Bamboo” from Blue Bamboo and Other Stories

…if it had been me, I’m quite sure I would have seen to it that the culprit did not remain among the living. I am three or four times as vengeful as the average man and, in seeking my vengeance, can be five or six times as ruthless.
- Dazai Osamu, “Canis familiaris” from Self Portraits

I have some grasp of human psychology, and have been known to predict the behavior of people with a certain degree of precision, but canine psychology is a lot more difficult. To what extent does human speech facilitate emotional interaction between man and dog? that’s question number one. If words are in fact of no use whatsoever, then neither party has any choice but to read the other’s gestures and expressions. Tail movement, for example, is crucial. But if you observe closely, you’ll find that these movements of the tail are extremely complex and by no means easy to interpret.
- Dazai Osamu, “Canis familiaris” from Self Portraits

The frivolous hypothesis that to be loved is never unpleasant, however unpleasant the one who loves you, simply doesn’t hold up in real life. There are times when your pride, your feelings, will not tolerate that love.
- Dazai Osamu, “Canis familiaris” from Self Portraits

Artists are supposed to be on the side of the underdog…The artist is a friend to the weak. That’s his first motivation and his ultimate goal.
- Dazai Osamu, “Canis familiaris” from Self Portraits

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?
- Dazai Osamu, “Cherries” from Self Portraits

Life is an awful ordeal. So many chains to bind you. Try to move an inch and the blood comes spurting out.
- Dazai Osamu, “Cherries” from Self Portraits

If you tried to develop it, it would do no good. A girl's literary talent is a very limited thing. A big fuss is made over a little flash in the pan, and the rest of her life is ruined because of it. Even Kazuko is afraid of that. The best life for a girl is to get married like everybody else and be a good mother. You people are trying to use her to satisfy your own vanity and ambition.
- Dazai Osamu, “Chiyojo” from A Late Chrysanthemum: Twenty-one Stories from the Japanese

I don’t know, but I think very badly of myself. Even as I say that, in a corner of my heart something stubborn that trusts in itself, that says there is one good thing in me somewhere, darkly and firmly coils its roots. More and more, I don’t understand. Now I feel something absolutely oppressive and unbearable, as if my head was stuck in a rusty pot. Truly, my head’s not right. It really is not.
- Dazai Osamu, “Chiyojo” from A Late Chrysanthemum: Twenty-one Stories from the Japanese

I couldn’t tell where Kasuga-cho was, and even when I asked some people in the fields they said they didn’t know of such a place. I was ready to cry. It was a hot day. Finally, I asked a man of about forty who was walking along pulling a bicycle cart full of empty cider bottles. Giving me a lonely smile, the man stopped and wiped the sweat that streamed down his face with a mouse-gray dirty towel. ‘Kasuga-cho, Kasuga-cho,’ he muttered to himself several times. Then he said: ‘Kasuga-cho is very far away. From the Nerima Station over there you have to take the eastbound line to Ikebukuro. There you change to the municipal railway. When you get to Shinjuku, you change to the inbound Tokyo line and get off at a place called Suidobashi.’ This terribly long itinerary, which he painstakingly explained to me in broken Japanese, seemed to be the way to get to the Kasuga-cho in Hongo. Listening to the man, I could tell right away that he was Korean, but I was all the more grateful because of that. My heart became full. A Japanese person, even though he knows, thinks it’s too much bother and pretends not to know, but this Korean mN, even though he didn’t know and the sweat was pouring down his face, did his honest best to try and tell me the way. ‘Thank you, thank you, sir,’ I said. And then, as the man had told me, I went to Nerima Station, changed back to the city-bound line and came home.
- Dazai Osamu, “Chiyojo” from A Late Chrysanthemum: Twenty-one Stories from the Japanese

For a whole hour, as if giving me a stern talking-to, [Mr. Sawada] praised me at the top of his voice. I began to be short of breath, and it got all misty and dark in front of my eyes. It was an awful feeling, as if my body was turning to stone. Because I knew that even if I was praised this much I was not worth it. I only worried about how painful it would be, how ashamed I would be when, after this, I wrote an inept composition and was laughed at by everyone. I didn’t even want to go on living.
- Dazai Osamu, “Chiyojo” from A Late Chrysanthemum: Twenty-one Stories from the Japanese

You are lacking in sincerity. No matter how much talent a person has, if he does not have sincerity, he will never succeed in anything.
- Dazai Osamu, “Chiyojo” from A Late Chrysanthemum: Twenty-one Stories from the Japanese

But never fear. I gave this a lot of thought, and the answer is clear to me now. It’s only natural that there was nothing manly about the rabbit’s way of doing things, because the rabbit wasn’t a man. This is definitive; there can be no question about it. The rabbit was a sixteen-year-old-maiden….and it is precisely this sort of woman that is the cruelest of human types…A maiden’s fury is bitter to the root. She knows no mercy, particularly for the ugly and stupid.
- Dazai Osamu, “Click-Clack Mountain” from Otogizoshi

     I led him to the back room, which I used as my study.
    ‘I’m afraid it’s in a bit of a mess,’ I said.
    ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he answered tolerantly. ‘Scholars’ rooms are always like pigsties. I used to know quite a few of you bookworms in my Tokyo days.’
- Dazai Osamu, “Courtesy Call” in Modern Japanese Stories: An Anthology

Until now, rather than admire the much-vaunted patience of [the men I had read about in school books on moral training], I had always tended to despise it as concealing an arragonant sense of superiority; my sympathy had, in fact, been on the side of the so-called rogues, whose behavior was at least natural and unpretentious. But now unexpectedly I found myself in the role of Kimura, Kanzai, and Kanshin. All of a sudden I knew the sense of isolation which they too must have felt when being attacked. It occurred to me that these didactic stories should be classified not under the usual headings of ‘Forbearance’ or ‘Great Men and Little Men,’ but, rather, under ‘Loneliness.’ At the same time I perceived that forbearance really had very little to do with the matter. It was simply that these ‘great men’ were weaker than their assailants and knew that they would not stand a chance if it came to a fight.
- Dazai Osamu, “Courtesy Call” in Modern Japanese Stories: An Anthology

At the moment I don’t know whether I’m dead or alive. Better to go up in smoke than have this doubtful feeling.
- Dazai Osamu, “Currency” from Dazai Osamu: Selected Stories and Sketches

A person of genuine feeling cannot rejoice so long as one other person is wretched. But the general run of people, merely to obtain brief comfort for themselves or families, will abuse, deceive, and shove aside their neighbors. (Yes, dear reader, you were guilty once too. How frightening that you were unaware of it. You should be ashamed. As long as you’re human, you should be ashamed. After all, shame is something humans alone can feel.)
- Dazai Osamu, “Currency” from Dazai Osamu: Selected Stories and Sketches

Of course, but I’ve got to live. And I have this feeling that artistic works must bow before society and beg its indulgence. I don’t write for fun. If I could afford that, I would never have written a word. Once I start, I realize the work will turn out well. But I wonder beforehand whether it’s really worth the effort, and I make such a fuss examining the project from every angle that I never get started. That’s why I don’t accomplish anything.
- Dazai Osamu, “Das Gemeine” from Dazai Osamu: Selected Stories and Sketches

To be sure, since childhood I have been mostly concerned about doing things right and proper. It’s not that my soul is so serious but that I’m just stiff and awkward and never have been able to be innocent and lighthearted and easy with people. That’s why I always lose out. Maybe it’s because my emotions are too deep.
- Dazai Osamu, “December 8th”

My husband makes his living by writing novels. He’s not very dedicated, and so he doesn’t bring in much of an income, just enough for us to get by from day to day. What kinds of things he writes, I can’t even imagine, because I do my best not to read the stories he writes. He’s apparently not very good.
- Dazai Osamu, “December 8th”

My husband’s patriotism somehow goes to extremes. The other day, he said that no matter how tough those foreigners acted, they probably wouldn’t even dare taste this salted fish-guts conserve, whereas we can eat any Western food at all; and he seemed to take some weird pride in that.
- Dazai Osamu, “December 8th”

As I cleared up the kitchen, I thought about various things. Different eye color, hair color—is that enough to arouse this much hostility? I want to smash them to pieces. When China was the other side, it felt totally different. Really—I thought of those cruel, beastly American soldiers meandering all over our dear, beautiful Japanese soil, and the very thought was unbearable. If you dare even set foot on our sacred soil, your feet will rot off, for sure. You’re not qualified to be here. Oh, our pure soldiers of Japan—you’ve got to beat them all to a pulp. From here on, as things get scarce, even in our homes we’ll probably have quite a hard time of it. But don’t worry about us. We don’t mind. You’ll never hear us saying how much we hate it all. You won’t find us pitying ourselves and whining about how horrid it is to be born at a time like this. Instead, I even feel that being born into this world gives us a reason for living. I think it’s great that we were born into such a world.
- Dazai Osamu, “December 8th”

"Even the brightest of you may not understand the agony of a writer who, feeling terribly ashamed of his work, sends it to a magazine as a duty to live in this world... It was a bad piece of work. On the surface, I was pretending to be honest, but underneath, I could see that it was crawling with the filthy worms of compromise."
- Dazai Osamu, "Derelict Student"

Someone put a live snake in my mailbox. Outrageous.  Must be the work of someone mocking unpopular writers who check their mailboxes twenty times a day. Out of whack now, spent the whole day in bed.
- Dazai Osamu, “Diary of Distress” or “Angst Journal”

Inheritance was apparently 1.5m yen. No clue how much is left now. Kicked out eight years ago. Managed to live until now thanks to my brother. But what now? Never even dreamed of having to earn own living expenses. No choice but death if this goes on. On this day, for all your impure acts, it serves you right, shitty writer of shitty books.
- Dazai Osamu, “Diary of Distress” or “Angst Journal”

Cannot go to the toilet on my own at night.  A small-headed boy of 15 or 16 in a white yukata stands behind me. Feel like just turning around is putting life on the line lately. Definitely a small-headed boy there. Yamagishi Gaishi says it’s because of something unspeakably cruel one of my ancestors did five or six generations ago. Perhaps so.
- Dazai Osamu, “Diary of Distress” or “Angst Journal”

The fact that a certain story depicts a rather dissipated young man does not, it seems to me, justify calling it an example of “decadent” literature. I have always written stories that might best be described as idealistic. I’m perfectly serious. I may very well be an idealist of sorts. Sadly, however, the words and deeds of idealists are generally regarded as somewhat suspect, or even comical, in the eyes of the world. Consider Don Quixote. Nowadays his name is nothing more than a synonym for “fool.” But whether he was or was not a fool is something only another idealist can say for certain. No one who has not cast off his own fortune and position in life for the sake of some lofty ideal and leaped headlong into the fray can ever understand the heartrending sorrow of Don Quixote. Somewhere out there, I suspect, are a few self-righteous old boys who would rather not hear this.
- Dazai Osamu, “Down with Decadence”

I left on the first morning of a two-day holiday, wearing my school uniform and cap. The outfit was shabby enough, in keeping with higher school tradition, but I wasn’t ashamed of it. I fancied that I rather resembled Kan'ichi-san, the lovelorn student of novels and plays and that my clothes were the most fitting, the most romantic attire for going to meet, at long last, the elegant little geisha girl whose image I’d kept in my heart over the months and years. I deliberately ripped one of the buttons from my jacket, hoping to give the impression of one whom love had left haggard and weary, and a wee bit wild.
- Dazai Osamu, “Down with Decadence”

My romanticism meant nothing to the woman, however. She said she couldn’t stay because she was “soiled.” I misunderstood her meaning, and her words had a tremendous impact on me. I edged still closer to her. “What are you talking about?” I said. “I’m not the same person I was either. I’m a mass of scars! I know you’ve suffered. Well, so have I. I’m soiled, too! You needn’t feel inferior because of some dark cloud in your past!” There was even a sob in my voice… . The real reason she left never occurred to me. I was convinced it was because she was ashamed of her status as a fallen woman. Now, of course, I realize what she meant about being “soiled”.
- Dazai Osamu, “Down with Decadence”

Doctors frequently make mistakes, however. In fact, they’re mistaken more often than not. I’ve never been one to put undue faith in anything doctors say.
- Dazai Osamu, “Early Light” from Self Portraits

A woman of twenty-seven or twenty-eight is in some ways more mature than a man forty or more.
- Dazai Osamu, “Early Light” from Self Portraits

      My wife and her sister, tired as they were, seemed unable to sleep and were quietly discussing what we should do.
      “Hey, there’s nothing to worry about,” I told them. “We’ll all go to my family’s place up north. Everything will 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 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 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.”
- Dazai Osamu, “Early Light” from Self Portraits

Every indication was that I was being taken for a fool. Perhaps it was my clothing.
- Dazai Osamu, “Eight Scenes from Tokyo” from Self Portraits

When you’re defeated, I thought, it’s time to die.
- Dazai Osamu, “Eight Scenes from Tokyo” from Self Portraits

I composed my last will and testament, my suicide note. One hundred pages that I entitled “Memories.” “Memories” is now considered my maiden work. I wanted to set down, without the least ornamentation, all the evil I’d done since childhood. This was in the autumn of my twenty-fourth year. I sat in the cottage gazing out at an abandoned garden overgrown with weeds, utterly devoid of the ability to laugh or smile. It was, once again, my intention to die. Call it affectation if you will. I was full of myself. I regarded life as a drama. Or, rather, I regarded drama as life. I was no longer of use to anyone…I hadn’t a single thing to live for. I resolved that I, as one of the fools, one of the doomed, would faithfully play out the role in which fate had cast me, the sad, servile role of one who must inevitably lose…I had written my suicide note, the testament of my infancy and boyhood, the first-hand account of a hateful child, but that testament, rather than freeing me, became a burning obsession that cast a faint light into the empty darkness. I couldn’t die yet. “Memories” alone wasn’t enough. Having revealed that much, I now wanted to set it all down, to make a clean breast of my entire life until then, to confess everything. But there seemed no end to it. First, I wrote about the [double suicide] at Kamakura,  No good. That didn’t say it all, somehow. I wrote another piece, and still I was unsatisfied. I sighed and began another. It was a series of little commas; the final period never came.
- Dazai Osamu, “Eight Scenes from Tokyo” from Self Portraits

But life, as it turned out, wasn’t a drama. No one knows for sure what will happen in the second act. The character tagged for destruction sometimes stays around till the final curtain.
- Dazai Osamu, “Eight Scenes from Tokyo” from Self Portraits

It was a series of little commas; the final period never came. I was already being devoured by that ever-beckoning demon. Trying to empty the sea with a teacup.
- Dazai Osamu, “Eight Scenes from Tokyo” from Self Portraits

To deceive someone who trusts you is to enter a hell that can take you to the brink of madness.
- Dazai Osamu, “Eight Scenes from Tokyo” from Self Portraits

I could see the foul and ugly hell that awaited me were I to go on making a pretense of perseverance in the name of some empty humanitarian ideal.
- Dazai Osamu, “Eight Scenes from Tokyo” from Self Portraits

This is my farewell look at the world
Standing at the gate in moonlight
Miles of withered fields/Lingering pines.
- Dazai Osamu, “Eight Scenes from Tokyo” from Self Portraits

People do not necessarily think and consider in a prescribed way before choosing the path they’ll walk. For the most part they simply wander, at some point, into a different meadow.
- Dazai Osamu, “Eight Scenes from Tokyo” from Self Portraits

I wasn’t writing suicide notes now: I was writing in order to live. A certain mentor of mine encouraged me. When everyone else ridiculed and despised me, that one writer alone quietly, consistently, gave me his support. I had to repay him for his priceless trust he’d placed in me.
- Dazai Osamu, “Eight Scenes from Tokyo” from Self Portraits

But I discovered that, for me, what might become art was not the scenery of Tokyo, but the ‘I’ inside the scenery. Had I been deluded by art? Had I deluded art? Conclusion: Art is 'I.’
- Dazai Osamu, “Eight Scenes from Tokyo” from Self Portraits

We waited a long time for T.’s unit to show up. Ten o’clock, eleven, twelve … Still they hadn’t arrived. Sightseeing buses full of schoolgirls passed by. On the door of each bus was a piece of paper with the name of the girls’ school written on it. I saw the name of a school back home. As far as I knew, my eldest brother’s daughter was a student there. she might be ion that bus, I thought. Maybe, as the bus passed, she was gazing innocently at the figure of her idiot uncle standing stolid and impassive before that famous Tokyo landmark, the main gate of Zōjō-ji, without realizing who it was. Twenty or so such buses came and went, and each time one passed, the lady tour guide would point in my direction and launch into an explanation. I feigned indifference at first, then tried a few poses. I folded my arms in a casual manner reminiscent of the statue of Balzac, and it was then that I began to feel as if I myself had become on of the famous landmarks of Tokyo.
- Dazai Osamu, “Eight Scenes from Tokyo” from Self Portraits

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” from The Saga of Dazai Osamu

My breathing grew faint, and even the doctor gave up on me. But true to my deep, evil fate, little by little I began to recover.
- Dazai Osamu, “Eight Views of Tokyo” from The Saga of Dazai Osamu

The literary establishment at that time pointed its finger at me and gave its critique: ‘Talent, but no virtue’; but I myself believe that it was, 'the bud of virtue, and yet no talent.’ I had nothing of what they call literary genius in me. I knew no other way but to go on crashing into things.
- Dazai Osamu, “Eight Views of Tokyo” from The Saga of Dazai Osamu

Now, there are many things one can present as explanations for a man’s turning point - age, war, shake-up of historical perspective, hatred of laziness, humility toward literature, recognition that there is a God - but they are all inadequate somehow. No matter how great a degree of precision such explanation hope to achieve, somewhere one can sense a crack, and the scent of a fiction comes through. Maybe this is because people do not always choose a path by considering this, contemplating that. Many times, a man simply finds himself walking in a different field before he realizes it.
- Dazai Osamu, “Eight Views of Tokyo” from The Saga of Dazai Osamu

I had associated with my younger friends without any consideration at all for such things as their age. It was not possible for me to sympathize with or favor those friends just because they were young. Within me there was no room to indulge in favoritism. I wanted to esteem all of my friends without distinctions of youth or age. I wanted to associate through a sense of respect.
- Dazai Osamu, “Fallen Flowers”

      At the time I received it, I had no way of knowing that the XX unit was the noble unit defending Attu Island. I knew of Attu Island, but since I could not have any premonition of Mita [Junji]’s heroic death, I was not especially startled upon encountering the name of the XX unit. I was moved by the lines on Mita’s postcard.
      Are you well? I am inquiring from over the distant horizon. I arrived at my post safely. Please lay down your life for the sake of great literature. I too will die, for the sake of this war.
      Mita’s expression, ‘please lay down your life’, was indescribably precious to me and I was extremely grateful and happy. I thought that this was indeed an expression that could only be uttered by a true son of Japan.
- Dazai Osamu, “Fallen Flowers”

Although I say that I do not understand poetry, I am the sort who spends day and night searching for true composition. This is different from the case of a complete illiterate - I believe I partially understand. Even at the time Yamagishi had said ‘He is good. He may be the best’, I had felt embarrassed at my ignorance and yet in the bottom of my heart I had stubbornly hesitated and wondered, ‘Is that so?’ I seem to have a provincial stubbornness and I have a tendency not be believe people until they unfold clear proof before my eyes. There’s a side to my character similar to Thomas’s - who to the end kept on doubting Christ’s resurrection. It is a bad trait. A stubbornness which leads one to say such things as ‘Except I shall see in His hands the print of the nails, and put my finger into the print of the nails, and thrust my hand into His side, I will not believe,’ is quite hopeless. I am also a good-natured person and have a streak of naivete. By no means am I a completely stubborn person like Thomas was, but still I have something of the temperament that will, if I am careless, probably turn me into an odd old crank after I grow old. Frankly, I could not believe Yamagishi’s judgement altogether. The misgiving ‘Is that so?’ had remained in my heart.
- Dazai Osamu, “Fallen Flowers”

I esteem poets. If they are genuine poets I believe that they are above humanity and that they are surely heavenly beings. Therefore, I expect a great deal from the poets of the world, and this is why I am usually disappointed.
- Dazai Osamu, “Fallen Flowers”

… The three of us discussed the posthumous manuscript collection at my house.
    I asked Yamagishi, ‘Should we publish all [Mita’s] poems?’
    ‘Well, that would probably be a good idea.’
    I was still slightly opposed and said, ‘The early ones were not too good, but…’ It was my habitual provincial stubbornness. I must be the son of an old crank.
    Yamagishi smiled sardonically, ‘You would say that.’ Then he suddenly seemed to understand. ‘Well, one shouldn’t die before Dazai, should he? There is no telling what would be said about him.’
- Dazai Osamu, “Fallen Flowers”

To love someone is to put your life on the line. I don’t take it lightly.
- Dazai Osamu, “Female” from Self Portraits

I heard a sound like water flowing behind me. It was only a faint sound, but a chill ran down my spine. The woman had quietly turned over in bed…‘Let’s die,’ I said…The following afternoon the woman and I attempted suicide. She was neither a geisha nor a painter. She was a girl from a poor background…She was killed simply because she turned over in bed. I didn’t die. Seven years have passed and I’m still alive.
- Dazai Osamu, “Female” from Self Portraits

That’s where you’re wrong,“ [my brother] said. "I guess you’re not capable of writing it. You ought to study the adult world a bit more. But then, you’re the unlearned man of letters, aren’t you.”…The Japanese writers my brother seems to respect at the moment are Nagai Kafuu and Tanizaki Jun'ichirō.
- Dazai Osamu, “Garden” from Self Portraits

      My brother began weeding his garden. I lent a hand.
      “When I was young,” he said, pulling up a clump of weeds, “I thought an overgrown garden had a certain charm of its own, but since I’ve gotten older, it bothers me to see so much as a single weed out here.”
      I wondered if that meant that I, even at my age, was still young. I still like old, untended gardens overgrown with weeds.
- Dazai Osamu, “Garden” from Self Portraits

Man are strange creatures.
- Dazai Osamu, “Garden” from Self Portraits

Though I continue to wage my solitary battle, I can now no longer deny that I seemed destined to lose, and loneliness and sorrow overwhelm me.
- Dazai Osamu, “Handsome Devils and Cigarettes” from Self Portraits

The other day I was in a certain shop drinking cheap liquor when three elderly men of letters came in and, though I’d never met any of them before, proceeded to surround me and to disparage my writing in a disgustingly drunken and thoroughly misinformed manner. I am one who, however much he may drink, hates to lose control of himself, so I merely smiled and let their abuse go in one ear and out the other, but once I’d returned home, as I sat eating a late supper, the vexation became too much for me and I suddenly began to sob. Unable to stop the flow of tears, I lay down by my bowl and chopsticks and brokenly unburdened my feelings to my wife. “Here I am … her I am, writing desperately … writing for all I’m worth, putting my very life on the line for my writing, and everybody treats me like a laughingstock … Those men are my seniors, they’re a good twenty years older than I am, but what do they do? They gang up on me … Cowardly bastards. It’s not fair … all right, then, if that’s the way they want it, I’m not holding back any more, either. I’m going to come right out in the open and say what I think of them. I’m going to fight … They’ve gone too far this time …”
- Dazai Osamu, “Handsome Devils and Cigarettes” from Self Portraits

