There is a tendency with Osamu Dazai, who in his lifetime struggled with addiction and ultimately committed suicide, to focus on the more overwrought and confessional elements of his prose, hoping to find a mirror of the tragedy of his life in his writings. For his dedicated readers spanning the globe, the relatable elements of the ill-fated author may well be the pessimism and emotive voice within his works, but as well as being blessed with a razor-sharp and often damning self-awareness, Dazai was an adept comic writer who mixed the jocular with the melancholic to brilliant effect.
In the twenty stories found in The Real Osamu Dazai, translator James O’Brien attempts to give a broad view of Dazai’s writings, revealing an artist just as skilled at satire and levity as he was at illustrating his own sense of indigent depravity. While a large number of the stories here are openly autobiographical—in particular, the accounts of destructive vanity and familial alienation found in “Memories”, “My Older Brothers”, and “Eight Views of Tokyo”—others are comical critiques of the social and economic situation of Japan’s post-war period, with perhaps the best example being “Currency”, which escorts readers through the postwar black market as an anthropomorphized 100-yen note.
Much of Dazai’s humor is wry, such as in the self-parody of “A Question of Apparel”, or in the sometimes tongue-in-cheek memoir of “Toys”, which includes the line, “No one realized that I had become insane; when I recovered, nobody could tell the difference.” The author’s humor could also be openly silly, best shown when he writes in “The Monkey’s Mound” that Oran, the much courted female protagonist of the story, was so beautiful “a man might well recall the sniveling countenance of his own daughter and take to drinking in despair.” The humorous narrative voice in this story, accompanied by metafictional asides, demonstrates Dazai’s talent for spinning deceptively childish but profound parables, of which “Taking the Wen Away” and “Crackling Mountain” are two other prime examples collected here. (A previously published collection translated by O’Brien, Crackling Mountain and Other Stories, includes eleven of Dazai’s stories featured here; The Real Osamu Dazai adds another nine and a fresh introduction.)
It is also in the inclusion of humor that many of Dazai’s stories become especially moving. “There’s always something both tragic and comic in people