      A young reporter from a certain magazine sat facing me and said the strangest thing.
      “Would you like to go to Ueno to see the bums?”
      “Bums?”
      “We’d like to photograph you with them.”
      “With the bums?”
      “Yes,” he said calmly.
      Why would they choose me in particular? Perhaps it’s a matter of free association: “Dazai.” “Bum.” “Bums.” “Dazai.”
-Dazai Osamu, “Handsome Devils and Cigarettes”

      When I received the photos, I called my wife over to take a look.
      “These are 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 honestly mistook me for a bum.
- Dazai Osamu, “Handsome Devils and Cigarettes” from Self Portraits

All my life I’ve had this vulgar, detestable ability to sniff out a shameful emotion. One look and I can spot a weakness.
- Dazai Osamu, “Hear My Plea” from Akutagawa and Dazai: Instances of Literary Adaptation

All my life I’ve had this vulgar, detestable ability to sniff out a shameful emotion. One look and I can spot a weakness.
- Dazai Osamu, “Heed My Plea” from Crackling Mountain and Other Stories

Pain: a night of submission, a morning of resignation. Is this life a mere effort at resignation? An endurance of wretchedness? Day after day, my youth is thus gnawed away; and happiness - I have found it in wretched quarters.
- Dazai Osamu, “I Can Speak”

My song having lost its voice, I lived in in idleness in Tokyo for a while, and then, quietly, I began to write something - not a song, but as it were a ‘murmur of life’; thus I was little by little led by my work to realize how my writing should proceed. ‘Guess this is about the sort of thing…’ -in this way I picked up a little something like confidence…
- Dazai Osamu, “I Can Speak”

The more I try to tell people I’m innocent, the more they won’t believe me. When I meet someone, they keep their distance. Even if I stop by just to see their face and say hello, they give me this look as if to say, ‘What did you come here for?’ It’s a terrible feeling. It’s gotten so bad I don’t want to go anywhere anymore.
- Dazai Osamu, “Lantern”

My life on a bed of nails went by one day at a time, and now I’m extremely lonely.
- Dazai Osamu, “Lantern”

Sorrowful songs are the salvation of sorrow-filled hearts.
- Dazai Osamu, “Lanterns of Romance” from Blue Bamboo and Other Stories

As long as one is capable of believing that one is qualified to receive the love of others, one feels that life is worth living, and the world is a wonderful place. But even if one should discover that one no longer has the necessary qualifications to be loved by others, one must continue to live on. Even if one is not ‘qualified to be loved,’ one is eternally ‘qualified to love.’ To seek only the joy of being adored is to surrender to savagery and ignorance.
- Dazai Osamu, “Lanterns of Romance” from Blue Bamboo and Other Stories

When one is in agony one prays to God, but in the mad delirium of despair, one may be willing even to cling to the devil.
- Dazai Osamu, “Lanterns of Romance” from Blue Bamboo and Other Stories

It would seem that the more irresponsible and crafty one is, the more likely one is to have a talent for storytelling.
- Dazai Osamu, “Lanterns of Romance” from Blue Bamboo and Other Stories

     In the September issue of Bungei Shunju you wrote of me disparagingly: “… After all, ‘The Flowers of Buffoonery’ is full of the life and the literary views of its author, but it seems to me that there is an unpleasant cloud surrounding the author’s personal life at present, and, regrettably, this prevents his talent from being expressed as it should be.”
    Let us not bandy inept lies. When, standing in the front of a bookshop, I read the words you had written, I was deeply aggrieved. From the way you had written, it was quite as if you alone had decided who should and should not receive the Akutagawa Prize. This was not your writing. Without doubt, someone had made you write this. What is more, you were even exerting yourself to make this obvious.
    … at the end of August, I stood in a bookshop, read a copy of Bungei Shunju, and discovered what you had written: “… an unpleasant cloud surrounding the author’s personal life at present…” etc. etc. To tell the truth, I burned with rage. For many nights I found it hard to sleep on this account.
      Is breeding exotic birds and going to see the dance, Mr Kawabata, really such an exemplary lifestyle? I’ll stab him! That is what I thought. The man’s an utter swine, I thought. But then, suddenly, I felt the twisted, hot, passionate love that you bore towards me – a love such as that of Nellie in Dostoyevsky’s The Insulted and the Injured – fill me to my very core. It can’t be! It can’t be! I shook my head in denial. But your love, beneath your affected coldness – violent, deranged, Dostoyevskian love – made my body burn as with fever. And, what’s more, you did not know a thing about it.
- Dazai Osamu, “Letter to Kawabata Yusanari”

… a writer lives in the midst of absurdity and imperfection.
- Dazai Osamu, “Letter to Kawabata Yusanari”

From the time I was five or six years old my memories become quite definite. Around that time a maid named Také taught me how to read. She really wanted me to learn, and we read all kinds of books together. Since I was a sickly child, I often read in bed. When we ran out of books, Také would bring back an armful from places like the village Sunday school and have me read them. I learned to read silently too. That’s why I could finish one book after another without getting tired.
- Dazai Osamu, “Memories” from Crackling Mountain and Other Stories

The compositions I wrote for school were mostly hokum. I tried to portray myself as a model boy, for I believed people would applaud me for that. I even plagiarized. The essay entitled ‘My Younger Brother’s Silhouette’ was a masterpiece according to my teacher, but I actually lifted it word for word from a selection of prize stories in a magazine for youngsters. The teacher had me make a clean copy with a brush and enter the work in a contest. When a bookish classmate found out what I had done, I prayed that he would die.
- Dazai Osamu, “Memories” from Crackling Mountain and Other Stories

A busy man, my father was seldom at home. Even when he was, he usually didn’t bother about his children. I once wanted a fountain pen like his, but was too afraid to ask for one. After wrestling with the problem, I fell back on pretending to talk in my sleep. Lying in bed one evening, I kept murmuring, Fountain pen … fountain pen … Father was talking with a guest in the next room, and my words were meant for him. Needless to say, they never reached his ear, let alone his heart.
- Dazai Osamu, “Memories” from Crackling Mountain and Other Stories

Everyone kept saying that I was the ugliest boy in the family. And if they had known how fussy I was about my clothes, they would surely have had a good laugh at my expense. I pretended not to care about my appearance, and this seemed to do the trick. I gave the impression of being dull and uncouth, no doubt about it. At mealtime by brothers and I sat on the floor, a tray before each of us. Grandmother and Mother were also present. It was awful hearing them remark over and over how ugly I was.
- Dazai Osamu, “Memories” from Crackling Mountain and Other Stories

Early the following spring, while the snow was still deep, my father coughed up blood in a Tokyo hospital and died. The local paper published his obituary in a special edition, an event that affected me more than the death itself. My own name appeared in the paper too, on a list of people from the gentry.
- Dazai Osamu, “Memories” from Crackling Mountain and Other Stories

There are people who get suddenly worked up over anything whatever, and I’m one of them.
- Dazai Osamu, “Memories” from Crackling Mountain and Other Stories

One day a student from my own village called me over to the sand dune in the schoolyard. You’re bound to flunk, he warned, as long [the teachers] keep hitting you like that. And, he added, you really do act like a smart aleck. I was dumbfounded. That afternoon after class, I hurriedly set out for home along the beach. With no one around, I sighed as the waves licked against my shoes.
- Dazai Osamu, “Memories” from Crackling Mountain and Other Stories

I was a petal quivering in the slightest breeze, about to fall any moment. Even the slightest insult made me think of dying.
- Dazai Osamu, “Memories” from Crackling Mountain and Other Stories

…my brother only ridiculed my [artistic] talent. When you’re young, he claimed, everyone says you’re gifted. He dismissed my writing too, calling it garde-schoolish. In return I was openly contemptuous of his abilities.
- Dazai Osamu, “Memories” from Crackling Mountain and Other Stories

I was depressed… At such times I always sought refuge in a bookstore. There was one close by, and I hurried there now. Just to see all the books lining the shelves would lighten my mood as if by magic… I went because any book gave me comfort and solace at the time.
- Dazai Osamu, “Memories” from Crackling Mountain and Other Stories

During high school I got into sports because of my complexion. On the way home from school in the summer, I always took a dip in the ocean. I liked to use the breaststroke, keeping my legs wide apart, just like a frog might. With my head sticking straight out of the water, I could observe various things as I swam - the delicate shading of the waves, the fresh leaves on shore, the drifting clouds. I kept my head stretched out like a turtle. If I could bring my face even a bit closer to the sun, I’d get a tan that much quicker.
- Dazai Osamu, “Memories” from Crackling Mountain and Other Stories

I felt as though someone else was behind me, and that I myself was always assuming some pose or other. I would comment on my every gesture, no matter how slight, as if I were standing beside my own self. Now he’s perplexed and is just looking at his palm - that’s what I would say. Or maybe - He muttered something now while scratching behind his ear. Because of this habit, I could no longer act on the spur of the moment, as one less aware of himself would.
- Dazai Osamu, “Memories” from Crackling Mountain and Other Stories

I went on across the bridge, various memories coming to mind, my footgear clattering on the floorboards. Again, I fell to dreaming. And I finally let out a sigh. Could I really become someone? That’s when I started getting fretful. Since I couldn’t be satisfied with anything, I kept writhing about in vain. Masks in one layer after another - as many as ten or twenty - had fastened themselves upon me, and I could no longer tell how sad any one of them really was. In the end I found a dreary way out of my dilemma - I would be a writer. There were many others who were subject to this same sort of incomprehensible agitation, and all of them would be my confederates.
- Dazai Osamu, “Memories” from Crackling Mountain and Other Stories

To meet up with a woman you once pursued but no longer feel any affection for is the worst of misfortunes. And, in my case, most of the ladies I know fit that bill. Most? All is more like it.
- Dazai Osamu, “Merry Christmas” from Self Portraits

I couldn’t help but think of this page from the manga that should have made it into the anime! Why it was left out I’ll never know.
- Dazai Osamu, “Merry Christmas” from Self Portraits

To show one’s stupidity is taboo in love.
- Dazai Osamu, “Merry Christmas” from Self Portraits

As long as it continued, I would keep going. I was too tired and confused for words, but that made me absolutely fearless.
- Dazai Osamu, “Monkey Island” from Crackling Mountain and Other Stories

The blowing snow
Is calling me.
Calling me
From captivity.
Calling me
From a wretched life.
- Dazai Osamu, “Monkey Island” from Crackling Mountain and Other Stories

My brother, who, though he left no works behind, was an artist of the highest order. My brother, who, though he had the most beautiful face in the world, was ignored by the ladies.
- Dazai Osamu, “My Elder Brothers”

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 Osamu, “No Kidding” from Self Portraits

A stagnant wind, reeking of sewage, raked the surface of Shinobazu pond. The lotuses growing there had begun to decay, their grisly carcasses entrapped between bent, elongated stalks, and the idiot faces of people streaming by in the evening cool were etched with such total exhaustion that one might have thought the end of the world was at hand.
- Dazai Osamu, “No Kidding” from Self Portraits

Daughters, fathers, sons on the benches around me, bereft of their wits, squinting through cloudy eyes. What did they see? Phantom flowers that dance in the air, their own life histories unfolding before them like scrolls or revolving lanterns decorated with faces and failures of every description.
- Dazai Osamu, “No Kidding” from Self Portraits

He tended to come across as arrogant and standoffish, but this was only a forbidding mask to disguise his own vulnerability; he was in fact a fragile and very gentle person.
- Dazai Osamu, “On Love and Beauty” from Blue Bamboo and Other Stories

Warm and generous by nature, she made friends easily and became thoroughly attached to them, only to be abandoned in due course. This was, in fact, her hobby; secretly she took pleasure in the heartache and melancholia such rejections afforded her.
- Dazai Osamu, “On Love and Beauty” from Blue Bamboo and Other Stories

Ah, the sadness of
Having become a grownup,
Mature in every way,
And being the only one
Who knows it.
- Dazai Osamu, “On Love and Beauty” from Blue Bamboo and Other Stories

A lofty character is always shadowed by adversity.
- Dazai Osamu, “On Love and Beauty” from Blue Bamboo and Other Stories

…he feels somewhat vulnerable and has a sudden urge to consult the fortune as to… where his destiny will lead him. When one’s life begins to unravel, one is tempted, sadly enough, to cling to the thread of prophecy.
- Dazai Osamu, “On Love and Beauty” from Blue Bamboo and Other Stories

But happiness is being able to hope, however faintly, for happiness.
- Dazai Osamu, “On Love and Beauty” from Blue Bamboo and Other Stories

You and I have become strangers, haven’t we? No, we always were strangers. Our hearts were in different worlds, a thousand miles, a million miles apart. If we were together, we’d only be miserable, both of us.
- Dazai Osamu, “On Love and Beauty” from Blue Bamboo and Other Stories

I was fascinated for only a short time - fascinated with apparel.
- Dazai Osamu, “On the Question of Apparel” from Crackling Mountain and Other Stories

The narrator of [Dazai’s autobiographical story] “Memories,” it will be recalled had a secret yearning to dress in style. This interest in clothes crops up regularly in Dazai’s writings. Dazai wrote one story entitled “The Dandy” and began another with a sketch giving the narrator’s thoughts on suicide and dress. Having received some fabric for a summer kimono, the narrator postpones committing suicide until he can wear the new garment.
- James O’Brien, Introduction to Dazai’s story “On the Question of Apparel” from Crackling Mountain and Other Stories

… I’m tall for a Japanese and I stand out even when walking down the street. (I’ve been measured at five feet, seven inches, but I don’t believe it. I’m actually five-six and a half.)
- Dazai Osamu, “On the Question of Apparel” from Crackling Mountain and Other Stories

Once a friend of mine looked at me seriesly and said, You know, if George Bernard Shaw had been born in Japan, he would not have made it as a writer. Equally serious myself, I pondered the extent of literary realism in Japan and then replied - Yes, you’re right. Our approach to writing is quite different here. I was going to mention several more ideas when the friend laughed and said - No, that’s not what I mean. Isn’t Shaw seven feet tall? A writer like that couldn’t manage in Japan. He was quite offhand and took me in utterly. I couldn’t really laugh off his innocent joke, either. Indeed, there was something quite chilling about it. If I had been just a foot taller … ! That was too close for comfort.
- Dazai Osamu, “On the Question of Apparel” from Crackling Mountain and Other Stories

‘Things don’t change no matter how old you get. I’ve tried my best and yet …’ As we walked along, I began to let my grievances against life come tumbling out. ‘Maybe that’s what writing’s all about,’ I went on. ‘But there’s something wrong with me.’
- Dazai Osamu, “On the Question of Apparel” from Crackling Mountain and Other Stories

‘It’s not just how you dress,’ I tried to argue. ‘It goes deeper. I didn’t get the right sort of education. Now take Verlaine’s case, for example …’ What did Verlaine have to do with my red kimono? An abrupt shift of thought even for me, and I felt quite sheepish about the remark. Whenever I’m feeling down and out, though, I remember Verlaine’s doleful countenance and it helps. The very weakness of the man gives me the strength to pull myself together and keep going. I firmly believe that the true glory can emerge only after the most timid introspection. In any even I want to live on, to have a life bereft of means but filled with pride.
- Dazai Osamu, “On the Question of Apparel” from Crackling Mountain and Other Stories

At first, because it was cloudy, I couldn’t see to top [of Mount Fuji], but I judged from the angle of the lower slopes and picked out a spot amid the clouds where I thought the peak probably was, only to find, when the sky began to clear, that I was way off. The bluish summit loomed up twice as high as I’d expected. I was not so much surprised as strangely tickled, and I cackled with laughter. I had to hand it to Fuji that time. When you come face to face with absolute reliability, you tend, first of all, to burst into silly laughter. You just come all undone…Young men, if ever the one you love bursts out laughing the moment she sees you, you are to be congratulated. By no means must you reproach her. She has merely been overwhelmed by the absolute reliability she senses in you.
- Dazai Osamu, “One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji” from Self Portraits

Far from being pleased with the view, however, I found myself holding it in contempt. It’s too perfect. You have Fuji right before you and, lying at its feet, the cold, white expanse of Lake Kawaguchi cradled by hushed, huddling mountains on either side. One look threw me into blushing confusion. It was a wall painting in a public bath. Scenery on a stage. So precisely made to order it was mortifying to behold.
- Dazai Osamu, “One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji” from Self Portraits

I was at my wit’s end. That night I sat alone in one room of my apartment, guzzling sake. I drank all night, without sleeping a wink. At dawn I went to relieve myself, and through the wire mesh screen covering the square window in the toilet I could see Fuji. Small, pure white, leaning slightly to the left: that’s one Fuji I’ll never forget.
- Dazai Osamu, “One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji” from Self Portraits

A courteous and affable young man of twenty-five named Nitta came to visit me at the teahouse…After we’d talked in my room for a while and had begun to feel at ease with each other, he smiled and said, ‘Actually, I was going to come with two or three of my friends, but at the last moment they all pulled out, and , well, I read something by Sato Haruo-sensei that said you. [Dazai], were terribly decadent, and mentally disturbed to boot, so I could hardly force them to come. I had no idea you’d be such a serious and personable gentleman…I read Sato-sensei’s piece again last night and resigned myself to various possible fates.’
- Dazai Osamu, “One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji” from Self Portraits

I was looking at Fuji through the window. Fuji stood there impassive and silent. I was impressed. ‘Not bad, eh? There’s something to be said for Fuji after all. It knows what it’s doing.’ It occurred to me that I was no match for Fuji. I was ashamed of my own fickle, constantly shifting feelings of love and hatred. Fuji was impressive. Fuji knew what it was doing.
- Dazai Osamu, “One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji” from Self Portraits

I have nothing worth boasting about. No learning to speak of. No talent. My body’s a mess, my heart impoverished. Only the fact that I’ve known suffering…that’s all I have, the only straw of pride I can cling to. But it’s one I’ll never let go of. A lot of people have written me off as a spoiled, selfish child, but how many really know how I’ve suffered inside?
- Dazai Osamu, “One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji” from Self Portraits

Before going to sleep I would quietly open the curtains in my room and look through the glass at Fuji. On moonlit nights it was a pale, bluish white, standing there like the spirit of the rivers and lakes. I’d sigh. Ah, I can see Fuji. How big the stars are. Fine weather tomorrow, no doubt. These were the only glimmerings I had of the joy of being alive, and after quietly closing the curtains again I’d go to bed and reflect that, yes, the weather would be fine tomorrow - but so what? What did that have to do with me? It would strike me as so absurd that I’d end up chuckling wryly to myself as I lay in my futon.
- Dazai Osamu, “One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji” from Self Portraits

It was excruciating. My work … Not so much the torment of purely dragging pen over paper (not that at all, in fact, since the writing itself is actually something I take pleasure in), but the interminable wavering and agonizing over my view of the world, and what we call art, and the literature of tomorrow, the search for something new, if you will - questions like these left me quite literally writhing in anguish. To take what is simple and natural - and therefore succinct and lucid - to snatch hold of that and transfer it directly to paper, was, it seemed to me, everything…
- Dazai Osamu, “One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji” from Self Portraits

Though I, a solitary man on the second floor, might feel for those girls to the extent that I’d be willing to die for them, there was nothing I could offer them in way of happiness. All I could do was look helplessly on. Those who suffer shall suffer. Those who fall shall fall. It had nothing to do with me, it was just the way the world was. Thus I forced myself to affect indifference as I gazed down at them, but it was still more than a little painful.
- Dazai Osamu, “One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji” from Self Portraits

Even as he died Sun Yat-sen claimed the revolution in China was not over. A revolution never is, I suppose. But we’ve got to start them. They’re sad and beautiful in their nature. That’s what comes of a revolution – beauty, sadness, and . . . love . . . .
- Dazai Osamu, “Osan” from Dazai Osamu: Selected Stories and Sketches

But don’t you realize just a little that I’ve wanted to live a normal life? And how hard I’ve worked for it? I’ve been hanging by a thread, and it’ll break with a bit more weight. I tried my best to be careful, though. You see that, don’t you? I’m not weak, my troubles are just too heavy. It’s stupid to talk like this. But if I don’t speak out loud and clear, people are taken in by my cheeky manner. Even you are. ‘He’s only acting when he talks about his troubles’ – that’s how casually you all take me.
- Dazai Osamu, “Putting Granny out to Die” from Dazai Osamu: Selected Stories and Sketches

I was a flower petal about to fall. I trembled and quivered at the slightest breeze; at the slightest insult, I writhed about and considered dying.
- Dazai Osamu, “Recollections” from The Saga of Dazai Osamu

At some point, however, he discovered a book on wizardry, and this he read with great fervor, devouring it from cover to cover and memorizing every word. After a year of study and practice he acquired the ability to transform himself variously into a mouse, and eagle, and a snake. Casting the spell that made himself a mouse, he’d dash about inside a storehouse, stopping every now and then to let out a squeak; as an eagle, he’d spread his wings, fly out the window, and soar through the sky to his heart’s content; and in the form of a snake, he’d crawl under the storehouse floor, dodging the cobwebs, and slide through the cool, shadowy weeds on this scaly belly. Before long he learned how to turn himself into a praying mantis as well, but this proved disappointing. There was nothing particularly fun about being a praying mantis.
- Dazai Osamu, “Romanesque” from Blue Bamboo and Other Stories

One lies to seek a bit of relief from a ponderous, suffocating reality, but the liar, like the drinker, gradually comes to need larger and larger doses. The lies become blacker and more complex…
- Dazai Osamu, “Romanesque” from Blue Bamboo and Other Stories

It seems to me that the fact that we happen to be drinking together like this, at this time of day, means that there’s some sort of bond between us. Especially when you consider where we are: Edo teams with so many people that it’s said if you walk half a block you’re in a different world, yet here we are in the same little shop at the same time of the same day - it’s like a miracle.
- Dazai Osamu, “Romanesque” from Blue Bamboo and Other Stories

When the flesh is weary, the spirit too gives up; and somewhere within the body a sense of indifference takes root.
- Dazai Osamu, “Run, Melos!” from Crackling Mountain and Other Stories

We kill others to save our own skin - that’s the way of the world, isn’t it?
- Dazai Osamu, “Run, Melos!” from Crackling Mountain and Other Stories

Though battling an illness that each and every night left my robe literally drenched with sweat, I had no choice but to press ahead with my work. The cold half pint of milk I drank each morning was the only thing that gave me a certain peculiar sense of joy of life; my mental anguish and exhaustion were such that the oleanders blooming in one corner of the garden appeared to me merely as flickering tongues of flame.
- Dazai Osamu, “Seascape with Figures in Gold” from Self Portraits

…it’s not polite to bother the weaver with greedy wishes on a night she’d rather not have everyone bothering her. Hell, I’ve refrained from even looking up at the sky on Tanabata, ever since I was a young boy. I was just wishing, deep within my little chest, that they could enjoy a fun night without wind or rain getting in the way. I thought looking at lovers who can only meet once a year, through a telescope of all things, was completely rude and utterly without class. I would have been ashamed to act like such a peeping Tom.
- Dazai Osamu, “Tanabata”

"Not even the wisest reader knows the anguish of the writer who has sent a truly awful piece of writing to a magazine in order to survive. Here goes nothing, I told myself, pushing that heavy envelope into the mailbox. It hit the bottom with a thunk. And that was that. Another crummy story. On the surface, it pretends to be a mirror to my soul, although I know as well as anyone the slimy worms of compromise are wriggling in the muck at the bottom. It's a work in which the work is far from done. ... It makes me so ashamed I want to scream and run around in circles. I promise you, it's terrible. A lousy piece of trash. I have no right to call myself a writer. Such is my ignorance. No insights to impart. No illuminating views."
- Dazai Osamu, The Beggar Student

"My work will disgrace bookstore windows all across the land. Critics will sneer; readers will give up. That hack writer has outdone himself again, they'll say, setting a low bar for writers everywhere. Tough to beat."
- Dazai Osamu, The Beggar Student

"I'll have you know, I may look like an ass, but I'm not a total moron, and when I say I lack conviction, I only mean it relative to my own high standards."
- Dazai Osamu, The Beggar Student

"You ought to try this out sometime, dear reader. Sit yourself down on the sofa of a coffee shop or bar, facing the fireplace beside the madam of the house, so that both of you are staring at the flames, and talk as if you're speaking to the fire - I promise, up against even the dullest mind, you'll be able to sustain a lively conversation for hour after hour. But take heed, reader: you must not look into each other's eyes, not even once."
- Dazai Osamu, The Beggar Student

"I couldn't shut up if I tried. The only way I can stand being alive is if I'm playing the buffoon."
- Dazai Osamu, The Beggar Student

"One might call reason the glue that holds society together. In that sense, the order we enjoy is artificial, but we need this artifice if we want to go on living."
- Dazai Osamu, The Beggar Student

"Even if I feel bad for a person, I'm certain of the cold hard fact that I can't do anything for them, which leaves me feeling even worse."
- Dazai Osamu, The Beggar Student

"Growing up, I found the name incredibly embarrassing, so despite being a string bean, I've been publishing as Osamu Dazai, a name that makes me sound like a street fighter who might break your neck."
- Dazai Osamu, The Beggar Student

"...This guy's a good person. Not egotistical like you."
"Hold on," I said, bristling at being labeled a good person. "I'm plenty egotistical..."
- Dazai Osamu, The Beggar Student

"When something pushes me over the brink of fear, I have a nasty tendency to begin laughing like an idiot. A disturbing, wild laugh. I lose control, can't hold it in. An expression not of brazenness, but extreme cowardice that takes me to the limits of delirium."
- Dazai Osamu, The Beggar Student

"Truth is that grownups are the same as kids, except a little worse for wear. Kids ask a lot from grownups, but grownups ask at least as much from kids. It's a real mess. But it's the truth. We count on you to hold it all together. ...To put it gently, we're always one step away from being overwhelmed. To put it harshly, we're all babies who cant' take a word of criticism."
- Dazai Osamu, The Beggar Student

"I wish I could just cut my belly open and let all of the words come spilling out. No matter if it's gibberish, as long as it's my flesh and blood doing the talking."
- Dazai Osamu, The Beggar Student

"Next time life gets you down, curl up in a blanket in your rented room and open a good book."
- Dazai Osamu, The Beggar Student

"I could feel the hands of fate upon me. I'd been caught. In his heart of hearts, the student is a thirty-two-year-old drunken poet."
- Dazai Osamu, The Beggar Student

The happiness of the fireside. Why is it impossible for me to attain it? I feel I could hardly endure such happiness. The fireside is a dreadful thing.
- Dazai Osamu, “The Father”

In all my forty years of life, most of my premonitions of happiness have not come true, but my premonitions of bad luck have all been right.
- Dazai Osamu, “The Father”

Without trust, how can one know what is real and what is not? Indeed, one may see and yet not believe - is this not the same as never seeing? Is not everything, then, no more than an immaterial dream? The recognition of any reality begins with trust. And the source of all trust is love for one’s fellow man.
- Dazai Osamu, “The Mermaid and the Samurai” from Blue Bamboo and Other Stories

These words of encouragement, stouthearted though they were, only left [him] feeling all the more keenly the hopelessness of his situation, and for some moments, wracked with mournful sobs, he could make no reply at all. Such it is for those in the grips of misfortune: declarations of support and sympathy, rather than providing comfort, may serve only to increase the victim’s pain.
- Dazai Osamu, “The Mermaid and the Samurai” from Blue Bamboo and Other Stories

How I envy those self-satisfied commoners who, seeing nothing and comprehending nothing, are convinced they know it all! There are in this world things of such mystery and awesome beauty that the small-minded cannot even imagine them.
- Dazai Osamu, “The Mermaid and the Samurai” from Blue Bamboo and Other Stories

I must have done something heinous in a previous life, to have accumulated such karma. Or perhaps I was born beneath an evil star that destined me to a wretched and ignominious death. If so, why delay it any longer?
- Dazai Osamu, “The Mermaid and the Samurai” from Blue Bamboo and Other Stories

Certainly the dreams of youth, whether of love or hate, fade quickly.
- Dazai Osamu, “The Monkey’s Mound” from Crackling Mountain and Other Stories

When we lived in Mitaka in Tokyo, bombs were falling nearby nearly every day, and I didn’t care if I died, but when I thought that if a bomb fell on my child, she would die without having seen the sea once, it was hard to take. I was born in the middle of the Tsugaru Plains, so I didn’t see the sea until late in life, taking my first trip there around the age of ten. And the great excitement of that became one of my most treasured memories for all time. I wanted to give her the chance to see the sea at least once.
- Dazai Osamu, “The Sea”

Should I take my own life? To die - I thought that alone was real. A hush had fallen upon the woods opposite the grounds, and the trees seemed like dark lacquer. A flock of small birds rose silently from the treetops and flew off like sesame seeds cast into the sky.
- Dazai Osamu, “The Sound of Hammering” from Crackling Mountain and Other Stories

Ah, that’s when it happened. From the barracks behind me came the faint sound of someone driving a nail. Perhaps the biblical phrase describes what I felt then - And the scales fell from my eyes. Both the pathos and glory of military life disappeared in an instant. I felt utterly listless and indifferent, as though I had been released from a spell. I gazed across a sand field in the summer noon without any feeling whatsoever…. The faint and distant sound of hammering was like a miracle, stripping me of every materialistic illusion. Never again would I become intoxicated by that nightmare with its so-called pathos and glory. And yet, that tiny sound must have resonated in my brain. For, ever since that day, I have become like one subject to ugly and bizarre epileptic fits.
- Dazai Osamu, “The Sound of Hammering” from Crackling Mountain and Other Stories

I was trembling with anticipation over getting to the last chapter that very night. Should I write it up as a grand tragedy in the manner of ‘Eugene Onegin?’ Or end in the pessimistic mode of Gogol’s ‘The Quarrel?’ While pondering this question, I looked up at the bare light bulb hanging in the distance the faint sound of hammering. At that moment a ripple arose along the surface, and I became merely another bather splashing around in a corner of the dimly lit pool. Disheartened, I crawled from the bath and washed the soles of my feet. As I listened to the other bathers talk about rationing, Pushkin and Gogol seemed as uninspiring as the names of several foreign-made toothbrushes. I left the bathhouse, crossed the bridge, and went home.
- Dazai Osamu, “The Sound of Hammering” from Crackling Mountain and Other Stories

When you fall in love, music permeates the soul, doesn’t it? I think that’s the surest sign of this affliction.
- Dazai Osamu, “The Sound of Hammering” from Crackling Mountain and Other Stories

I also wanted to quote for her the famous words from Kyōka’s novel: ‘Even if you die, don’t become his plaything!’ but that would be going too far…. Even if you die, don’t become his plaything! What does wealth amount to? Or material goods?
- Dazai Osamu, “The Sound of Hammering” from Crackling Mountain and Other Stories

Real thought takes courage more than intelligence.
- Dazai Osamu, “The Sound of Hammering” from Crackling Mountain and Other Stories

When describing their plans for unwritten works, authors are prone to naïve exaggeration. Everyone knows it’s not that easy. But let it go. It’s all just hot air anyway.
- Dazai Osamu, “The Sparrow who Lost her Tongue” from Otogizoshi

While I presume to understand to some extent the psychology of the weak, perhaps because I’m a helpless sort myself, I’m afraid I don’t really have a clear understanding of the psychology of the powerful… I’m a story writer with such feeble imaginative powers that unless I myself have experienced something, I can’t write a line - can’t write a word - about it.
- Dazai Osamu, “The Sparrow who Lost her Tongue” from Otogizoshi

Momotarō, after all carries the banner that reads Nippon-ichi - Number One in Japan. An author who has never been number one in Japan, or even two or three, can hardly be expected to produce an adequate picture of Japan’s foremost young man. The moment his ‘Nippon-ichi’ banner came to mind, I gallantly abandoned all plans [to write] ‘My Momotarō’… If the true Nippon-ichi were to appear before you, your eyes would probably be blinded by the radiant light of his countenance. All right? You got that? The characters in this Fairy Tale Book of mine are not Nippon-ichi, or -ni or -san either. Nor are they in any way what you would call representative types. They were born of the doltish misadventures of an author named Dazai, and as such they’re of very little interest.
- Dazai Osamu, “The Sparrow who Lost her Tongue” from Otogizoshi

      “Me, well… I was born to tell the truth.”
      “But you don’t say anything at all.”
      “That’s because the people in this world are all liars. I got sick of talking with them. All they do is lie. And the worst part is that they don’t even realize they’re doing it.”
- Dazai Osamu, “The Sparrow who Lost her Tongue” from Otogizoshi

Who do you think made me such a taciturn man? ‘Chatting and laughing’ about what over dinner? I’ll tell you what - their neighbors. Criticizing. Tearing others down. Nothing but backbiting, malicious gossip, all based on the mood of the moment. You know, I’ve never, ever heart you praise anyone. I’m a weak-willed man myself. When I’m around judgmental people, I to start to grow judgmental. That’s what scares me. And that’s why I decided to stop talking. The only thing people like you can see is other people’s faults, and you’re oblivious to the horror in your own hearts. You people terrify me.
- Dazai Osamu, “The Sparrow who Lost her Tongue” from Otogizoshi

Human beings are like that, though. They’ll do the most unbelievably cruel things when you least expect it.
- Dazai Osamu, “The Sparrow who Lost her Tongue” from Otogizoshi

But perhaps this is only my lack of experience talking; perhaps Oni come in a wider variety than I’m aware of. If only I had an Encyclopedia Nipponica at hand, I could easily assume the guise of a respectable scholar, admired by women of all ages (as most academicians tend to be), and with a look of unfathomable profundity on my face hold forth at great length and in minute detail on the subject of Oni, but, unfortunately, I’m crouching in a bomb shelter, and the only volume I have at my disposal is this children’s book on my lap. I am obliged to base my argument entirely on the illustrations.
- Dazai Osamu, “The Stolen Wen” from Otogizoshi

Guess I came out more or less even. Something lost, something gained. What’s on the plus side here? Well, I danced and sang my heart out for the first time in ages…such are his generally optimistic thoughts as he makes his way home.
- Dazai Osamu, “The Stolen Wen” from Otogizoshi

When an artist is pumped up with the intention of creating a masterpiece, however, the work generally comes out poorly.
- Dazai Osamu, “The Stolen Wen” from Otogizoshi

Just speak your mind. Say what you have to say, without trying to cover anything up. No more jokes or silly grins. For once in your life, tell the truth. - If I were to do as you suggest, I’d have to spend time in jail again. I’d have to leap into the sea again. I’d have to become a madman again. You wouldn’t run away if that happened? Yes, I’m forever telling lies. But you are one person I’ve never deceived. You’ve never had any trouble seeing through my lies, have you? as for truly diabolical liars, there may be one or two among the people you most respect. Yes, that man. That man is repulsive to me. so great is my distaste for him, my determination not to become like him, that I’ve ended up making even the truth sound like lies. Muddying the waters. But I won’t deceive you. Today, again, I’ll tell you a story that’s far from limpid, a story that sounds like a lie but is, in fact, the truth.
- Dazai Osamu, “Thinking of Zenzo” from Self Portraits

Sunrise is the child of sunset. Without the setting sun, dawn could never be born. Sunset is always trying to tell us this: ‘I’ve grown weary. you mustn’t stare at me so. You mustn’t love me. I am not long for this world. But tomorrow morning, in the eastern sky, a new sun will be born. Promise me you will be his friend nad companion. I’ve brought him up with tender care. He’s a fine, healthy child - so plump and round.’ When sunset makes this appeal to you, my friends, can you revile him with a mocking sneer, calling him sick or decadent? The bully who steps boldly forward with folded arms and a read 'Of course I can’ is the biggest asshole alive. Fools like you just make this world all the harder to live in.
- Dazai Osamu, “Thinking of Zenzo” from Self Portraits

I’m in no position to stand above humanity, acting as prosecutor, or judge. I have no right to condemn others. I am a child of evil. Beyond redemption. I suspect my past sins are fifty or a hundred times greater than yours.
- Dazai Osamu, “Thinking of Zenzo” from Self Portraits

Her eyes were moist, as if brimming with tears. That clinched it. she was a swindler. When people are lying, their eyes always water - it’s a rule with no exception.
- Dazai Osamu, “Thinking of Zenzo” from Self Portraits

There’s not a single person back home who reads my works. Or, if they do read them, no doubt they merely focus with a pitying smile on the vile nature of the main character, recounting his flaws to others with exasperated shakes of the head, scornfully deriding me for bringing shame upon our homeland. Once, four years ago, when I briefly met my eldest brother in Tokyo, he told me to stop sending my books to the relatives. ‘Not even I want to read them,’ he said. 'When the relatives read what you write, how do you think they…’ He didn’t finish, but bowed his head, as if the words had caught in his throat, but he’d said enough to make things perfectly clear to me. I didn’t intend to send another one of my books back home as long as I live.
- Dazai Osamu, “Thinking of Zenzo” from Self Portraits

I will be impervious to them, acting out the role of the prominent man of letters…
- Dazai Osamu, “Thinking of Zenzo” from Self Portraits

I’m not the sort who gets ahead in the world. I have no choice but to resign myself to that. I must now unequivocally abandon the dream of a triumphant return in robes of gold. I shall proceed with calm composure…I may remain a mere street-corner musician to the end of my days. Only those who want to listen to my moronic, obstinate music - only they should listen. Art cannot order people around. Art dies the moment it acquires authority.
- Dazai Osamu, “Thinking of Zenzo” from Self Portraits

As long as these roses are living, I am king of my own heart.
- Dazai Osamu, “Thinking of Zenzo” from Self Portraits

Something must yield. I pass each day hoping that something will yield, but aware of those unavoidable cases when nothing does. When at last nothing yields, I drift toward home like a kite with a broken string.
- Dazai Osamu, “Toys” from Dazai Osamu: Selected Stories and Sketches

From the moment I leave Tokyo I habitually act as one dead to the world. Regardless of how much Father rails or Mother pleads, I respond with an enigmatic smile – nothing more. People prefer the pain of ‘sitting on a bed of spikes;’ I feel instead like one ‘resting on fog and clouds’ as I gaze into space.
- Dazai Osamu, “Toys” from Dazai Osamu: Selected Stories and Sketches

Even though one listens halfheartedly, he instinctively comprehends the meaning of something rightly named. I listen with my skin. The word ‘thistle’ crawls over me whenever I gaze distractedly upon the plant. Certain dull words, however, have no effect. I can’t absorb a word like ‘person’ no matter how often I hear it.
- Dazai Osamu, “Toys” from Dazai Osamu: Selected Stories and Sketches

No one realized that I had become insane; when I recovered nobody could tell the difference.
- Dazai Osamu, “Toys” from Dazai Osamu: Selected Stories and Sketches

Gazing at the roaring falls when she was very young, [she] had thought the water would someday be used up. And why, she would muse, did the shape of the falling water never seem to change. Lately her reflections had become less naïve. The pattern of the falls was never the same. Watching the flying spray shift and vary almost made her dizzy. The billowing form seemed more like a cloud than like water; besides, water could never be so white.
- Dazai Osamu, “Transformation” from Dazai Osamu: Selected Stories and Sketches

What the hell, I thought, I’ll piss it all away on booze. I’ll get by somehow, whatever happens afterwards. If it turns out I can't get by - well, even if it comes to that, I’ll probably get by somehow.
- Dazai Osamu, “Two Little Words” from Self Portraits

As the night deepened, the wind died down and the weather turned cold. An unearthly quiet settled upon the hill, the kind of quiet in which wondrous events are bound to happen.
- Dazai Osamu, “Undine” from Crackling Mountain and Other Stories

Now, eldest sons of respected families have had, from ancient times to our own, a certain characteristic in common: namely, a sense of style.
- Dazai Osamu, “Urashima-san” from Otogizoshi

To allow one’s curiosity to get the better of one is a sort of adventure,…And to control one’s curiosity is also a species of adventure. Both are risky propositions.
- Dazai Osamu, “Urashima-san” from Otogizoshi

Why can’t people get along without criticizing one another?..Each individual has his own way of living. Can we not learn to respect one another’s chosen way? One makes every effort to live in a dignified and proper manner, without harming anyone else, yet people will carp and cavil and try to tear one down. It’s most vexing.
- Dazai Osamu, “Urashima-san” from Otogizoshi

There’s no such thing as ‘seeing what happens’ in this life. To do something just to see what happens is exactly the same as just plain doing it.
- Dazai Osamu, “Urashima-san” from Otogizoshi

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” from Otogizoshi

Speech blossomed from anxiety, after all. Words were fermented from the uncertainty of existence,…human beings experience anxiety even in the midst of joy.
- Dazai Osamu, “Urashima-san” from Otogizoshi

Time and tide are man’s salvation. Oblivion is man’s salvation.
- Dazai Osamu, “Urashima-san” from Otogizoshi

All the suffering I have gone through has been because of my own stupidity.
- Dazai Osamu, “Villon’s Wife”

      “Why didn’t I do this from the start? It’s brought me such happiness.”
      “Women don’t know anything about happiness or unhappiness.”
      “Perhaps not. What about men?”
      “Men only have unhappiness. They are always fighting fear.”
- Dazai Osamu, “Villon’s Wife”

I must seem a horrible character to you, but the fact is that I want to die so badly I can’t stand it. Ever since I was born I have been thinking of nothing but dying. It would be better for everyone concerned if I were dead, that’s certain. And yet I can’t seem to die. There’s something strange and frightening, like God, which won’t let me die.
- Dazai Osamu, “Villon’s Wife”

My work doesn’t mean a thing. I don’t write either masterpieces or failures. If people say something is good, it becomes good. If they say it’s bad, it becomes bad.
-Dazai Osamu, “Villon’s Wife”

Now that I have worked twenty days at the restaurant I realize that every last one of the customers is a criminal. I have come to think that my husband is very much on the mild side compared to them. And I see now that not only the customers but everyone you meet walking in the streets is hiding some crime.
- Dazai Osamu, “Villon’s Wife”

...I still wait for someone. Who on earth am I waiting for? For what sort of person? Maybe what I’m waiting for isn’t a human. I dislike humans. No, I fear them. When I meet someone and indifferently exchange such greetings as ‘How are you?’ or ‘It’s become cold,’ greetings I don’t want to make, I somehow get the unpleasant feeling that there is no such horrible liar in the world as I, and I wish I were dead. Also, the other people, too, are unduly wary of me and use diplomatic speech which tries very hard to be harmless and inoffensive, and relate their pompous, false feelings. As I listen to it all, I find their petty cautiousness deplorable, and the world becomes more and more unbearably odious. Are ‘people in the world’, I wonder, creatures that spend their whole lives greeting each other in stiff, formal patterns, being cautious about each other, then growing tired of each other? I hate meeting people.
- Dazai Osamu, “Waiting”

...my heart gets choked with emotions and I just about suffocate from pain. I feel the floor dropping out from under me, as if not knowing whether I were alive or dead, as if dreaming in broad daylight; the comings and goings of the people in front of the station, too, seem small and far away, as though I have peeked through the wrong end of a telescope; and the world is completely hushed. What on earth am I waiting for?
- Dazai Osamu, “Waiting”

I sacrificed ten years of my life for this one volume of short stories. For ten full years I did not know what is was to eat the invigorating breakfast of the good citizen. Because of this one book I lost my place in the world, was constantly wounded in my self-esteem and buffeted by the cold winds of the world, and I wandered around in a daze. I squandered tens of thousands of yen. I could not lift my head before my eldest brother, knowing the hardships I was causing him. I burnt my tongue, singed my breast, and deliberately harmed my body beyond any possibility of recovery. I tore up and discarded over a hundred stories. Five thousand sheets of manuscript paper. And all that remained, just barely, was this one volume. Nothing else. The manuscript comes to about 600 pages, but the fee is altogether a little over sixty yen. But I believe in it. I believe that ‘Declining Years’ will take on deeper and deeper colors with the passing years, that it will surely penetrate ever more profoundly into your eyes, your heart. I was born only to write this one volume. From today on I am a corpse, through and through. I am merely living out my remaining days.
- Dazai Osamu, found in Donald Keene's Dawn to the West, page 1028-9

      His head is tilted at an angle thirty degrees to the left, and his teeth are bared in an ugly smirk. Ugly? You may well question the word, for insensitive people (that is to say, those indifferent to matters of beauty and ugliness) would mechanically comment with a bland, vacuous expression, “What an adorable little boy!” It is quite true that what commonly passes for “adorable” is sufficiently present in this child’s face to give a modicum of meaning to the complement. But I think that anyone who has ever been subjected to the least exposure to what makes for beauty would most likely toss the photograph to one side with the gesture employed in brushing away a caterpillar, and mutter in profound revulsion, “What a dreadful child!”
      Indeed, the more carefully you examine the child’s smiling face the more you feel an indescribable, unspeakable horror creeping over you. You see that it is actually not a smiling face at all. The boy has not a suggestion of a smile. Look at his tightly clenched fists if you want proof. No human being can smile with his fists doubled like that. It is a monkey. A grinning monkey-face. The smile is nothing more than a puckering of ugly wrinkles. The photograph reproduces an expression so freakish, and at the same time so unclean and even nauseating, that your impulse is to say, “What a wizened, hideous little boy!” I have never seen a child with such an unaccountable expression.
- Dazai Osamu, No Longer Human pg. 13-14

Again he is smiling, this time not the wizened monkey’s grin but a rather adroit little smile. And yet somehow it is not the smile of a human being: it utterly lacks substance, all of what we might call the “heaviness of blood” or perhaps the “solidity of human life” - it has not even a bird’s weight. It is merely a blank sheet of paper, light as a feather, and it is smiling.
- Dazai Osamu, No Longer Human pg. 15

This time he is not smiling. There is no expression whatsoever. The picture has a genuinely chilling, foreboding quality, as if it caught him in the act of dying as he sat before the camera, his hands held over a heater. That is not the only shocking thing about it. The head is shown quite large, and you can examine the features in detail: the forehead is average, the wrinkles on the forehead average, the eyebrows also average, the eyes, the nose, the mouth, the chin … the face is not merely devoid of expression, it fails even to leave a memory. It has no individuality. I have only to shut my eyes after looking at it to forget the face. I can remember the wall of the room, the little heater, but all impression of the face of the principal figure in the room is blotted out; I am unable to recall a single thing about it.
- Dazai Osamu, No Longer Human pg. 16

Something ineffable makes the beholder shudder in distaste.
- Dazai Osamu, No Longer Human pg. 17

Mine has been a life of much shame. I can’t even guess myself what it must be to live the life of a human being.
- Dazai Osamu, No Longer Human pg. 21

I have been sickly ever since I was a child and have frequently been confined to bed. How often as I lay there I used to think what uninspired decorations sheets and pillow cases make. It wasn’t until I was about twenty that I realized that they actually served a practical purpose, and this revelation of human dullness stirred dark depression in me.
- Dazai Osamu, No Longer Human pg. 22

Eat or die, the saying goes, but to my ears it sounded like just one more unpleasant threat. Nevertheless this superstition (I could only think of it as such) always aroused doubt and fear in me. Nothing was so hard for me to understand, so baffling, and at the same time so filled with menacing overtones as the commonplace remark, ‘Human beings work to earn their bread, for if they don’t eat, they die.’
- Dazai Osamu, No Longer Human pg. 24

[Y]ou might say that I still have no understanding of what makes human beings tick. My apprehension on discovering that my concept of happiness seemed to be completely at variance with that of everyone else was so great as to make me toss sleeplessly and groan night after night in my bed. It drove me indeed to the brink of lunacy. I wonder if I have actually been happy.
- Dazai Osamu, No Longer Human pg. 24-5

I have sometimes thought that I have been burdened with a pack of ten misfortunes, any one of which if borne by my neighbor would be enough to make a murderer of him.
- Dazai Osamu, No Longer Human pg. 25

The more I think of it, the less I understand. All I feel are the assaults of apprehension and terror at the thought that I am the only one who is entirely unlike the rest. It is almost impossible for me to converse with other people. What should I talk about, how should I say it?—I don’t know.
- Dazai Osamu, No Longer Human pg. 26

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

Although I had a mortal dread of human beings I seemed quite unable to renounce their society. I managed to maintain on the surface a smile which never deserted my lips; this was the accommodation I offered to others, a most precarious achievement performed by me only at the cost of excruciating efforts within.
- Dazai Osamu, No Longer Human pg. 28

I see in the face of the human being raging at me a wild animal in its true colors, one more horrible than any lion, crocodile or dragon. People normally seem to be hiding this true nature, but an occasion will arise…when anger makes them reveal in a flash human nature in all its horror. Seeing this happen has always induced in me a fear great enough to make my hair stand on end, and at the thought that this nature might be one of the prerequisites for survival as a human being, I have come close to despairing of myself.
- Dazai Osamu, No Longer Human pg. 28

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 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.
- Dazai Osamu, No Longer Human pg. 28-9

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.
- Dazai Osamu, No Longer Human pg. 30

What a failure. Now I had angered my father and I could be sure that his revenge would be something fearful. That night as I lay shivering in bed I tried to think if there were still not some way of redressing the situation… . I had not the faintest wish for a lion mask. In fact, I would actually have preferred a book. But it was obvious that Father wanted to buy me a mask, and my frantic desire to cater to his wishes and restore his good humor had emboldened me to sneak into the parlor in the dead of night.
- Dazai Osamu, No Longer Human pg. 31

“Father. In “My Childhood” Dazai writes that the one he feared most in the family was his father. ‘For that reason, I was usually good in his presence.’…Later, in “Recollections,” he emphasizes how little he knew of his father, and how intimidating he was. There, the ominous image of his father, a dark figure standing in the doorway of the storehouse, and scolding Dazai and his little brother who were playing there, measures vividly for the reader how that figure haunted Dazai’s memory.”
- The Saga of Dazai Osamu, by Phyllis I. Lyons, pages 59-60.

I was well on the way to winning respect. But the idea of being respected used to intimidate me excessively. My definition of a “respected” man was one who had succeeded almost completely in hoodwinking people, but who was finally seen through by some omniscient, omnipotent person who ruined him and made him suffer a shame worse than death. Even supposing I could deceive most human beings into respecting me, one of them would know the truth, and sooner or later other human beings would learn from him. What would be the wrath and vengeance of those who realized how they had been tricked! That was a hair-raising thought.
- Dazai Osamu, No Longer Human pg. 33

I smiled in my weakness.
- Dazai Osamu, No Longer Human pg. 35

It is only too obvious that favoritism inevitably exists: it would have been useless to complain to human beings.
- Dazai Osamu, No Longer Human pg. 35

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

On the shore, at a point so close to the ocean one might imagine it was there that the waves broke, stood a row of over twenty fairly tall cherry trees with coal-black trunks. Every April when the new school year was about to begin these trees would display their dazzling blossoms and their moist brown leaves against the blue of the sea. Soon a snowstorm of blossoms would scatter innumerable petals into the water, flecking the surface with points of white which the waves carried back to the shore.
- Dazai Osamu, No Longer Human pg. 41

An actor dreads most the audience in his home town; I imagine the greatest actor in the world would be quite paralyzed in a room where all his family and relatives were gathered to watch him.
- Dazai Osamu, No Longer Human pg. 42

Just when I had begun to relax my guard a bit, fairly confident that I had succeeded by now in concealing completely my true identity, I was stabbed in the back, quite unexpectedly. The assailant, like most people who stab in the back, bordered on being a simpleton—the puniest boy in the class, whose scrofulous face and floppy jacket with sleeves too long for him was complemented by a total lack of proficiency in his studies and by such clumsiness in military drill and physical training that he was perpetually designated as an “onlooker.” Not surprisingly, I failed to recognize the need to be on my guard against him.
- Dazai Osamu, No Longer Human pg. 43

I felt as if I had seen the world before me burst in an instant into the raging flames of hell. It was all I could do to suppress a wild shriek of terror. The ensuing days were imprinted with my anxiety and dread. I continued on the surface making everybody laugh with my miserable clowning, but now and then painful sighs escaped my lips. Whatever I did Takeichi would see through it, and I was sure he would soon start spreading the word to everyone he saw. At this thought my forehead broke out in a sweat; I stared around me vacantly with the wild eyes of a madman.
- Dazai Osamu, No Longer Human pg. 44-5

I had no choice but to pray for his death. Typically enough, the one thing that never occurred to me was to kill him. During the course of my life I have wished innumerable times that I might meet with a violent death, but I have never once desired to kill anybody. I thought that in killing a dreaded adversary I might actually be bringing him happiness.
- Dazai Osamu, No Longer Human pg. 45

‘To fall for,’ 'to be fallen for’ I feel in these words something unspeakably vulgar, farcical, and at the same time extraordinarily complacent. Once these expressions put in an appearance, no matter how solemn the place, the silent cathedrals of melancholy crumble, leaving nothing but an impression of fatuousness. It is curious, but the cathedrals of melancholy are not necessarily demolished if one can replace the vulgar 'What a messy business it is to be fallen for’ by the more literary 'What uneasiness lies in being loved.’
- Dazai Osamu, No Longer Human pg. 47

I have always found the female of the human species many times more difficult to understand than the male… . it was with very much the sensation of treading on thin ice that I associated with these girls. I could almost never guess their motives. I was in the dark; at times I made indiscreet mistakes which brought me painful wounds. These wounds, unlike the scars from the lashing a man might give, cut inwards very deep, like an internal hemorrhage, bringing intense discomfort. Once inflicted it was extremely hard to recover from such wounds.
- Dazai Osamu, No Longer Human pg. 48

Women sleep so soundly they seem to be dead. Who knows? Women may live in order to sleep.
- Dazai Osamu, No Longer Human pg. 49

…though women appear to belong to the same species as man, they are actually quite different creatures…
- Dazai Osamu, No Longer Human (pg. 49)

I have often felt that I would find it more complicated, troublesome and unpleasant to ascertain the feelings by which a woman lives than to plumb the innermost thoughts of an earthworm.
- Dazai Osamu, No Longer Human, pg. 51-52

Long personal experience had taught me that when a woman suddenly bursts into hysterics, the way to restore her spirits is to give her something sweet.
- Dazai Osamu, No Longer Human (pg. 52)

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. Takeuchi 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.
- Dazai Osamu, No Longer Human pg. 53-4

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.
- Dazai Osamu, No Longer Human pg. 55

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.
- Dazai Osamu, No Longer Human pg. 55

I was equally afraid that they might not recognize my true self when they saw it, but imagine that it was just some new twist to my clowning—occasion for additional snickers.
- Dazai Osamu, No Longer Human pg. 56

Communal living had proved quite impossible for me. It gave me chills just to hear such words as ‘the ardor of youth’ or 'youthful pride’: I could not by any stretch of the imagination soak myself in 'college spirit.’
- Dazai Osamu, No Longer Human pg. 57

No less than myself, though in a different way, he was entirely removed from the activities of the human beings of the world. We were of one species if only in that we were both disoriented. At the same time there was a basic difference in us: he operated without being conscious of his farcicality or, for that matter, without giving any recognition to the misery of that farcicality.
- Dazai Osamu, No Longer Human pg. 60

To tell the truth, when I first came to the city, I was afraid to board a streetcar because of the conductor; I was afraid to enter the Kabuki Theatre for fear of the usherettes standing along the sides of the red-carpeted staircase at the main entrance; I was afraid to go into a restaurant because I was intimidated by the waiters furtively hovering behind me waiting for my plate to be emptied. Most of all I dreaded paying a bill—my awkwardness when I handed over the money after buying something did not arise from any stinginess, but from excessive tension, excessive embarrassment, excessive uneasiness and apprehension. My eyes would swim in my head, and the whole world grow dark before me, so that I felt half out of my mind.
- Dazai Osamu, No Longer Human pg. 61

Another thing which saved me when with Horiki was that he was completely uninterested in what his listener might be thinking, and could pour forth a continuous stream of nonsensical chatter twenty-four hours a day, in whichever direction the eruption of his “passions” led him. (It may have been that his passions consisted in ignoring the feelings of his listener.) His loquacity ensured that there would be absolutely no danger of our falling into uncomfortable silences when our pleasures had fatigued us. In dealings with other people I had always been on my guard lest those frightful silences occur…
- Dazai Osamu, No Longer Human pg. 62

I felt sure that something more obscure, more frightening lurked in the hearts of human beings. Greed did not cover it, nor did vanity. Nor was it simply a combination of lust and greed. I wasn’t sure what it was, but I felt that there was something inexplicable at the bottom of human society which was not reducible to economics. Terrified as I was by this weird element, I assented to materialism as naturally as water finding its own level. But materialism could not free me from my dread of human beings; I could not feel the joy of hope a man experiences when he opens his eyes on young leaves.
- Dazai Osamu, No Longer Human pg. 66

I found it uproariously amusing to see my “comrades,” their faces tense as though they were discussing matters of life and death, absorbed in the study of theories so elementary they were on the order of ‘one and one makes two.
- Dazai Osamu, No Longer Human pg. 66

I did it because I liked to, because those people pleased me—and not necessarily because we were linked by any common affection… Irrationality. I found the thought faintly pleasurable. Or rather, I felt at ease with it.
- Dazai Osamu, No Longer Human pg. 67

What frightened me was the logic of the world; in it lay the foretaste of something incalculably powerful. Its mechanism was incomprehensible, and I could not possibly remain closeted in that windowless, bone-chilling room. Though outside lay the sea of irrationality, it was far more agreeable to swim in its waters until presently I drowned.
- Dazai Osamu, No Longer Human pg. 67

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.
- Dazai Osamu, No Longer Human pg. 67

People also talk of a “criminal consciousness.” All my life in this world of human beings I have been tortured by such a consciousness, but it has been my faithful companion, like a wife in poverty, and together, just the two of us, we have indulged in our forlorn pleasures. This, perhaps, has been one of the attitudes in which I have gone on living. People also commonly speak of the “wound of a guilty conscience.” In my case, the wound appeared of itself when I was an infant, and with the passage of time, far from healing it has grown only the deeper, until now it has reached the bone. The agonies I have suffered night after night have made for a hell composed of an infinite diversity of tortures, but—though this is a very strange way to put it—the wound has gradually become dearer to me than my own flesh and blood, and I have thought its pain to he the emotion of the wound as it lived or even its murmur of affection.
- Dazai Osamu, No Longer Human pg. 67-8

Unable to suppress such reactions of annoyance, I escaped. I escaped, but it gave me no pleasure: I decided to kill myself.
- Dazai Osamu, No Longer Human, pg. 73

I was well aware that it never offends a woman to be asked to do an errand; they are delighted if some man deigns to ask them a favor.
- Dazai Osamu, No Longer Human, pg. 75

Inwardly I was no less suspicious than before of the assurance and the violence of human beings, but on the surface I had learned bit by bit the art of meeting people with a straight face—no, that’s not true: I have never been able to meet anyone without an accompaniment of painful smiles, the buffoonery of defeat. What I had acquired was the technique of stammering somehow, almost in a daze, the necessary small talk.
- Dazai Osamu, No Longer Human, page 77

I felt afraid no matter where I was. I wondered if the best way to obtain some surcease from this relentless feeling might not be to lose myself.
- Dazai Osamu, No Longer Human pg. 77

It was a cold autumn night. I was waiting at a sushi stall back of the Cinza for Tsuneko (that, as I recall, was her name, but the memory is too blurred for me to be sure: I am the sort of person who can forget even the name of the woman with whom he attempted suicide) to get off from work. The sushi I was eating had nothing to recommend it. Why, when I have forgotten her name, should I be able to remember so clearly how bad the sushi tasted? And I can recall with absolute clarity the close-cropped head of the old man—his face was like a snake's—wagging from side to side as he made the sushi, trying to create the illusion that he was a real expert. It has happened to me two or three times since that I have seen on the streetcar what seemed to be a familiar face and wondered who it was, only to realize with a start that the person opposite me looked like the old man from the sushi stall. Now, when her name and even her face are fading from my memory, for me to be able to remember that old man’s face so accurately I could draw it, is surely a proof of how bad the sushi was and how it chilled and distressed me.
- Dazai Osamu, No Longer Human pg. 78-9

She gave me the impression of standing completely isolated; an icy storm whipped around her, leaving only dead leaves careening wildly down.
- Dazai Osamu, No Longer Human pg. 79

‘I feel so unhappy.' I am sure that this one phrase whispered to me would arouse my sympathy more than the longest, most painstaking account of a woman’s life. It amazes and astonishes me that I have never once heard a woman make this simple statement. This woman did not say, “I feel so unhappy” in so many words, but something like a silent current of misery an inch wide flowed over the surface of her body. When I lay next to her my body was enveloped in her current, which mingled with my own harsher current of gloom…
- Dazai Osamu, No Longer Human pg. 80

They say that love flies out the window when poverty comes in the door, but people generally get the sense backwards. It doesn’t mean that when a man’s money runs out he’s shaken off by women. When he runs out of money, he naturally is in the dumps. He’s no good for anything. The strength goes out of his laugh, he becomes strangely soured. Finally, in desperation, he shakes off the woman. The proverb means that when a man becomes half-mad, he will shake and shake and shake until he’s free of a woman.
- Dazai Osamu, No Longer Human pg. 81

The weak fear happiness itself. They can harm themselves on cotton wool. Sometimes they are wounded even by happiness.
- Dazai Osamu, No Longer Human, pg. 81

It frightened me even that I had accepted a moment’s kindness: I felt I had imposed horrible bonds on myself.
- Dazai Osamu, No Longer Human pg. 82

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

Then, the next moment, I meekly, helplessly resigned myself… . I grinned.
- Dazai Osamu, No Longer Human pg. 84

…she really was a tired, poverty-stricken woman and nothing more. But this thought itself was accompanied by a welling-up of a feeling of comradeship for this fellow-sufferer from poverty. (The clash between rich and poor is a hackneyed enough subject, but I am now convinced that it really is one of the eternal themes of drama.) I felt pity for Tsuneko; for the first time in my life I was conscious of a positive (if feeble) movement of love in my heart. I vomited. I passed out. This was also the first time I had ever drunk so much as to lose consciousness.
- Dazai Osamu, No Longer Human pg. 85-6

She too seemed to be weary beyond endurance of the task of being a human being;
- Dazai Osamu, No Longer Human pg. 86

This was a humiliation more strange than any I had tasted before, a humiliation I could not live with… . It was then I myself determined, this time as a reality, to kill myself.
- Dazai Osamu, No Longer Human pg. 87

My performance was all but inspired - a great performance which brought me no benefit whatsoever.
- Dazai Osamu, No Longer Human pg. 90

I should have preferred to be sentenced to ten years imprisonment rather than meet with such gentle contempt…
- Dazai Osamu, No Longer Human pg. 93

The change in him was so extraordinary as to inspire me with thoughts of how contemptible—or rather, how comic—human beings are who can metamorphize themselves as simply and effortlessly as they turn over their hands.
- Dazai Osamu, No Longer Human pg. 98

Flatfish seemed to be keeping an eye on me, as if I were very likely to commit suicide—he must have thought there was some danger I might throw myself into the sea after the woman—and he sternly forbade me to leave the house. Unable to drink or to smoke, I spent my whole days from the moment I got up until I went to bed trapped in my cubicle of a room, with nothing but old magazines to read. I was leading the life of a half-wit, and I had quite lost even the energy to think of suicide.
- Dazai Osamu, No Longer Human pg. 98

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

I yearned with such desperation for “freedom” that I became weak and tearful.
- Dazai Osamu, No Longer Human pg. 101

So, you see, your rehabilitation depends entirely on yourself. If you mend your ways and bring me your problems—seriously, I mean—I will certainly see what I can do to help you.
- Dazai Osamu, No Longer Human pg. 101

Flatfish’s manner of speech—no, not only his, but the manner of speech of everybody in the world—held strange, elusive complexities, intricately presented with overtones of vagueness: I have always been baffled by these precautions so strict as to be useless, and by the intensely irritating little maneuvers surrounding them. In the end I have felt past caring; I have laughed them away with my clowning, or surrendered to them abjectly with a silent nod of the head, in the attitude of defeat.
- Dazai Osamu, No Longer Human pg. 101-2

…if Flatfish had at the time presented me with a simple statement of the facts, there would have been no untoward consequences. But as a result of his unnecessary precautions, or rather, of the incomprehensible vanity and love of appearances of the people of the world, I was subjected to a most dismal set of experiences.
- Dazai Osamu, No Longer Human pg. 102

Why, I wonder, couldn’t he have mentioned that one simple fact… That one fact would probably have settled my feelings, but I was left in a fog.
- Dazai Osamu, No Longer Human pg. 103

I can never forget the indescribably crafty shadow that passed over Flatfish’s face as he laughed at me, his neck drawn in. It resembled contempt, yet it was different: if the world, like the sea, had depths of a thousand fathoms, this was the kind of weird shadow which might be found hovering here and there at the bottom. It was a laugh which enabled me to catch a glimpse of the very nadir of adult life.
- Dazai Osamu, No Longer Human pg. 104-5

‘There is no point in discussing such a thing. Your feelings are still all up in the air. Think it over. Please devote this evening to thinking it over seriously.’…I did not run away because I was mortified at having been lectured by Flatfish. I was, exactly as Flatfish described, a man whose feelings were up in the air, and I had absolutely no idea about future plans or anything else.
- Dazai Osamu, No Longer Human pg. 105

I think that might be a somewhat more accurate presentation of my motives. I knew that the facts were certain to be discovered, but I was afraid to state them as they were. One of my tragic flaws is the compulsion to add some sort of embellishment to every situation—a quality which has made people call me at times a liar—but I have almost never embellished in order to bring myself any advantage; it was rather that I had a strangulating fear of that cataclysmic change in the atmosphere the instant the flow of a conversation flagged, and even when I knew that it would later turn to my disadvantage, I frequently felt obliged to add, almost inadvertently, my word of embellishment, out of a desire to please born of my usual desperate mania for service. This may have been a twisted form of my weakness, an idiocy, but the habit it engendered was taken full advantage of by the so-called honest citizens of the world.
- Dazai Osamu, No Longer Human pg. 106-107

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

Horiki showed me that day a new aspect of his city-dweller personality. This was his knowing nature, an egoism so icy, so crafty that a country boy like myself could only stare with eyes opened wide in amazement. He was not a simple, endlessly passive type like myself.
- Dazai Osamu, No Longer Human pg. 109

‘Hey! What are you doing there? Don’t tear the thread off the cushion!’ While we were talking I had unconsciously been fiddling with and twisting around my finger one of the tassel-like threads which protruded from the corners of the cushion on which I sat—binding-threads, I think they are called. Horiki had assumed a jealous possessiveness about everything in his house down to the last cushion thread, and he glared at me, seemingly quite unembarrassed by this attitude. When I think of it, Horiki’s acquaintanceship with me had cost him nothing.
- Dazai Osamu, No Longer Human pg. 109-10

The jelly and the way Horiki rejoiced over it taught me a lesson in the parsimoniousness of the city-dweller, and in what it is really like in a Tokyo household where the members divide their lives so sharply between what they do at home and what they do on the outside. I was filled with dismay at these signs that I, a fool rendered incapable by my perpetual flight from human society from distinguishing between “at home” and “on the outside,” was the only one completely left out, that I had been deserted even by Horiki. I should like to record that as I manipulated the peeling lacquer chopsticks to eat my jelly, I felt unbearably lonely.
- Dazai Osamu, No Longer Human pg. 110-11

You look like someone who’s had an unhappy childhood. You’re so sensitive—more’s the pity for you.
- Dazai Osamu, No Longer Human pg. 112

For about a week I remained in a state of daze. Just outside the apartment window was a kite caught in the telegraph wires; blown about and ripped by the dusty spring wind, it nevertheless clung tenaciously to the wires, as if in affirmation of something. Every time I looked at the kite I had to smile with embarrassment and blush. It haunted me even in dreams.
- Dazai Osamu, No Longer Human pg. 113

At such times the self-portraits I painted in high school—the ones Takeichi called “ghost pictures"—naturally came to mind. My lost masterpieces. These, my only really worthwhile pictures, had disappeared during one of my frequent changes of address. I afterwards painted pictures of every description, but they all fell far, far short of those splendid works as I remembered them. I was plagued by a heavy sense of loss, as if my heart had become empty.
- Dazai Osamu, No Longer Human pg. 113-4

The undrunk glass of absinthe. A sense of loss which was doomed to remain eternally unmitigated stealthily began to take shape. Whenever I spoke of painting, that undrunk glass of absinthe flickered before my eyes. I was agonized by the frustrating thought: if only I could show them those paintings they would believe in my artistic talents.
- Dazai Osamu, No Longer Human pg. 114

      "Do you really? You’re adorable when you joke that way with a serious face.“
      But it was no joke. It was true.
- Dazai Osamu, No Longer Human pg. 114

Clownish words of deceit were taken more seriously than the truth
- Dazai Osamu, No Longer Human pg. 114

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.
- Dazai Osamu, No Longer Human pg. 115

I was frightened even by God. I could not believe in His love, only in His punishment. Faith. That, I felt, was the act of facing the tribunal of justice with one’s head bowed to receive the scourge of God. I could believe in hell, but it was impossible for me to believe in the existence of heaven.
- Dazai Osamu, No Longer Human pg. 117

’…But everybody says you’re so nice.‘ That’s because I deceived them. I was aware that everybody in the apartment house was friendly to me, but it was extremely difficult for me to explain to Shigeko how much I feared them all, and how I was cursed by the unhappy peculiarity that the more I feared people the more I was liked, and the more I was liked the more I feared them—a process which eventually compelled me to run away from everybody.
- Dazai Osamu, No Longer Human pg. 117

Here was another frightening grown-up who would intimidate me. A stranger, an incomprehensible stranger, a stranger full of secrets.
- Dazai Osamu, No Longer Human pg. 117

It occurred to me that a man like myself who dreads human beings, shuns and deceives them, might on the surface seem strikingly like another man who reveres the clever, wordly-wise rules for success embodied in the proverb ‘Let sleeping dogs lie.’
- Dazai Osamu, No Longer Human pg. 118-9

Is it not true that no two human beings understand anything whatsoever about each other, that those who consider themselves bosom friends may be utterly mistaken about their fellow and, failing to realize this sad truth throughout a lifetime, weep when they read in the newspapers about his death?
- Dazai Osamu, No Longer Human pg. 119

      What, I wondered, did he mean by “society”? The plural of human beings?    Where was the substance of this thing called “society”? I had spent my whole life thinking that society must certainly be something powerful, harsh and severe, but to hear Horiki talk made the words “Don’t you mean yourself?” come to the tip of my tongue. But I held the words back, reluctant to anger him.
      Society won’t stand for it.
      It’s not society. You’re the one who won’t stand for it—right?
      If you do such a thing society will make you suffer for it.
      It’s not society. It’s you, isn’t it?
      Before you know it, you’ll be ostracized by society.
      It’s not society. You’re going to do the ostracizing, aren’t you?
- Dazai Osamu, No Longer Human pg. 119-20

From then on, however, I came to hold, almost as a philosophical conviction, the belief: What is society but an individual? From the moment I suspected that society might be an individual I was able to act more in accordance with my own inclinations.
- Dazai Osamu, No Longer Human pg. 120

      …et puis on recommence encore le lendemain
      avec seulement la même règle que la veille
      et qui est d'éviter les grandes joies barbares
      de même que les gr-andes douleurs
      comme un crapaud contourne une pierre sur son chemin…
      When I first read in translation these verses by Guy-Charles Cros, I blushed until my face burned.
        The toad.
      (That is what I was—a toad. It was not a question of whether or not society tolerated me, whether or not it ostracized me. I was an animal lower than a dog, lower than a cat. A toad. I sluggishly moved— that’s all.)

Poem Translation:
[…and then it all starts again the next day
with only the same rules as in the night before
and that is to evade the great barbarian joys
thus will the great sorrows be likewise
as how a toad circumvents a stone on its pathway…]

- Dazai Osamu, No Longer Human pg. 122

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 gradually came to relax my vigilance towards the world. I came to think that it was not such a dreadful place. My feelings of panic had been molded by the unholy fear aroused in me by such superstitions of science as the hundreds of thousands of whooping-cough germs borne by the spring breezes, the hundreds of thousands of eye-destroying bacteria which infest the public baths, the hundreds of thousands of microbes in a barber shop which will cause baldness, the swarms of scabious parasites infecting the leather straps in the subway cars; or the tapeworm, fluke and heaven knows what eggs that undoubtedly lurk in raw fish and in undercooked beef and pork; or the fact that if you walk barefoot a tiny sliver of glass may penetrate the sole of your foot and after circulating through your body reach the eye and cause blindness. There is no disputing the accurate, scientific fact that millions of germs are floating, swimming, wriggling everywhere. At the same time, however, if you ignore them completely they lose all possible connection with yourself, and at once become nothing more than vanishing “ghosts of science.” This too I came to understand. I had been so terrorized by scientific statistics (if ten million people each leave over three grains of rice from their lunch, how many sacks of rice are wasted in one day; if ten million people each economize one paper handkerchief a day, how much pulp will be saved?) that whenever I left over a single grain of rice, whenever I blew my nose, I imagined that I was wasting mountains of rice, tons of paper, and I fell prey to a mood dark as if I had committed some terrible crime. But these were the lies of science, the lies of statistics and mathematics: you can’t collect three grains of rice from everybody. Even as an exercise in multiplication or division, it ranks as one of the most elementary and feeble-minded problems, about on a par with the computation of the percentage of times that people slip in dark, unlighted bathrooms and fall into the toilet, or the percentage of passengers who get their feet caught in the space between the door of a subway train and the edge of the platform, or other such footling exercises in probability. These events seem entirely within the bounds of possibility, but I have never heard a single instance of anyone hurting himself by falling into the toilet. I felt pity and contempt for the self which until yesterday had accepted such hypothetical situations as eminently factual scientific truths and was terrified by them. This shows the degree to which I had bit by bit arrived at a knowledge of the real nature of what is called the world.
- Dazai Osamu, No Longer Human pg. 126-7

Having said that, I must now admit that I was still afraid of human beings, and before I could meet even the customers in the bar I had to fortify myself by gulping down a glass of liquor. The desire to see frightening things—that was what drew me every night to the bar where, like the child who squeezes his pet all the harder when he actually fears it a little…
- Dazai Osamu, No Longer Human pg. 127-8

I craved desperately some great savage joy, no matter how immense the suffering that might ensue…
- Dazai Osamu, No Longer Human pg. 128

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

The joy I obtained as a result of this action was not necessarily great or savage, but the suffering which ensued was staggering—so far surpassing what I had imagined that even describing it as “horrendous” would not quite cover it. The “world,” after all, was still a place of bottomless horror. It was by no means a place of childlike simplicity where everything could be settled by a single then-and-there decision.
- Dazai Osamu, No Longer Human pg. 132-3

Despising each other as we did, we were constantly together, thereby degrading ourselves. If that is what the world calls friendship, the relations between Horiki and myself were undoubtedly those of friendship.
- Dazai Osamu, No Longer Human pg. 137

Just when I was beginning to forget, that bird of ill-omen came flapping my way, to rip open with its beak the wounds of memory. All at once shame over the past and the recollection of sin unfolded themselves before my eyes and, seized by a terror so great it made me want to shriek, I could not sit still a moment longer.
- Dazai Osamu, No Longer Human pg. 139

        We began a guessing game of tragic and comic nouns. This game, which I myself had invented, was based on the proposition that just as nouns could be divided into masculine, feminine and neuter, so there was a distinction between tragic and comic nouns. For example, this system decreed that steamship and steam engine were both tragic nouns, while streetcar and bus were comic. Persons who failed to see why this was true were obviously unqualified to discuss art, and a playwright who included even a single tragic noun in a comedy showed himself a failure if for no other reason. The same held equally true of comic nouns in tragedies.
        I began the questioning. “Are you ready? What is tobacco?”
        "Tragic,“ Horiki answered promptly.
        "What about medicine?”
        "Powder or pills?“
        "Injection.”
        "Tragic.“
        "I wonder. Don’t forget, there are hormone injections too.”
        "No, there’s no question but it’s tragic. First of all, there’s a needle—what could be more tragic than a needle?“
        "You win. But, you know, medicines and doctors are, surprisingly enough, comic. What about death?”
        "Comic. And that goes for Christian ministers and Buddhist priests, too.“
        "Bravo! Then life must be tragic?”
        "Wrong. It’s comic, too.“
        "In that case everything becomes comic. Here’s one more for you. What about cartoonist? You couldn’t possibly call it a comic noun, could you?”
        "Tragic. An extremely tragic noun.“
        "What do you mean? Extremely tragic is a good description of you.”
- Dazai Osamu, No Longer Human pg. 141-2

He could only consider me as the living corpse of a would-be suicide, a person dead to shame, an idiot ghost.
- Dazai Osamu, No Longer Human pg. 144

His friendship had no other purpose but to utilize me in whichever way would most further his own pleasures. This thought naturally did not make me very happy, but I realized after a moment that it was entirely to be expected that Horiki should take this view of me ; that from long ago, even as a child, I seemed to lack the qualifications of a human being; and that, for all I know, contempt, even from Horiki, might be entirely merited.
- Dazai Osamu, No Longer Human pg. 144

…once again the ingrained habit of considering myself evil took command.
- Dazai Osamu, No Longer Human pg. 146

Crime and punishment. Dostoievski. These words grazed over a corner of my mind, startling me. Just supposing Dostoievski ranged ‘crime’ and 'punishment’ side by side not as synonyms but as antonyms. Crime and punishment—absolutely incompatible ideas, irreconcilable as oil and water. I felt I was beginning to understand what lay at the bottom of the scum-covered, turbid pond, that chaos of Dostoievski’s mind—no, I still didn’t quite see … Such thoughts were flashing through my head like a revolving lantern…
- Dazai Osamu, No Longer Human pg. 147

The feelings which assailed me as I looked up at the summer night sky heavy with rain were not of fury or hatred, nor even of sadness. They were of overpowering fear, not the terror the sight of ghosts in a graveyard might arouse, but rather a fierce ancestral dread that could not be expressed in four or five words, something perhaps like encountering in the sacred grove of a Shinto shrine the white-clothed body of the god. My hair turned prematurely grey from that night. I had now lost all confidence in myself, doubted all men immeasurably, and abandoned all hopes for the things of this world, all joy, all sympathy, eternally.
- Dazai Osamu, No Longer Human pg. 148-9

I wept bitterly, crying aloud. I could have wept on and on, interminably… Is trustfulness a sin, I wonder?
- Dazai Osamu, No Longer Human pg. 149

It was less the fact of Yoshiko’s defilement than the defilement of her trust in people which became so persistent a source of grief as almost to render my life insupportable…. Yoshiko’s immaculate trustfulness seemed clean and pure, like a waterfall among green leaves. One night sufficed to turn the waters of this pure cascade yellow and muddy. Yoshiko began from that night to fret over my every smile or frown.
- Dazai Osamu, No Longer Human pg. 150

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

Even though such an incident certainly comes as a great shock… it is a shock and not an endless series of waves which lash back at him over and over again.
- Dazai Osamu, No Longer Human pg. 152

…I came to feel that everything was my fault. Far from becoming enraged, I could not utter a word of complaint;
- Dazai Osamu, No Longer Human pg. 152

Now that I harbored doubts about the one virtue I had depended on, I lost all comprehension of everything around me.
- Dazai Osamu, No Longer Human pg. 152

Then I made an utterly unpremeditated slip of the tongue, one so comic, so idiotic that it all but defies description. I said, ‘I’m going somewhere where there aren’t any women.’ Flatfish was the first to respond, with loud guffaws; the madam tittered; and in the midst of my tears I turned red and smiled despite myself. ‘An excellent idea,’ said Flatfish still continuing his inane laughter. ‘You really ought to go to a place with no women. Everything goes wrong as soon as women are around you. Yes, a place without women is a fine suggestion.’
- Dazai Osamu, No Longer Human pg. 155

Flatfish had left some money when he came to visit me. (He said, “It’s a little gift from me,” and offered it exactly as if it were his own money, though I gathered that it actually came from my brothers as usual…. I was able to get a vague glimpse through his theatrical airs of importance; I too was clever and, pretending to be completely unaware of what was going on, humbly offered Flatfish my thanks for the money. It nevertheless gave me a strange feeling, as if at the same time I could and could not understand why people like Flatfish resorted to such complicated tricks.)
- Dazai Osamu, No Longer Human pg. 156

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

My unhappiness stemmed entirely from my own vices, and I had no way of fighting anybody. If I had ever attempted to voice anything in the nature of a protest, even a single mumbled word, the whole of society… would undoubtedly have cried out flabbergasted, “Imagine the audacity of him talking like that!” Am I what they call an egoist? Or am I the opposite, a man of excessively weak spirit? I really don’t know myself, but since I seem in either case to be a mass of vices, I drop steadily, inevitably, into unhappiness, and I have no specific plan to stave off my descent.
- Dazai Osamu, No Longer Human pg. 157-8

Unhappy people are sensitive to the unhappiness of others.
- Dazai Osamu, No Longer Human pg. 158

I feel so on edge I can’t stand it. I’m afraid. I’m no good for anything.
- Dazai Osamu, No Longer Human pg. 159

I am very susceptible to other people’s suggestions. When people say to me, ‘You really shouldn’t spend this money, but I suppose you will anyway … ‘ I have the strange illusion that I would be going against expectations and somehow doing wrong unless I spent it. I invariably spend all the money immediately.
- Dazai Osamu, No Longer Human pg. 161

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.
- Dazai Osamu, No Longer Human pg. 163-4

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. The result was to make everything only the worse: the answer, for which I waited day and night, never came…
- Dazai Osamu, No Longer Human pg. 164

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

My unhappiness was the unhappiness of a person who could not say no. I had been intimidated by the fear that if I declined something offered me, a yawning crevice would open between the other person’s heart and myself which could never be mended through all eternity.
- Dazai Osamu, No Longer Human pg. 166

I was no longer a criminal—I was a lunatic. But no, I was definitely not mad. I have never been mad for even an instant. They say, I know, that most lunatics claim the same thing. What it amounts to is that people who get put into this asylum are crazy, and those who don’t are normal.
- Dazai Osamu, No Longer Human pg. 166-7

Disqualified as a human being. I had now ceased utterly to be a human being.
- Dazai Osamu, No Longer Human pg. 167

The news… eviscerated me. He was dead, that familiar, frightening presence who had never left my heart for a split second. I felt as though the vessel of my suffering had become empty, as if nothing could interest me now. I had lost even the ability to suffer.
- Dazai Osamu, No Longer Human pg. 168

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.
- Dazai Osamu, No Longer Human pg. 169

‘Did you cry?’ ‘No. I didn’t cry … I just kept thinking that when human beings get that way, they’re no good for anything.’
- Dazai Osamu, No Longer Human pg. 176

I felt as though I have been riding a huge, newly built ship. But where is this ship going? Even I don’t know. I’m still in a dreamscape. This ship is effortlessly leaving the shore. I have a vague premonition that is heading in an uncharted virgin course that has never been experienced by anyone in the world. But now, only the huge new ship is welcomed and advances by yielding to the mercy of the sea lane in the heavens.
- Dazai Osamu, Pandora’s Box

Despair is impossible in humans. They often are deceived by hope, but are also deceived by the notion of despair. Let me state this plainly. People fall into the depths of misery, but they grope for a ray of hope as they are tumbling down.
- Dazai Osamu, Pandora’s Box

Anxiety was trapped in the depths of my heart, like a formation of black clouds I could not break free of. By living this way, what will my fortune be? There is nothing. Am I simply a sickly man? I was staggered by these thoughts. What should I do? I had no direction, nothing. I though that this reckless life of mine was only a nuisance to others and devoid of meaning. This is quite hard to bear. A talented guy like you probably doesn’t understand, but no thought in the world is worse than the realization that, ‘My life is a nuisance to others. I am useless.’
- Dazai Osamu, Pandora’s Box

Despite [her] demented laugh, she may actually be an uncommonly sad girl. Doesn’t a person who laughs a lot also cry a lot?
- Dazai Osamu, Pandora’s Box

As the seasons turn, everything seems brand new, and I yearn for love. I like her. I really like her. I am going completely berserk. No, I don’t like her that much.
- Dazai Osamu, Pandora’s Box

I don’t hate myself for it or feel a deep, bitter regret. Initially, I thought that the elimination of that feeling of hatred was a mystery, but it’s not a mystery at all. Didn’t I intend to become an entirely different man? I have become the New Man. So far, my greatest joy is not feeling self-hatred or regret. I think that’s a good thing. Now, as the New Man, I possess a refreshing self-confidence….The skylark sings. Spring water flows. I live transparently and with lightness!
- Dazai Osamu, Pandora’s Box

People depend on death to be complete. While alive, they are all incomplete…The paradox of people becoming the most human because they will die seems to be valid…We all live a sheet of paper away from death, so we shouldn’t be surprised by death.
- Dazai Osamu, Pandora’s Box

Courage demands both great courage and small courage. So for humanity, the three critical elements are wisdom, virtue, and valor. Being popular with women is not the problem at all.
- Dazai Osamu, Pandora’s Box

I stroked the trunk of a pine tree. The tree trunk was alive and warm like blood was coursing through it. I crouched down, surprised by the strong smell of grass at my feet, and scooped up some dirt in both hands. I was impressed by the weight of the dampness. To say nature lives is obvious, but a stronger feeling of realism comes with natural scents. But that wonder vanished in about ten minutes. Then I felt nothing. Numbness set in, and indifference returned.
- Dazai Osamu, Pandora’s Box

The original form of free thought is a rebellious spirit. It may be called destructive thought. These are not the thoughts that initially arose in the removal of oppression and shackles, but are the thoughts of fighting that arose in concert with reactions to oppression and shackles. Although there are many examples, one day a dove asked the gods, ‘When I fly, the air becomes a barrier and I cannot move forward quickly. I would like you to make the air go away.’ The gods listened to this wish. Then, however, no matter how hard the dove flapped, he could not fly. Free thought with no target for struggle is like a dove flapping in a vacuum tube, and is unable to soar.
- Dazai Osamu, Pandora’s Box

It’s never too late to change one’s ways. The sooner the better.
- Dazai Osamu, Pandora’s Box

We are searching for art like the music of Mozart, art that is exuberant and radiates goodness. Strangely affected gestures and grave seriousness are already old and obvious. Are there any poets to eloquently recite even in the small green patches in the corners of the ruins of a fire? It’s not to escape reality. The hardships are all too obvious. I already intend to live with indifference. It is not an escape. Life in on hold. It’s carefree. We feel that now the truth resides only in art with the touch of a swiftly running, clear stream to exactly match our feelings…It’s not a matter of doctrines, the -isms. Those things are deceptive and useless. I understand the degree of purity of a person, by only his touch. The problem is the touch. It is the rhythm. If no goodness is radiated, everyone is a fraud.
- Dazai Osamu, Pandora’s Box

Devotion is nothing like mindlessly killing oneself with hopeless sentimentality. There is an immense difference. Devotion is to live a worthwhile life forever. Humanity is immortal only by relying on this pure devotion. However, there is no need to dress up for devotion. Today, I should offer everything as I am. The plowman should show devotion as the field hand with the plow. You cannot be an impostor. You’re not allowed to postpone devotion. Every moment of life must have devotion.
- Dazai Osamu, Pandora’s Box

We will move straight ahead at the perfect pace, neither too fast nor too slow. Where does this road lead? Perhaps, you should ask a growing vine. The vine may answer, ‘I don’t know. But I grow toward the sunlight.’
- Dazai Osamu, Pandora’s Box

The joy felt upon meeting vanishes in an instant, but the pain of separation runs deep. It is no exaggeration to say that we always live with the reluctance to part.
- Dazai Osamu, Pandora’s Box

After I woke up from my trance on the bridge I trembled with loneliness, and in this mood I reflected on my past and my future. All sorts of things went through my mind as I clattered over the bridge in my clogs, and I began to dream again. Finally I sighed and wondered whether I would ever make my mark on in the real world… .
- Dazai Osamu, quoting “Memories” in Tsugaru

Falling asleep is such a strange feeling. It’s like a carp or an eel is tugging on a fishing line, or something heavy like a lead weight is pulling on the line that I’m holding with my head, and as I doze off to sleep, the line slackens up a bit. When that happens, it startles me back to awareness. Then it pulls me again. I doze off to sleep. The line loosens a bit again. This goes on three or four times, and then, with the first really big tug, this time it lasts until morning...
- Dazai Osamu, Schoolgirl, pages 102-3

Waking up in the morning is always interesting. It reminds me of when we’re playing hide-and-seek - I’m hidden crouching in the pitch-dark closet and suddenly Deko throws open the sliding door, sunlight pouring in as she shouts, ‘Found you!’ - that dazzling glare followed by an awkward pause, and then, my heart pounding as I adjust the front of my kimono and emerge from the closet, I’m slightly self-conscious and then suddenly irritated and annoyed - it feels similar, but no, not quite like that, somehow even more unbearable. Sort of like opening a box, only to find another box inside, and you open it, and one after another there are smaller boxes inside each other, so you keep opening them, seven or eight of them, until finally what’s left is a tiny box the size of a small die, so you gently pry it open to find… nothing, it’s empty - more like that feeling.
- Dazai Osamu, Schoolgirl, pages 16-17

Given my lack of experience, if my books were taken away from me, I would be utterly devastated. That’s how much I depend on what’s written in books. I’ll read one book and be completely wild about it - I’ll trust it, I’ll assimilate it, I’ll sympathize with it, I’ll try to make it a part of my life. Then, I’ll read another book and instantly, I’ll switch over to that one.
- Dazai Osamu, Schoolgirl, pages 34-5

Some of us, in our daily depressions and rages, were apt to stray, to become corrupted, irreparably so, and hen our lives would be forever in disorder. There were even some who would resolve to kill themselves. And when that happened, everyone would say, Oh, if only she had lived a little longer she would have known, if she were a little more grown up she would have figured it out. How saddened they would all be. But if those people were to think about it from our perspective, and see how we had tried to endure despite how terribly painful it all was, and how we had even tried to listen carefully, as hard as we could, to what the world might have to say, they would see that, in the end, the same bland lessons were always being repeated over and over, you know, well, merely to appease us. And they would see how we always experienced the same embarrassment of being ignored. It’s not as though we only care about the present. If you were to point to a faraway mountain and say, If you can make it there, it’s a pretty good view, I’d see that there’s not an ounce of untruth to what you tell us. But when you say, Well, bear with it just a little longer, if you can make it to the top of that mountain, you’ll have done it, you are ignoring the fact that we are suffering from a terrible stomachache - right now. Surely one of you is mistaken to let us go on this way. You’re the one who is to blame.
- Dazai Osamu, Schoolgirl, pages 98-99

Scoundrels like Naoji simply don’t die. The ones who die are always the gentle, sweet, and beautiful people. Naoji wouldn’t die even if you clubbed him with a stick.
- Dazai Osamu, The Setting Sun

Everything seemed to go blank before me. It wasn’t an ordinary sickness. God killed me, and only after He had made me into someone entirely different from the person I had been, did he call me back to life.
- Dazai Osamu, The Setting Sun

As for love … no, having once written that word I can write nothing more.
- Dazai Osamu, The Setting Sun

Last year nothing happened
The year before nothing happened
And the year before that nothing happened.
…Of course all kinds of things actually did take place, but when I try to recall them now, I experience that same feeling that nothing happened.
- Dazai Osamu, The Setting Sun

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.
- Dazai Osamu, The Setting Sun

I have discovered the one way in which human beings differ completely from other animals. Man has, I know, language, knowledge, principles, and social order, but don’t all the other animals have them too, granted the difference of degree? Perhaps the animals even have religions. Man boasts of being the lord of all creation, but it would seem as if essentially he does not differ in the least from other animals. But there was one way I thought of. Perhaps you won’t understand. It’s a faculty absolutely unique to man - having secrets.
- Dazai Osamu, The Setting Sun

A sensation of helplessness, as if it were utterly impossible to go on living. Painful waves beat relentlessly on my heart, as after a thunderstorm the white clouds frantically scud across the sky. A terrible emotion - shall I call it an apprehension - wrings my heart only to release it, makes my pulse falter, and chokes my breath. At times everything grows misty and dark before my eyes, and I feel the strength of my whole body is oozing away through my finger tips.
- Dazai Osamu, The Setting Sun

Logic, inevitably, is the love of logic. It is not the love for living human beings.
- Dazai Osamu, The Setting Sun

But rather than the patronizing 'But being decadent is the only way to survive!’ of some who criticize me, I would far prefer to be told to simply to go and die. It’s straightforward. But people almost never say, ‘Die!’ Paltry, prudent hypocrites!
- Dazai Osamu, The Setting Sun

Humanity? Don’t be silly. I know. It is knocking down your fellow-men for the sake of your own happiness.
- Dazai Osamu, The Setting Sun

I want to spend my time with people who don’t look to be respected. But such good people won’t want to spend their time with me.
- Dazai Osamu, The Setting Sun

I felt, as I was tossed in the decrepit old taxi, as if the world had suddenly opened as wide as the sea.
- Dazai Osamu, The Setting Sun

Addiction is perhaps a sickness of the spirit.
- Dazai Osamu, The Setting Sun

The words “realism” and “romanticism” welled up within me. I have no sense of realism. And that this very fact might be what permits me to go on living sends cold chills through my whole body.
- Dazai Osamu, The Setting Sun

I am afraid because I can so clearly foresee my own life rotting away of itself, like a leaf that rots without falling, while I pursue my round of existence from day to day. That is what I find impossible to bear, and why I must escape from my present life.
- Dazai Osamu, The Setting Sun

A faint pale rainbow formed in my breast. It was not love or passion, but the colors of the rainbow have deepened and intensified as time has gone by. Never once have I lost it from sight. The rainbow that spans the sky when it clears after a shower soon fades away, but the rainbow in a person’s heart does not seem to disappear that way.
- Dazai Osamu, The Setting Sun

I am convinced that those people whom the world considers good and respects are all liars and fakes. I do not trust the world.
- Dazai Osamu, The Setting Sun

In our lives we know joy, anger, sorrow, and a hundred other emotions, but these emotions all together occupy a bare one percent of our time. The remaining ninety-nine per cent is just living in waiting.
- Dazai Osamu, The Setting Sun

Destruction is tragic and piteous and beautiful. The dream of destroying, building anew, perfecting. Perhaps even, once one has destroyed, the day of perfecting may never come, but…I must destroy. I must start a revolution.
- Dazai Osamu, The Setting Sun

Man was born for love and revolution.
- Dazai Osamu, The Setting Sun

The sensation of happiness might be something like faintly glittering gold sunken at the bottom of the river of sorrow.
- Dazai Osamu, The Setting Sun

I drink out of desperation. Life is too dreary to endure. The misery, loneliness, crampedness - they’re heartbreaking. Whenever you can hear the gloomy sighs of woe from the four walls around you, you know that there’s not a chance of happiness existing just for you. What feelings do you suppose a man has when he realizes that he will never know happiness or glory as long as he lives?
- Dazai Osamu, The Setting Sun

     “And why,” my wife asked, “are you making this trip?”
    “Because things are getting me down.”
    “Things are always getting you down. I don’t believe it for a moment.”
    “Masaoka Shiki, 35; Ozaki Kouyou, 36; Satou Ryoku’u, 37; Kunikida Doppo, 37; Nagatsuka Takashi, 36; Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, 35; Kamura Isota, 36.”
    “What do you mean by that?”
    “The age at which they all died. All the same age. Me too, I’m just about reaching that age. For an author, this is the most important time of his life.”
    “The time when things get him down?"
- Dazai Osamu, Tsugaru

Grown-ups are lonely people. Even if we love each other, we must be careful not to show it publicly. And why all this caution? The answer is simple: because people are too often betrayed and put to public shame. The discovery that you cannot trust people is the first lesson young people learn as they grow up into adults. Adults are adolescents who have been betrayed.
- Dazai Osamu, Tsugaru

My self-imposed rule to stop caring about food contained an escape clause for crab. I love crab. I don’t know why, but I do. Crab, shrimp, squilla, I like only light fare. And then there’s another thing I’m very fond of, and that’s alcohol. Ah! No sooner are we on the subject of eating and drinking that the apostle of love and truth, who we supposed not to give a damn about such things, reveals a glimpse of his inborn gluttony.
- Dazai Osamu, Tsugaru

Reality is in the things one believes, but reality can never make one believe.
- Dazai Osamu, Tsugaru

I had meant to restrain myself - but I’ve expressed my confused thoughts after all. My theories are so muddled that I myself often cannot understand what I am saying. There are even times when I lie. That’s why I hate explaining my feelings. It seems as if this is all some sort of transparent charade I’m perpetrating, and that idea is a thoroughly humiliating one. I will regret it bitterly afterward, when I get excited I just ‘flog my unwilling tongue,’ as they say, and in a sharp voice blurt out all sorts of inconsistencies, filling my audience not so much with scorn as pity. This seems to be my sorry fate.
- Dazai Osamu, Tsugaru

It is one of my bad habits that I feel absurdly self-conscious when doing something perfectly acceptable.
- Dazai Osamu, Tsugaru

When you talk of scenery, you think of something that has been seen and described by many people over long periods of time. Human eyes have, as it were, softened in with their gaze, human hands have fed it and tamed it…. In all the steep and rugged places that have ever been celebrated in paintings, songs, or poems, without a single exception, one can discover some human element, but this extreme northern coast of Honshu has steadfastly refused to transform itself into anything resembling scenery. It even spurns that speck of a human figure that can often be seen in landscapes and paintings…. This landscape does not lend itself to picture or song. There are just the rocks, and water.
- Dazai Osamu, Tsugaru

I believe it’s Goncharov who tells of an old sea dog of a captain crying out during a storm, ‘Hey! Come up on deck for a moment and look! How would you describe these waves? I’m certain you literary gentlemen have some splendid adjectives for them.’ And Goncharov looked at the waves, heaved a deep sigh, and spoke only one word: ‘Frightening.’
- Dazai Osamu, Tsugaru

The very thought of my Kanagi home makes me feel tired. True, but do I really have to put that down in writing? The gods spare no love for a man who goes burdened under the bad karma of having to sell manuscripts filled with details of his family in order to earn a living; they banish him from his birthplace. I’m afraid I am doomed to move from one drab Tokyo dwelling to another, wandering around aimlessly, longing for my native home in my dreams, until at last I die.
- Dazai Osamu, Tsugaru

I can’t explain it very well, but I have this obsession about going through life as a - well - exemplary author, you might say. But my stupid vanity has turned me into a common snob, so I’ll never make it.
- Dazai Osamu, Tsugaru

‘Men are sorry creatures who give in easily to glory…. It’s poison: no sooner are you famous than you turn into a fool.’ It was a strange occasion to vent my indignation at my own fate. But let the reader beware. Deep in their hearts grumblers like me really want to be famous, no matter what they say.
- Dazai Osamu, Tsugaru

After [she] had led me through the town for about five minutes, we reached the river. My aunt used to take me there frequently when I was a child, but it had seemed much further from town. For a child’s feet this was a great distance. I was, moreover, the type of child who was always indoors and afraid to go out. When I did leave the house, I used to be so tense that the world would swim before my eyes, and this must have made the river seem all the farther off.
- Dazai Osamu, Tsugaru

Because my mother was in poor health, I never drank a drop of her milk, but was given to a wet nurse as soon as I was born. When I was two years old and tottering about on my own, I was taken away from her and put into the care of a nanny… At night I would sleep in my aunt’s arms, but during the day I was always with [her]. For the next five years, until I was about seven, she raised me. And then one morning I opened my eyes and called for [her], but [she] did not come. I was shocked. Instinctively I knew what had happened. I wailed: ‘[She] has gone! [She] has gone!’ I sobbed, feeling as if my heart would break; and for two or three days all I could do was cry. Even today I have not forgotten the pain of that moment.
- Dazai Osamu, Tsugaru

With the clear morning sun shining into the train, the feeling that I alone exuded filth, impurity, and corruption was almost too much to bear. Thousands of times I have experienced this kind of self-loathing…
- Dazai Osamu, Tsugaru

To have come all this way to see her, to have found out immediately where she was, but to go home without having been able to meet her - perhaps it was an outcome befitting the bungled life I have been leading all these years. The plans I make so ecstatically invariably end up in a shambles, like now. I was born under an unlucky star.
- Dazai Osamu, Tsugaru

Is this the kind of feeling that is meant by ‘peace’? If it is, I can say that my heart experienced peace for the first time in my life. My real mother, who died a few years ago, was an extremely noble, gentle, and good mother, yet she never gave me this strange feeling of reassurance. I wonder: do the mothers of this world all give their children this rest, the rest of a mind that can be at peace because Mother will always be there to help? If this is so, then the desire at all costs to be good to one’s parents springs naturally from this feeling. I cannot understand how some people can fall sick or idle their time away while they have this wonderful thing, a mother. Filial piety is a natural emotion, not an imposed code of conduct.
- Dazai Osamu, Tsugaru

Well then, reader, let us meet again, if we live. Let us keep our spirits up. Do not despair. Goodbye.
- Dazai Osamu, Tsugaru

Oda wanted to die. . . . I, above all other men, felt and understood deeply the sadness of Oda. The first time I met him on the Ginza, I thought, "God, what an unhappy man," and I could scarcely bear the pain. He gave the vivid impression that there was across his path nothing but the wall of death. He wanted to die. But there was nothing I could do. A big-brotherly warning - what hateful hypocrisy. There was nothing to do but watch. The "adults" of the world will probably criticize him smugly, saying he didn't have enough self-respect. But how dare they think they have the right! Yesterday I found record in Mr. Tatsuno [Yutaka]'s introductory essay on Senancour the following words: "People say it is a sin to flee by throwing life away. However, these same sophists who forbid me death often expose me to the presence of death, force me to proceed toward death. The various innovations they think up increase the opportunities for death around me, their preaching leads me toward death, and the laws they establish present me with death." You are the ones who killed Oda, aren't you? His recent sudden death was a poem of his final, sorry resistance. Oda! You did well.
- Dazai Osamu’s published eulogy for Odasaku, found in The Saga of Dazai Osamu: A Critical Study and Translation by Phyllis I. Lyons, pages 49-50.

Dazai was born in the northernmost part of Honshū, the tenth child of his parents. The household included not only parents and the surviving children but many relatives, ranging down from Dazia’s great-grandmother to small cousins, and also fourteen or fifteen cooks, maids, manservants, and other domestics, who swelled to total number of people living under the one roof to more than thirty. The Tsushima family (Dazai’s real name was Tsushima Shūji) was one of the richest in that part of Japan. The wealth was not of long standing: the founder of the family fortune was Dazai’s great-grandfather who, shortly after the Meiji Restoration, had established a trading company that had prospered. He used the profits to increase the family property holdings by buying up fields abandoned by the samurai, who were free after 1871 to sell their land. The great-grandfather’s business acumen enabled him to rank among the dozen highest taxpayers in Aomori Prefecture and he eventually obtained political office. His grandson, Dazai’s father, increased the family fortune and built the imposing house in which Dazai was born. Dazai often referred to himself as a farmer’s son, but this no doubt was by way of apology to the world for the privileges he had enjoyed as a child. Wherever he went in the vicinity he was treated with the deference due to a ‘young master.’ Dazai’s mother, perhaps exhausted by repeated childbirths, was unable to look after him, and he was left in the care of an aunt whom he supposed for years to be his mother. A feeling that he had been rejected by his mother may account for his unhappy disposition.
- Donald Keene, Dawn to the West, page 1026

Dazai returned again and again to incidents in his life, especially those that occurred during the period when he was nominally in the French Literature Department of Tokyo University, for materials for his writings. His descriptions of such incidents has induced some critics to treat him as an ‘I’ novelist, but he was in no sense a faithful chronicler of his own life. For example, his first attempt at a love suicide on November 26, 1930, while he was a university student, was described in at least five different ways in stories written between 1932 and 1948:
1. A woman at a bar behind the Ginza fell in love with me. There is a period in everyone’s life when people fall in love with you, an unclean time. I induced the woman to leap into the sea with me at Kamakura.
2. She lay down beside me. Towards dawn she pronounced for the first time the word ‘death.’ … I consented easily to the suggestion… . We threw ourselves into the sea at Kamakura that night. She untied her sash, saying she had borrowed it from a friend at the café, and left it folded neatly on a rock. I removed my cape and put it in the same spot. We entered the water together.
3. I planned to commit suicide with a married woman. I was twenty-two, she was nineteen. Late one bitterly cold night in December the woman, still wearing her coat, and I in my cape, entered the water. The woman died.
4. Presently the woman undid her sash. ‘I borrowed this sash with the poppy-flower pattern from my friend, so I’ll leave it hanging here,’ she said calmly. She folded the sash neatly and hung it from a branch of the tree behind us. We talked together quietly, very tenderly, with composed feelings, and then we watched the light blinking in the lighthouse somewhere off toward Jōgashima.
5. It’s a boring story. The woman killed herself because of the trouble she had in making a living. Until the very last minute when we jumped in we seem to have been thinking about entirely different things.
- Donald Keene, Dawn to the West, page 1027-8

No matter how straightforwardly Dazai might seem to be narrating actual events, an element of fiction was generally present. He seems to have been unable, ever since he was a child, to tell the unadorned truth. Probably in the case of this pathetic attempt at lovers’ suicide he felt embarrassed that he had survived even though the woman died. In other instances he altered the truth because it interfered with the persona he had created for himself or because the truth was not stranger than fiction.
- Donald Keene, Dawn to the West, page 1028

Dazai excelled at school. He was first in his class at both elementary and middle schools and, initially at least, did well in high school, but he was not happy. He recalled: ‘Unable to feel satisfaction with anything, I was constantly involved in pointless struggles. Ten or twenty layers of masks clung to my face, and I could not even tell how much pain each cost me.’ Dazai and some high school friends formed a little magazine in which he published a story every month. His eldest brother, worried about Dazai’s future, pointed out that only a few people ever succeed as writers, but Dazai was confident that he was one of the elect.
- Donald Keene, Dawn to the West, page 1030

Even if the story [Gakuseigun (The Student’s)] was a fabrication, his first attempt at suicide, made while he was a high school student, was apparently occasioned by ideological anguish. Dazai in 1946 described this event in the following terms: ‘Dictatorship of the proletariat. That, without a doubt, was a new concept. Not cooperation, but dictatorship. Indiscriminately knocking down the opposition. The rich are all wicked. The aristocrats are all wicked. Only the impoverished poor are good. I was in favor of an armed uprising. A revolution without a guillotine doesn’t make sense. But I did not belong to the lower classes. I was one of those destined to end up on the guillotine. I was a nineteen-year-old high school student, the only member of my class whose school uniform was noticeably well-made. I became increasingly convinced that I was fated to kill myself. I swallowed a good deal of calmotin. It did not kill me.’
- Donald Keene, Dawn to the West, page 1033

In the summer of 1930 Dazai visited Ibuse Masuji with the manuscripts of two stories. Ibuse recalled twenty-five years later that Dazai wrote him saying he would kill himself if Ibuse refused to meet him. Ibuse naturally consented, and Dazai soon afterward appeared at the publishing company where Ibuse worked. He insisted that Ibuse read the stories on the spot. Ibuse read them, recognized the influence of one of his own stories, and bluntly told Dazai that the stories were no good. He urged Dazai to read the classics, rather than worthless fiction, if he intended to become a writer. Dazai had chosen Ibuse as his mentor because he had enjoyed Ibuse’s writings ever since he was a boy of fourteen. He later even induced Ibuse to contribute a story to his high school magazine. After the meeting in 1930 Dazai continued to send Ibuse stories, and when three or four had accumulated would pay a visit. He probably hoped that Ibuse would recommend publication to a literary magazine, but Ibuse never vouchsafed a word of criticism. Instead, he once again recommended that Dazai read Pushkin, Chekhov, Proust, and other major European writers. Dazai’s reading of Evgeni Onegin provided direct inspiration for writing “Memories.” Perhaps in the hope of strengthening their ties, Dazai initially urged Ibuse to become a left-wing writer; Ibuse, refusing, urged Dazai in return not to become one.
- Donald Keene, Dawn to the West, page 1038

          “Memories” may have been intended as the testament of Tsushima Shūji, sometime university student and Communist party sympathizer, but it marked the birth of Dazai Osamu. He apparently decided to use this pseudonym after a meeting with Ibuse in January 1933. He also decided at this time the title of his first collection of short stories, Declining Years. “Memories” was the first work by Dazai to elicit praise from Ibuse, who wrote:
          I was much impressed by your most recent manuscript. It represents a marked change from the previous ones. It is written with an objective, critical eye. In any case, “Memories” is first-rate in execution. From now on you should be able to attend the university in good spirits and at the same time continue to write stories with sufficient self-confidence. If you have time enough to visit me, it would be much, much better spent in reading one page or even half a page of Tolstoy or Chekhov. Write as much as you can, and so as not to get exhausted by writing, attend school every day.
          Ibuse’s praise undoubtedly encouraged Dazai, but he did not take the advice about faithfully attending the university. “Memories” was published in three successive issues o the recently founded literary magazine Kaihyō (Sea Lion), which had published Dazai’s story “Gyofukuki” in its inaugural issue in March 1933.
        “Memories,” one of Dazai’s most affecting works, contains its share of masochistic details, but there is also a note of hope in his determination to become a writer: ‘In the end I discovered a safety valve, a miserable little safety valve - writing. In this, there were many like me, I could sense all concentrating like myself on their crazy palpitations. I prayed secretly, again and again, “May I become a writer! May I become a writer!”’
- Donald Keene, Dawn to the West, page 1038-9

Early in April 1935, a bare two weeks after his attempted suicide, Dazai had an attack of acute appendicitis that was complicated by his slowness in calling a doctor. The operation was difficult and (according to Dazai) the doctors despaired of saving his life. He developed peritonitis and was in such agony that pabinal, a pain-killer, was administered. Dazai came to depend on this narcotic after he left the hospital and steadily increased the dosage. He was an addict for about a year and a half, perhaps the darkest period of his entire life. He was able in one way or another to obtain the drug, but the cost was considerable, and he soon ran up debts not only with pharmacists but with every friend and every publisher from whom he could borrow money. He sold on by on all the manuscripts he had in the big manila envelope and forced himself to write more. The stories of this period are harrowing to read, suggesting the desperation of a man writing in misery.
- Donald Keene, Dawn to the West, page 1041-2

          The publication of Declining Years in June 1936 had enhanced Dazai’s reputation, and he bean at this time to find new friends among the tenkō writers who welcomed him as one of their number, but his drug addiction grew only more serious. His common-law wife, Hatsuyo, turned to Ibuse for help and he went to Satō [Haruo], who, despite his profound annoyance with Dazai, agreed to enlist his brother’s support once more. This time Dazai was not consulted. He was bundled off to a mental hospital without his realizing where he was going, and was kept in confinement. Even at this time he still went on writing. The story ‘Human Lost’ (the title is in English), published in April 1937, described his experiences. The story opens with a series of diary entries that consist of a date followed by the single stark word ‘Nothing’ (nashi). Gradually the entries grow longer:
          Fourth day. Went on a speaking tour. Iron window grilles, metal screens and the clanking of keys every time the heavy door is opened or shut. The all-night watchmen loitering around. I addressed every single of one the twenty-odd patients in this human warehouse, throwing myself physically into it. I used all my strength to shake by the shoulders a roly-poly, handsome young man, and snarled, ‘Lazybones!’ at him. And to the student who had been driven crazy by exams and who kept a textbook of commercial law by his bedside which he read aloud at every waking moment, intoning the words as if they were a collection of poetry, I shouted, ‘Stop studying! Exams have been abolished!’ For a moment he looked relieved.
          Dazai was kept under surveillance and not allowed visitors for fear that he might try either to kill himself or to escape. The withdrawal symptoms were extreme. He tore his clothes, broke windows, kept scribbling incessantly on the walls, on the Shōji, on the bits of paper in which his medicine was wrapped. Some of these scribblings are apparently included in ‘Human Lost.’ A typical example is: ‘(On the wall.) What Napoleon wanted was not the whole world. He only wanted to be trusted by a single dandelion.’
- Donald Keene, Dawn to the West, page 1044-5

Dazai and his family suffered considerably during the war. Twice they were bombed out of their house, and the nightmarish quality of these disasters is conveyed in several stories written soon after the war, such as ‘Hakumei’ (Twilight, 1946), which describes the escape of the family from the bombing of Kōfu at a time when his daughter was suffering from temporary blindness. The harrowing experiences Dazai underwent are effectively conveyed in his stories; at the same time, however, it is difficult not to form the impression that this was the happiest time of Dazai’s life. He was living with his wife and children, and his concern for their safety and comfort overrode his usual narcissistic preoccupation with his own unhappiness. He had become, without intending it, a good husband and father for the one time in his life.
- Donald Keene, Dawn to the West, page 1059

No Longer Human was the one book that Dazai had to write, his final attempt to elucidate himself and his unhappiness. It is an attack on the habits and traditions of Japanese society, but above all it is a record of his alienation from society. Ōba Yōzō, the name Dazai again called himself, is constantly ‘performing’ for other people in the hopes of ingratiating himself and concealing his true nature. The book is not factual, and Dazai undoubtedly exaggerated his misfortunes, not in order to make the reader feel sympathy (in the manner of an ‘I novel’), but to make the hero seem even more contemptible. The reader may well be revolted when the narrator confesses, for example, that he cannot recall the name of the woman with whom he first attempted a love suicide. His insistence that he is unlike other human beings, and has even been disqualified as a human being, leads up to the declaration, made when he is confined in a mental hospital,’ I had now ceased utterly to be a human being.’ No doubt such reflections actually occurred to Dazai, but perhaps he was also influenced by such works as Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground. If so, such borrowing not only enriched the work but enabled Dazai to give his portrait of a failed hero with a touch of universality.
- Donald Keene, Dawn to the West, page 1063

Oda Sakunosuke was closely associated with the burai-ha, especially during the last years of his brief life. He would meet Dazai Osamu and Sakaguchi Ango at bars in Tokyo, sometimes for the ostensible purpose of having their conversations recorded in a magazine, and he drank heavily, in the manner expected of a believer in the burai ideals. Oda died of tuberculosis at thirty-four, his premature death having been hastened not only by drink but by drugs: a widely publicized photograph showed Oda injecting philopon into his arm with a hypodermic needle. Like other members of the group, he admired French literature, was pleased to think of himself as an outsider constantly at odds with society, and expressed strong dislike of the writings of Shiga Naoya and his followers. For a time, especially during the years immediately after the war, his writings enjoyed considerable popularity, and he wrote prolifically in response to the demand for manuscripts, but most of his hastily composed manuscripts have been forgotten…
- Donald Keene, Dawn to the West, page 1081

Soon after the war ended in 1945 a group of writers, all of whom had acquired something of a reputation before the ward, began to publish works of fiction that set them off from other postwar writers and gave them an identity of their own. The membership of this group was never clearly defined. Three writers - Dazai Osamu, Sakaguchi Ango, and Oda Sakunosuke - undoubtedly belonged to the group, and others, including Dazia’s ‘disciple’ Tanaka Hidemitsu, Ishikawa Jun, and even Itō Sei, the Modernist, were at various times identified with it. At first, the group was known as the ‘gesaku’ or ‘new gesaku’ writers, presumably because of their resemblances to the gesaku writers of the Tokugawa period who presented their criticisms of society in a deliberately comic, even farcical manner. The self-mockery of the ‘new gesaku’ writers implied a rejection of the self-satisfaction of the Shirakaba writers, who were convinced of the importance of their every act, and of the proletarian writers, who were sure that they could explain all human activities in terms of Marxist doctrine. The ‘new gesaku’ writers usually came from well-to-do families, though they made a point of associating with the lower classes - not factory workers or farmers, but city derelicts. Their heavy drinking and sometimes disorderly behavior were notorious. Although most were at one time attracted to Communism, they had become disillusioned, not so much with Marxist theory as with the day-to-day activities of party members. At implicit rejection of the present often led them to display an interest in the past, whether the Edo of the gesaku writers or more distant history. Their existential despair was not easily consoled: several of the group, including Dazai Osamu, the most important member, committed suicide, and others deliberately ruined their constitutions. The combination of intense depression, usually brought on by the loss of hope and a disgust with established values, tended to be expressed not in terms of burning indignation but of farce, and gave the group its most distinctive characteristic.
- Donald Keene, Dawn to the West, pages 1022-3

In July of [1927], Akutagawa Ryūnosuke committed suicide, and this is said to have had a tremendous affect on [Dazai], who idolized the great write and whose behavior subsequently underwent radical changes. He began to neglect his studies, devoting himself instead to writing and making use of his princely allowance to dress foppishly and to hire the services of geisha at expensive restaurants in Aomori and Asamushi Hot Springs.
- Exerpt from Osamu Dazai: Self Portraits Introduction.  The introduction was written by Ralph. F. McCarthy

           Osamu Dazai had tried to take his own life on a number of occasions, two of these attempts assuming the form of shinjuu, the traditional Japanese suicide pact entered into by a pair of lovers. But when he disappeared with his mistress on a rainy night in mid-June of 1948, the signs that he was thoroughly prepared to die were unmistakable. Dazai and his companion, Tomie Yamazaki, left behind a series of farewell notes to friends and kin, the author conscientiously composing his last will and testament for his wife, Michiko. Photographs of Dazai and Tomie stood next to one another in Tomie’s lodging in the Tokyo suburb of Mitaka, along with the traditional water offering to the deceased. Also, nearby was a small pile of ashes, all that remained of the incense that the lovers had lit before departing.            After the police began an intensive search for the couple’s whereabouts, they eventually found a suspicious-looking place along the Tamagawa Canal, midway between Dazai’s own home and Tomie’s residence. A strip of wet grass lay flattened from the top to the bottom of the bank, as if something heavy had slid down into the water. The ground nearby was strewn with several objects - a small bottle or two, a glass plate, a pair of scissors, and a compact. A little ways downstream, two pairs of wooden clogs were found against the lock of a dam. Despite these ominous signs, an intensive search along the canal failed to turn up anything more. It was almost a week later - on June 19, the author’s thirty-ninth birthday - that a passer-by happened to notice two waterlogged corpses in the canal tied together with a red cord. This discovery occurred less than a mile from where the couple had evidently entered the water.
- James O’Brien, Crackling Mountain and Other Stories Introduction

Scholars of Dazai Osamu often divide his career into three phases. The first phase is said to begin in the mid-1920s, when Dazai was a middle-school student in Aomori City, and stretches through the chaotic years of the early and mid-thirties, when he lived in Tokyo; the second begins in 1938, about a year before his marriage to his second wife, Ishihara Michiko, and lasts until November of 1946, when he returned to Tokyo from wartime exile in his home village in northern Honshū; and the third encompasses the succeeding year-and-a-half of turbulence that ended with Dazai’s suicide, at age thirty-nine, in June of 1948. … Although this middle period of tranquility has been closely studied and discussed, the dominant image of Dazai during these years - that of a relatively conscientious husband and a disciplined writer - has never captured the public’s imagination. Whether Japanese or not, most readers still associate the name with the early and late Dazai: with suicide attempts and drug addiction, political radicalism and novels of desperation.
- James O’Brien, from the introduction to Akutagawa and Dazai: Instances of Literary Adaptation

Separated by almost a generation, Akutagawa and Dazai were never associated with one another as members of a school or literary current; nor did they ever come close to creating the master-disciple bond so common in the history of modern Japanese letters. However, Dazai was keenly interested in Akutagawa, especially during those formative years of late adolescence and early manhood; indeed, several of his youthful writings make indirect references to the older writer. Looking at both lives in retrospect, one can detect a number of striking resemblances. Each writer occupied a peculiar and ambiguous position in his family, giving rise to a troubled childhood and adolescence in each case; each entered his maturity deeply alienated from society; and finally, each committed suicide on the threshold of middle age. Not surprisingly, both Akutagawa and Dazai wrote out of desperation and with a degree of moral passion. Both excelled in the short tale, Akutagawa never attempting anything longer than a novelette, and Dazai, except for his two postwar novels, appearing to best advantage in the short tale and the vignette.
- James O’Brien, from the introduction to Akutagawa and Dazai: Instances of Literary Adaptation

Akutagawa usually took a basic idea from another work as the starting point for his own composition. And the debt - if that is actually the word for the process - seldom went beyond. … While Akutagawa often alludes in significant ways to brief, anecdotal materials, Dazai customarily has recourse to more substantial works as source materials. More to the point, he incorporates large swatches of detail, his own retelling of an earlier tale usually ending up as an amalgam of sorts. It must also be said, however, the Dazai virtually obliterates the tone and effect of the originals. … Dazai [has an] uncanny ability to turn almost any material to his own purpose … And yet, Dazai succeeds in preserving much that is recognizable from the originals even as he totally transforms them.
- James O’Brien, from the introduction to Akutagawa and Dazai: Instances of Literary Adaptation

Akutagawa’s more fastidious use of this sources seems consistent with hsi normal narrative strategies. He composed in a spare, deliberate vein; … In Akutagawa a dialectic often takes place between such opposed concepts as reality and appearance, truth and falsehood, art and power. The author’s scheme of thesis and antithesis is seldom obscured by descriptive details, nor is it substantially altered in the interests of achieving a resolution. … Dazai, on the other hand, seldom shapes his stories so entirely around a thematic statement. Measured against Akutagawa’s orderly procedures, many Dazai works have a random, even wayward, character about them. Rather than limit himself to an idea or theme from an earlier work, or hone a plot from a classic story, Dazai habitually augments the received materials. The plot takes new twists and turns, with added dialogue and idiosyncratic authorial commentary casting the old tale in a totally different light. At the end Dazai tries to sum up the meaning of the tale: a character will confess to his real motives or the author/persona deliver a verdict on the events that have just transpired. Nonetheless, such comments usually seem interpolations more than integral parts of the narrative. … Did Dazai merely find a story which he could manipulate and expand in multiple ways, then throw himself into the business of generating out of this genius for language an essentially different narrative? Or was there more deliberation and planning than this description implies? There is, to be sure, an organizing intelligence behind much of Dazai’s fiction. One sees this, among other things, in the ironies and reversals that permeate much of his writing. As with Akutagawa, things often turn out to be the opposite of what they seem. And, despite the bizarre character of the above-mentioned final comments by the author/persona in Dazai, the relation of these comments to the finished narrative is less tenuous than it might seem.
- James O’Brien, from the introduction to Akutagawa and Dazai: Instances of Literary Adaptation

With Akutagawa, the heart of the tale is in the sequence of events; with Dazai, it lies in the rhetoric that is generated by the unfolding situation. Although Akutagawa has been praised as a stylist of great virtuosity, especially by a few Western scholars, certain comments by Japanese scholars - the references to the awkwardness of his dialogue, to mention just one example - tend to bolster my own sense that style indeed was not Akutagawa’s forte. Akutagawa seems mainly interested in thematic arrangement - in setting events, personalities, and ideas in a certain relationship to one another. … Dazai, on the other hand, would take over the plot outline as he found it in the earlier narrative. Or … stitch together his own plot with lots of material quoted … Dazai transformed these works, either by retelling in a wholesale fashion, or unique use of language - whether in retelling or adding - that makes Dazai’s work an intriguing transformation.
- James O’Brien, from the introduction to Akutagawa and Dazai: Instances of Literary Adaptation

Like Dazai, however, thought not quite so often, Akutagawa will intrude into his work with an authorial comment. Yet … Akutagawa limited himself to authorial comment that was brief and often cryptic. When he - or his persona - does make a more substantial appearance, his role seems problematic. One senses, however, a deliberate decision on the author’s part to implicate himself, and thereby give an added complication to the basic narrative. Dazai’s presence too, whether as author or character, whether directly or through the indirect method of his telltale language, is always a complicating factor. But one senses that he, unlike Akutagawa, was acting on instinct or from habit. One can hardly imagine Dazai being anything other than forthright about his presence in a story, even one partially borrowed from other sources.
- James O’Brien, from the introduction to Akutagawa and Dazai: Instances of Literary Adaptation

Akutagawa … gives the impression of pursuing a more organized program of reading than Dazai does. Perhaps, then, Akutagawa might be labelled catholic, with the term eclectic reserved for Dazai alone. In any event Akutagawa is assuredly more cultivated and scholarly, his reading experience and general literary knowledge far surpassing that of Dazai. Akutagawa’s ability to read English gave him a considerable advantage, especially when Dazai made no discernible progress in French, his chosen field of study at the university. In contrast to Dazai, who appears for the most part to have read whatever came to hand, Akutagawa, while hardly confining himself to specific authors and certain kinds of literature, seems to have intensively explored special dominant interests, the ghostly and the absurd prominent among them. In the final analysis, however, Akutagawa and Dazai both emboy the sort of unrestrained curiosity and interest that one readily identifies with modern Japan in many areas of endeavor.
- James O’Brien, from the introduction to Akutagawa and Dazai: Instances of Literary Adaptation

Dazai is more fascinated by himself than by his characters. In understanding Dazai, the individual characters in a given work are less significant than certain ‘archetypal’ experiences that occur to a variety of characters in different works and that seem crucially personal to the author.
- James A. O’Brien, Dazai Osamu (pg. 28)

[Dazai] was involved in enough left-wing activity to imagine that the police would like to get their hands on him. If in truth they had considered him a danger, Dazai would no doubt have grown in self-respect and pride. But when he turned himself over to the police in a particularly despondent moment, they immediately released him. Again, finding himself in the police station on another occasion, Dazai was released on the grounds that an ineffectual person such as he seemed to be could not have helped a revolution even with the best of intentions. On such occasions Dazai no doubt experienced the isolation of the outsider disqualified from joining the game.
- James A. O’Brien, Dazai Osamu (pg. 39)

Carve on the stone pedestal the following inscription: ‘Here stands a man. He was born, died, and spent a life destroying his ill-written manuscripts.’
- Dazai Osamu, “Leaves” (excerpt taken from James A. O’Brien, Dazai Osamu pg. 41)

When Dazai does not compose straight autobiography, he is often writing disguised autobiography. He may be speaking merely of a monkey or a boy; but the reader who goes through his work chronologically senses in a certain gesture or remark that Dazai is present in the boy or the monkey. Once initiated into the Dazai manner, a reader can easily begin to take the works as clever exercises in covert autobiography.
- James A. O’Brien, Dazai Osamu (pg. 59)

Clearly, Dazai wants his readers to see him [within his stories]. He is neither wearing a mask, in the manner of a Mishima, nor entering into a persona, in the manner of a Yeats or a Pound. He is not much concerned with creating a social self distinct from the person, nor with extending the range of his experience through imagining characters beyond his experience. Dazai’s mask is like the Halloween kind; he wears it in fun, to give his friends a momentary thrill. And there is seldom any doubt as to who is actually wearing the mask.
- James A. O’Brien, Dazai Osamu (pg. 59)

Dazai sees the pathos and potential self-destruction in the kind of comedy he practiced both in life and in writing. Any full account of his career must, above all, come to grips with the tragicomedy of Dazai Osamu.
- James A. O’Brien, Dazai Osamu (pg. 59)

[Dazai] let himself be taken from his pleasant Funabashi home to the Musashino Hospital. Only when he found himself locked alone in a cell did he wake up to the fact that his friends and put him in a mental institution. It was indeed a traumatic experience for Dazai. His fear that he belonged to some sobhuman, ‘twilight’ zone had been publicly validated. Indeed, the few friends Dazai thought he could trust had conspired with the institutions of society to mark him thus. When he was released after a month’s confinement, Dazai characteristically began a work based on his experience with the English title ‘Human Lost.’ Shortly before his death after the war, he still felt moved to write of this event. His greatest work in the opinion of most Japanese critics purports to be the notebook of a ‘madman’ confined for a time in an asylum.
- James A. O’Brien, Dazai Osamu (pg. 61)

On January 8, 1939, Dazai, in the presence of Ibuse, Kita, Nakabatake, and the relatives of the bride, was married in Tokkyo to Miss Ishihara Michiko, an instructress at the Tsuru Girls’ Higher School. Neither Miss Ishihara, the first candidate Ibuse uncovered, nor her mother was very impressed with Dazai initially. Michiko, having read descriptions of Dazai’s character and behavior in Sato Haruo’s ‘The Akutagawa Prize,’ fretted about her prospective husbands unreliability; her mother, after meeting with Dazai, confided to Ibuse that Dazai was like a child. It was Dazai’s persistence, along with a radical change in his character that apparently won their consent to the match.
- James A. O’Brien, Dazai Osamu (pg. 65)

You slip in, snatch up the cash, and take off. Is that all there is to it? There's nothing romantic about this world of mine. I’m the only degenerate around here. Yet I too now make my way through the world industriously following the bourgeois code. Disgusting! Even if I must do it alone, I want to leap once more into that romantic hell of ambition and striving. Is that impossible? Is that forbidden?
- Dazai Osamu, “A Spring Burglar” (excerpt taken from James A. O’Brien, Dazai Osamu, pg. 67)

The fools say that I have become a plebian. The setting sun seems very large each evening from Musashino. It falls tremulously as though sinking into a boiling cauldron. Sitting with crossed legs in a three-mat room to watch the spectacle during my meager supper, I confide to my wife: ‘I’ll never get rich or cut a figure in the world living like this. But, somehow or other, I want to preserve what we have.’
- Dazai Osamu, excerpt taken from James A. O’Brien, Dazai Osamu (pg. 68)

More than anything else I wish to speak with authority. If others regard what I say as eccentric, I’d rather be silent. In that event my passions will remain hidden behind a genial mask.
- Dazai Osamu, excerpt taken from James A. O’Brien, Dazai Osamu (pg. 69)

Our society takes as its gospel only the statements of those routine creatures who lead respectable lives. To consciously plan one’s behavior so no one can point the finger - to cleverly abide by the mores of society - then you can show them. You can write, just as you please, a murder novel or an even more frightening novel or essay. Ogai was clever at this. He carried off the affair perfectly with a completely innocent air. I want to try it. I’d be content to do half as well. I shall not be satisfied with mediocrity; I shall instead take utter revenge upon it.
- Dazai Osamu, excerpt taken from James A. O’Brien, Dazai Osamu (pg. 69)

One occasionally hears claims that ‘Tsugaru’ is, in fact, Dazai’s best work, because it is more optimistic, and therefore closer to the ‘real Dazai,’ than the despairing masterpieces for which he is best known for in Western counties - ‘The Setting Sun’ and ‘No Longer Human.’ But such claims are exaggerated at best. ‘Tsugaru’ is a different sort of work than the novels. It contains several powerfully written passages, but since the book was supposed to be a gazetteer it also contains sections of little literary value. Not that this unevenness should deter the reader - the book amply rewards one’s patience. As for ‘the real Dazai,’ the great novels of his last years reflect the gloom that had overtaken his personal life quite as accurately as ‘Tsugaru’ expresses the relative happiness that characterized the first years of his marriage. But the existence of these claims, excessive though they obviously are, does indicate that this particular work needs to be taken seriously, especially because closer study will reveal that, for all its supposed lightness of tone, ‘Tsugaru’ is a darker book than it seems.
- James Westerhoven, from the introduction of Tsugaru by Dazai Osamu

…Dazai wrote ‘Tsugaru’ as the journal of a quest for love, which in his terminology would seem to mean a willingness to accept others without requiring them to present themselves as different from what they really are. ‘Pretentiousness’ and ‘affection’ are words that recur time and again in Dazai’s works. One of his constant gripes against the world is that it refused to accept him as he was, and his life appears to have been a constant struggle to seem natural - with the ironic result that his naturalness was often forced, and therefore unnatural. ‘You shouldn’t be so damned stuck-up!” -the parting shot of the visitor in his story ‘The Courtesy Call’ (1946) - could serve as a motto for most of his work. One could make a strong case that Dazai’s clowning and his debunking the ‘refined artist’ was an overreaction to this fear of appearing affected.
- James Westerhoven, from the introduction of Tsugaru by Dazai Osamu

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 own feelings of 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 Literature Department at Tokyo Imperial University in 1930, he wrote Ibuse a desperate letter demanding that he consent to meet with him or he would kill himself. In one of Ibuse’s many memoirs of Dazai, he recalls that such an ultimatum left him with 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, Tougou Katsumi speculates that the reading public would never have 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.
- John Whittier Treat, Pools of Water, Pillars of Fire: The Literature of Ibuse Masuji

At first [Ibuse and Dazai’s] relationship was the traditional pedagogic one of an established writer with a neophyte. Ibuse advised Dazai to read Chinese poetry and modern Western classics, especially those of Proust, Pushkin, and Chekhov. Each read the other’s stories and acted as critic and editor. Ibuse has stated several times that Dazai helped him write the eruption scene in ‘A General Account of Agoshima.’ And he revealed after Dazai’s death that ‘Younosuke’s Boasts” (1934), though published under Ibuse’s name, had in fact been a joint effort. For his part, Dazai seemed to have inherited something of Ibuse’s flair for characterization. Gradually however, their association grew less literary and more personal, eventually becoming like that of a father and son, involving not only the affection but the rivalry and frustration that so often accompanies such a bond in real life.
- John Whittier Treat, Pools of Water, Pillars of Fire: The Literature of Ibuse Masuji

What Dazai might very well have been seeking from Ibuse was, in fact, a mentor whom he could respect, a role his actual father did not fulfill. In an essay appended to an edition of Ibuse’s works, written on the eve of his suicide, Dazai said of Ibuse: ‘Reflecting upon this collection of short stories, I experienced a strong sensation, something like a mystical revelation yet somehow one still very physical. Everything seemed “all right” [daijoubu]… . I had the feeling that this writer is “all right,” and the feeling made me happy.’ Ibuse did little to discourage Dazai’s deepening dependency upon him. He intercedes with his family whenever there was trouble, which was often and which usually involved women. He acted as the go-between for Dazai’s last marriage, looked after him in the hospital, sought to cure him of the drug addiction he developed there, and continued as his patron in Tokyo literary circles. They were as close as men of nearly different generations could be.
- John Whittier Treat, Pools of Water, Pillars of Fire: The Literature of Ibuse Masuji

Eventually, however, [Ibuse and Dazai] drifted apart. Dazai’s career was as disolute as Ibuse’s was upright. They were evacuated to the same village in Koufu in 1944, by which time according to Ibuse in ‘Fishermen’ (1970), Dazai already seemed prepared to die. One might wonder, of course, if this was true or simply an observation, after the fact, to assuage guilt; but it does seem that Dazai’s tendencies toward self-destruction were accelerating. The men were separated later when Ibuse was evacuated to Kamo and Dazai to Aomori; but even after the war, back in Tokyo, the two met only a few times, and then only in the protective company of Dazai’s circle of self-proclaimed decadents.
- John Whittier Treat, Pools of Water, Pillars of Fire: The Literature of Ibuse Masuji

No matter how prepared Ibuse might have been for Dazai’s death, it still came as a great shock to him. He writes in ‘The Ways of Women’ (1949) about the loss of his best friend… ‘The police officer told his story. A writer by the name of Dazai had thrown himself into the water. When the corpse was found he went to the scene as the investigating detective. The results of his examination revealed bruises on Mr. Dazia’s neck and throat caused by a cord or rope. It was called an involuntary double suicide [muri shinjuu]. In deference to the position of the deceased, however, this was not announced to the public.’ What is interesting here is not only that Ibuse speaks through a calm observer, the policeman, to recount the details of his friend’s death… but that Ibuse subtly suggests that the circumstances of that death are open to varying interpretations. So shortly after the tragedy, Ibuse perhaps wished to believe anything but that Dazai was actually to blame for what happened to him. Dazai’s absolution would be Ibuse’s own: he died leaving the world a suicide not which among other things, decried Ibuse as an ‘evil man’ (akunin). This unexpected accusation became something of a literary scandal at the time. A number of theories were offered to explain, or discount, this evidence of a surprising enmity harbored by the disciple for his teacher. Some claimed that it was his mistress and fellow suicide, Yamazaki Tomie, who in fact wrote the note, a supposition built on the knowledge that she disliked Ibuse. Satou Haruo, however, proposed the far more likely hypothesis that this note, like all of Dazai’s literature, was cryptic. Satou exculpates his own disciple, Ibuse, by insisting that Dazai was only decrying his efforts to make him respectable, efforts that had included marriage to a good woman and the subsequent birth of children, whose existence no doubt had made the decision to kill himself in the spring of 1948 a difficult, torturous one.
- John Whittier Treat, Pools of Water, Pillars of Fire: The Literature of Ibuse Masuji

That awareness [of the violence of history] was born, however, not solely from the national experience of the Second World War, but from a personal crisis Ibuse suffered in the postwar period, namely, the death of his disciple and friend, Dazai Osamu. In June 1948, the double suicide of Dazai and his mistress by drowning was, in retrospect, as shocking and disorienting, and nearly as influential on Ibuse’s writing, as was the war itself. The troubling circumstances attending the demise of this talented writer, Ibuse’s closest friend… would serve to compound and confirm Ibuse’s similarly tragic experiences as a soldier and then an evacuee. In other words, the death of Dazai once again rendered Ibuse the close observer of death, the immediate survivor of a tragedy.
- John Whittier Treat, Pools of Water, Pillars of Fire: The Literature of Ibuse Masuji

Yet whatever excuses might be offered, the combination of Dazai’s death and his personal rebuke [of calling Ibuse an ‘evil man’] first upset and then obsessed Ibuse. Although he had written of Dazai long before his suicide (he is first mentioned in 1932) and had even kept a special ‘Dazai diary’ on five separate occasions, after his death Ibuse was to publish over thirty works specifically about Dazai, at least half a dozen in 1948 alone. Dazai Osamu holds the record as Ibuse’s most written-of figure, a fact that should establish him as one of the principal themes of Ibuse’s literature. The first pieces Ibuse wrote about Dazai after his suicide are alternately confused and bitter, as if he felt betrayed by his friend’s death. In ‘Parting Regrets’ (Sekibetsu, 1948), along with a protest that he really did like Dazai, Ibuse insists that his friend had died abruptly without explanation and without ‘leaving behind anything written for me.’ It seems as if Ibuse wishes to deny the existence, or at least the direct import, of the note. In ‘Dazai’ (Dazai-kun no koto, 1948) Ibuse begins with the defensive disclaimer: ‘I have no idea why Dazai died.’ Perhaps it is easier for Ibuse to accept Dazai’s death if he views him and his final act as an enigma.
- John Whittier Treat, Pools of Water, Pillars of Fire: The Literature of Ibuse Masuji

Akutagawa Hiroshi, the actor son of Dazai’s literary hero Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, visited him in May to discuss the possibility of having “A New Hamlet” staged by the troupe that he and the playwright Katou Michio had formed. We can only guess how Dazai must have been moved by Akutagawa’s two-day visit; having failed twice at the Akutagawa Prize, at a time in his life when critical recognition would have been like a lifeline thrown to a drowning man, Dazai was now being consulted by Akutagawa’s son. Nevertheless, Dazai’s career as a playwright was very limited, and despite some interest from the theater world at the time, his plays are remembered more as printed texts  than as working scripts.
- Phyllis I. Lyons, The Saga of Dazai Osamu (pg. 49)

      It was not just this family background, but the nature of the area itself in which his family acquired social importance and he grew to young adulthood, that had its effect on the man Dazai was to become. Aomori is the northernmost of the six prefectures that make up Touhoku, the Northeast Region. And the Tsugaru Peninsula, a part of Aomori, projects yet farther northward from the mainland, at the very end of the island of Honshuu. Hokaidou lies just eighteen kilometers away, across the Tsugaru Strait from Cape Tappi; on a clear day the mountains of southern Hokkaidou lie low along the horizon across the swifly moving waters. But history - economic, political and literary - flew straight from Tokyo to Hokkaidou, as the airlines do today, without stopping at this little backwater. At the turn of the century, young literary romantics had their fling at Emersonian self-reliance in Hokkaidou, and economic exploiters toyed there with various schemes. Hokkaidou, for all its distance from the capital, had about it the aura of Wild West freedom. But only today is the central government turning its attention to the development of northern Touhoku, which has occupied in Japan a place similar to that of Appalachia in the United States. It is important to remember that Dazai Osamu, the Tokyo litterateur and would-be decadent, came from such an area, a region whose folkways and social fabric were distinctly different from those of the central region.
      Tradition has it that the inhabitants of this culturally and economically backward Touhoku region are naturally taciturn. It is widely repeated in Japan that the peculiar Touhoku accent known familiarly as zu-zu- ben (because the su sound of standard Japanese emerges as zu) results from climatic conditions: it is very cold up there, and people have to keep their mouths fairly well closed to conserve heat. This kind of crude anthropologizing is amusing, perhaps; but very real is the agony still today confessed by natives of Touhoku when they move to Tokyo and find they must ‘remedy’ their speech so as not to be laughed at. And if zu-zu ben is a peculiar dialect, within the Tsugaru ben (’dialect’) is very nearly a separate language. Superstition aside, to be a native of Tsugaru seems to have been, and is still, somewhat of a handicap in Japan. The natives of Tsugaru are not to be dismissed as ‘naturally taciturn,’ however. They speak volubly and with much evident humor in their own backyards; it is when they make the leap to Tokyo that a sense of inferiority bred of their peculiarities dries up the well of spontaneity, perhaps in personality as well as in language. Some have laid this conviction of backwardness to northern Toukou’s nonparticipation in the politics of the modernizing Meiji period, during which a new national educational system first began propagating throughout Japan a standard speech based on dialects of the central region. Whatever the source, Touhoku people are still self-conscious about their speech.
      Dazai Osamu, who captivated audiences of friends with unforgettable conversation, had to rid himself of backwoods twang. Despite the contacts his wealthy and prominent family enjoyed with Tokyo, his high school copybooks show in their spelling that as a child he spoke the nonstandard local dialect. He himself relates that his sister teased him about these discrepancies when he wrote to her at school. Occasionally in his writings he mentions his ‘muddy Tsugaru dialect,’ and he reveals that his mentor, Ibuse Masuji, ‘fixed up’ his early writings. Already saddled with a well-developed sense of being an outsider, he was no doubt hindered in his adjustment to Tokyo by the stigma of speech.
      In a sense, Tsugaru was always with him. To him, that meant that his family was also always with him. Although Dazai left Tsugaru at the relatively advanced age of twenty-one, almost never to return, even in Tokyo he was scarcely free of ties to the family that stayed behind. Whether they were supporting him financially or interfering in his first marriage or disinheriting him or forgiving him, for years they were a constant force in his life. And, his writing reveal, he would not have had it otherwise. In fact, there is an undercurrent of lament that he could never fully go home again once he had left.”
- The Saga of Dazai Osamu by Phyllis I. Lyons, pages 22-23

It reached a point that I saw but two alternatives: either I could doff my helmet and surrender or I could die fighting…. I believed so deeply in my cause, however, that there really was no alternative. I could never quit. As long as I had a tongue or a brush, I would have to continue the battle… So I just fought harder.
- Fukuchi Gen’ichirō, Shimbunshi jitsureki; found in Politics of the Meiji Press by James L. Huffman pg. 115

People long on talent and rich in knowledge are likely to be dissatisfied with conditions in today’s society. Becoming strangely cynical about the world… they may well find pleasure in making fun of society … through the medium of humorous novels.
- Fukuchi Gen’ichirō, Moshiya sōshi; found in Politics of the Meiji Press by James L. Huffman pg. 145

…Ichiyō began to read not only the translations appearing in Bungakkai, but ‘Macbeth,’ a life of Schiller, and ‘Crime and Punishment.’ Her diary, skimpy by now, provides no clue as to what these readings of foreign literature might have meant to her, and it is hard to find anything in her later worlds that reveals specific foreign influence. It is nevertheless tempting to attribute the remarkable development in Ichiyō’s work at the time to such an influence.
- Donald Keene, Dawn to the West page 178

…indeed, [Higuchi Ichiyō] ranks among the major authors of the time, despite the fewness of her works. Ichiyō’s fiction, at once sensitive and realistic, earned her so high a place in modern literature that voluminous studies have appeared, painstakingly examining every detail of her short life in the hopes of discovering clues as to how a woman with so little formal education and initially, at least, so little contact with other writers (she belonged to no school [of writing]) managed to attain such great distinction.
- Donald Keene, Dawn to the West, page 166

Ichiyō’s formal education had come to an end when she was eleven. This was not for lack of scholastic ability - she stood at the head of her class - nor even because of poverty, but because her parents, typically for the times, were sure that too much book learning was undesirable for a girl. Ichiyō was permitted, however, to study the tanka - an appropriate accomplishment for a young lady - and in 1886 she entered a private school called Hagi-no-ya (House of the Bush Clover) run by Nakajima Utako (1841-1903), a leading woman tanka poet. Not only did Ichiyō learn to write tanka in the faded style of the late Keien school, but she received instruction in such classics as ‘Kokinshuu,’ ‘The Tale of Genji,’ and ‘Essays in Idleness.’
- Donald Keene, Dawn to the West, page 166

Although [Higuchi’s stories “The Last Frost of Spring” and “Two Nights before the Full Moon”] did not reveal great talent, Nakarai [Tousui] confidently predicted that Ichiyō would become famous once they were published. Realizing perhaps that someone better placed than himself was needed to help her advance in her career, he promised to arrange a meeting with Ozaki Kōyō, then the literary editor of the Yomiuri Shimbun, the most important outlet for newspaper fiction; only with such a connection could Ichiyō hope to earn a regular income as a writer. But before the meeting with Kōyō could take place, Ichiyō… was warned by a friend… that she must break with Nakarai if she valued her reputation. Ichiyō had earlier heard rumors about Nakarai’s profligacy, but they seem not to have disturbed her; now, however, gossip had it that she herself was his mistress. Horrified, she swore she was innocent of any improper behavior. Two days later she went to see Nakajima Utako and learned from her that Nakarai had publicly referred to Ichiyō as his ‘wife.’ She declared her intention of breaking with him and she would inform him of this the next day.  Ichiyō apparently could not muster the courage to tell Nakarai the news at once. On her visit the following day she merely declined his offer of an introduction to Kōyō, and only a week later did she tell him of the rumors and her painful decision not to see him for the time being.
- Donald Keene, Dawn to the West, pages 171-2

[Higuchi Ichiyō’s] ‘Growing Up’ was acclaimed as a masterpiece, especially when the entire work was republished in a single issue of the popular magazine Bungei Kurabu in April 1896, Mori Ōgai… lavishly praised its every feature: …
(Ōgai): It is not especially remarkable that this author, a member of a literary circle in which the Naturalist school is said to be enjoying a vogue should have chosen to set her story in this place [the Yoshiwara district]. What is remarkable is that the characters who haunt this area are not the brute beasts in human form - the copies of Zola, Ibsen, and the rest - presented by the assiduous imitators of the so-called Naturalist school, but human beings with whom we can laugh and cry together… . At the risk of being mocked as an Ichiyō-idolater, I do not hesitate to accord to her the name of ‘poet.’ It is more difficult to depict a person with individual characteristics than a stereotype, and far more difficult to depict and individual in a milieu than a special person all by himself. This author, who has painted the ‘local coloring’ of Daionji-mae so effectively that one might say it has ceased to exist apart from ‘Growing Up,’ without leaving any trace of the efforts such portraiture must have cost her, must truly be called a woman of rare ability.
- Donald Keene, Dawn to the West, pages 179-80

During the last months of Ichiyō’s life, when she was too ill to write, a steady stream of visitors came to pay respects. In May 1896 Satou Ryokuu, who would figure importantly in the disposition of Ichiyō’s papers after her death, first visited her; Kouda Rohan came to ask for a manuscript; and Izumi Kyōka, another caller, was so impressed that he styled himself a disciple. Her illness, which first became noticeable in April of that year, grew steadily worse. In July she took to her sickbed, and four months later she died, at the height of her fame, not only the first woman writer of distinction for centuries but, thanks to ‘Growing Up,’ the finest writer of her day.
- Donald Keene, Dawn to the West, pages 182-3

A Day like this inspires poetry and song. How I envy those who see the snow spread out before them and fashion their metaphors. Silver sprinkles the earth. Softly, snowflakes fall like dancing butterflies; wings flutter but there is no sound. Six-petaled crystals come to rest on withered trees, spring’s first flowering. But for me, the snow invites fresh pain, summoning as it falls and falls a past beyond forgetting.
- Higuchi Ichiyō, “A Snowy Day” from In the Shade of Spring Leaves

It is a world of mistakes we live in. Rumors break like waves from nameless rivers.
- Higuchi Ichiyō, “A Snowy Day” from In the Shade of Spring Leaves

Ah, the power of women. One need hardly say more.
- Higuchi Ichiyō, “Child’s Play” (or “Growing Up”) from In the Shade of Spring Leaves

When she felt so awkward and unhappy, flattery only sounded like an insult.
- Higuchi Ichiyō, “Child’s Play” (or “Growing Up”) from In the Shade of Spring Leaves

Feelings … She couldn’t put them into words. They made her cheeks burn. Nothing she could point to - and yet lately everything discouraged her. So many thoughts; none of them would ever have occurred to [the girl she was] yesterday. This awkwardness all of a sudden! How was she to explain it? If they would just leave her alone … she’d be happy to spend night and day in a dark room. No one to talk to her, no one to stare. Even if she felt unhappy, at least she would be spared the embarrassment. If only she could go on playing house forever - with her dolls for companions, then she’d be happy again. Oh! She hated, hated, hated this growing up! Why did things have to change? What she would give to go back a year, ten months, seven months, even.
- Higuchi Ichiyō, “Child’s Play” (or “Growing Up”) from In the Shade of Spring Leaves

Why should he who knows the limits of his fate tremble over things that might have been?
- Higuchi Ichiyō, “Encounters on a Dark Night” from In the Shade of Spring Leaves

‘Take my hand when you are lonely,’ he heard her say. ‘Rest your head in my lap when the world is cruel to you. Together we can play among the mountains and fields. The tears you hide from others you need not conceal from me - my sleeve with dry them all. I shall never hold you in contempt as others have, and, even if your character is flawed, I shall never despise you for your weaknesses. If there are secrets troubling you, offenses in the past that still torment you, tell me of them. It will cleans your heart and make you feel better. I shall always be beside you. When you are angry, when you are disappointed. When you feel ashamed. When you have failed and know discouragement. When all you want to do is flee the world and hide among the mountains. When murderous or thieving instincts have the better of you. When you yearn for the distinction of high rank and high office. When your life seems bereft of beauty and you long to see the flowers and the moon. When you are waiting for a wind to cool you, or a cloud to bring some rain. When your boat is adrift upon the waves, or your little hut amid the mountains is oppressed by raging storms. When you are buried deep within a valley where the sun can never shine. Or when the summer sun pounds down upon the earth. I am your water; I shall quench your thirst. When sleet and snow are falling, let me be your fur robe on cold winter nights. We were never meant to be apart. Who cares what the world has to say? Forget distinctions of good and bad and beautiful and ugly. There is nothing you should hide from me. You must come to feel at home here. In my arms, in my lap.’
- Higuchi Ichiyō, “Encounters on a Dark Night” from In the Shade of Spring Leaves

Once there had been a summer house, but it was gone now. On the hill a hill a few remains stood. No autumn breeze blew. The setting sun shimmered in the disk. The sight summoned strange feelings in the boy’s heart. It was not a place to be alone. As far as the eye could see, the view was awesome. Even without such a distressing scene, [he] was inclined toward the melancholy. He was always lonely, and he felt ever more detached from the world.
- Higuchi Ichiyō, “Encounters on a Dark Night” from In the Shade of Spring Leaves

Love was something she did not believe in. One hides one’s feelings for a man, but eventually they come out as clearly as the random patterns on a cloth. And then, there are the barriers that keep the two apart. One suffers waiting for a man who does not come. It is not a pleasant thing, love.
- Higuchi Ichiyō, “Encounters on a Dark Night” from In the Shade of Spring Leaves

She was in love. But she was frightened, and she felt utterly confused. If she said one thing, he would laugh at her; if she did another, he would hold her in contempt. She could not even answer a simple question. She would cringe and begin to pull dust balls from the matting on the floor - piling them up, piling them up, like the mountain of thoughts weighing on her ind. How she longed to see him! Yesterday she would have said it openly. She blamed herself for her predicament: she would not speak his name or mention his family, and it only made things worse. Clearly something must be done - even tears would have cooled the fire in her heart. She couldn’t sleep at night. Finally, exhausted from her yearning, she would doze off. In her dreams, he would come to her. His gentle hand would tap her on the back. ‘What are you thinking about?’ ‘You,’ she could not bring herself to say.
- Higuchi Ichiyō, “Flowers at Dusk” from In the Shade of Spring Leaves

All had been a dream. How hateful the cock’s crow is to those in love, she thought… the sun was rising, but she was loath to put her dreams aside.
- Higuchi Ichiyō, “Flowers at Dusk” from In the Shade of Spring Leaves

I’ve had so many troubles on my mind, sometimes it feels as if my heart’s on fire.
- Higuchi Ichiyō, “Separate Ways”, The Oxford Book of Japanese Short Stories

How pointless everything turns out. What a life! People are friendly, and then they disappear. It’s always the ones I like… I’m always disappointed in the end. Why should I be surprised, I suppose?
- Higuchi Ichiyō, “Separate Ways”, The Oxford Book of Japanese Short Stories

‘All things come to him who waits,’ they say, but I wait and wait, and all I get is more unhappiness.
- Higuchi Ichiyō, “Separate Ways”, The Oxford Book of Japanese Short Stories

Most women are glad for the chance to talk about their troubles.
- Higuchi Ichiyō, “Troubled Waters” from In the Shade of Spring Leaves

I can’t seem to get my story going as I want it. My head keeps aching, and every scrap of good sense has deserted me. All I keep dreaming of is creating a woman of complete and flawless beauty. I shut my eyes and face the wall. I cover my ears and lean against my desk. When I attempt to capture this ideal beauty in the realm of mystery (yuugen), heaven and earth alike become dark; neither the form of that lovely flower nor the voice of the bulbul finds any reflection in my mind… . Is the beauty I long for so difficult to discover in this world? Or is it my fate to have only the commonplace beauties of cherry blossoms and crimson maple leaves show themselves in my mind’s eye? Or is it that there is no such thing as true beauty in heaven and earth? Or is it, perhaps, that what does not seem beautiful to my eyes is true beauty? … My mind, torn by these thoughts, raced over heaven and earth, and my body was bathed in the sweat of anguish.
- Higuchi Ichiyō, diary entry included in Donald Keene’s Dawn to the West page 175

In his writings, Kyōka found hope through the careful and insistent deployment of salutary figures. Most frequently they are women, archetypal heroines of beauty, wit, and grace. Reflective of his longing for his young mother [who had died when he was nine], his heroines both seduce and save, tempt and chasten Kyōka’s male characters as they wander in mountainous and watery territories of mystery and awe. By projecting the image of his mother onto these gallant though often unfortunate women, he was able to visit and revisit deprivation in a way that allowed him to find a measure of relief from dread and to vent his disdain for the crass unfeeling world of risshin shusse, the Meiji-period (1868-1912) ethic of ‘success at all costs.’
- Charles Shirō Inouye, from the introduction to Izumi Kyōka’s Japanese Gothic Tales short story collection

Never doubting the miracle of a pure heart and the power of language and literature, he delivered himself from his many anxieties by establishing a fictive purgatory that is often precious and bizarre, though always genuine despite is melodramatic formality. This is a small and idiosyncratic world. However, Kyōka went deep enough in his search to find that place which is connected with all others, and the world of his imagining provides us with vistas of emotional territories that expand in every direction. Akutagawa Ryūnosuke (1892-1927), the brilliant novelist of the generation that followed, coined the term ‘Kyōka’s world” (Kyōka no sekai) for this eccentric place.
- Charles Shirō Inouye, from the introduction to Izumi Kyōka’s Japanese Gothic Tales short story collection

In 1890 Kyōka went to Tokyo, intending to call on Kōyō, but he was too shy to appear at Kōyō’s door. Instead, he wandered the streets, shifting his lodgings a dozen times, leading the hand-to-mouth existence he would describe in several especially moving works. One morning in October 1891 he finally mustered up the courage to visit Kōyō, who accepted him as a disciple immediately. From the following day Kyōka lived in Kōyō’s house, in a tiny room next to the entrance. He was charged with cleaning the house, keeping track of visitors’ footwear, and running errands. He ate his meals in Kōyō’s house and received in addition the incredibly small monthly wage of fifty sen, which he used to buy paper, brushes, and cigarettes. Kyōka remained in the household for about three years with few breaks. He was the perfect disciple, ever solicitous of his master’s good opinion, and absolutely loyal to Kōyō. The one stark conflict between the two men occurred when Kōyō, discovering that Kyōka was secretly living with a geisha, ordered him to pay the woman and get rid of her…. Kyōka, in difference to his master’s wishes, refrained from marrying the geisha until after Kōyō’s death. Undoubtedly this incident caused Kyōka much anguish, but far from resenting the interference in his private life, he continued even after Kōyō’s death to pay obeisance to his mentor’s photograph every day. Kōyō, it should be said, was an ideal teacher, consecrating innumerable hours to improving Kyōka’s writings and to finding publishers for them.
- Donald Keene, Dawn to the West page 205

There was little interest in serious fiction during the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-1895. Kyōka reportedly was so dejected over his inability to earn enough money to support himself that he contemplated drowning himself in the moat of Kanazawa Castle. Kōyō, sensing the danger, wrote Kyōka, praising his most recent story (which he had arranged to have published) and urging him to rejoice that it was his destiny to be a writer: ‘The great poet’s mind is like a diamond; fire does not burn it, water cannot drown it, so no sword can penetrate its surface, no cudgel can smash it. How much less, then, can it be impaired by hunger for a bowl of rice! Because the time is not yet ripe for your diamond-mind to reveal its full brilliance, Heaven has provided the sand of suffering and the whetstone of hardship to polish it so that it may in a few years shine in all-pervading, eternal radiance.’
- Donald Keene, Dawn to the West page 208

After Tanizaki completed the first draft of ‘The Tattooer,’ his first thought was to show it to Izumi Kyōka. At this time, when Naturalism of the most prosaic variety was the prevalent literary mode, only Kyōka continued to include in his works supernatural or irrational elements associated with the writings of the past. Tanizaki’s world was closer to reality than Kyōka’s, but the early works resemble Kyōka’s in their rejection of the cold glare of common sense.
- Donald Keene, Dawn to the West, page 727

Izumi Kyōka (1873-1939) has been called the supreme ‘romanticist’ of Meiji literature. His stories often deal with the supernatural; and love - whether the self-sacrificing devotion of a geisha to a young man or the vengeance of a ghost for unrequited passion - is his main theme, rather than the ills of society or the loneliness of the individual. In later years, when attacked by members of the Naturalist school, he defended himself against the charge of being an escapist in these terms: ‘Of late considerable space in newspapers and magazines has been taken up by professions of Naturalism, but I am not interested in Naturalism or anything similar. I have never once while writing a work considered what ‘ism’ I should adopt for it. I have been quite satisfied if I succeeded in making my readers feel exactly what I have felt about the materials conceived within my head by presenting them in works of excellence, in complete works of art… . I have felt that in order to claim the attention of readers for something I have written as a work of art, if must at the very least give them pleasure, make them happy, arouse in them feelings or perceptions of beauty which ordinary people are incapable of experiencing.’ Despite Kyōka’s rejection of labels, the term ‘romanticist’ is not without meaning in his case, if only because it sets him off from the Naturalists, who dominated the literary scene after 1905.
- Donald Keene, Dawn to the West, pages 202-3

Kyōka is… renowned for his stories describing contemporary Tokyo, particularly the world of geishas and prostitutes. He delighted in using both the language of the Edo old-timers and the most up-to-date Tokyo slang, and he could describe with confidence exactly what a fashionable geisha would wear or how a fishmonger would press his fish on customers. Kyōka’s interest in geishas was no doubt heightened by his having fallen in love with one, and his happy marriage may have lead him to idealize women of this profession. Although he frequently described the hardships of the geisha’s life, whether caused by their patrons or by other geisha’s, he never seems to have questioned the propriety of a system of open or covert prostitution, perhaps because so much of the traditional Japanese life, especially depicted in the old novels and woodcuts, was involved with this system.
- Donald Keene, Dawn to the West, pages 203-4

In a nap at midday
    I met my beloved,
Then did I begin to believe
      In the things we call dreams.
- Izumi Kyōka, “One Day in Spring”, Japanese Gothic Tales short story collection

We all want romance, even if it means the agony of separation.
- Izumi Kyōka, “One Day in Spring”, Japanese Gothic Tales short story collection

He progressed deeper and deeper into the woods, feeling that, having come this far, it would be a shame to go back. And somehow he also felt that the path ahead of him was brighter than the one behind.
- Izumi Kyōka, “One Day in Spring”, Japanese Gothic Tales short story collection

I don’t have to tell you how despondent I was. But I suppose a dark place like that is better than daylight for strengthening one’s faith and pondering the eternal truths, even for a coward such as myself.
- Izumi Kyōka, “The Holy Man of Mount Kōya”, Japanese Gothic Tales short story collection

When the heart is darkened in the throes of passion it is really nothing to be lost on some path.
- Izumi Kyōka, “The Tale of the Enchanted Sword”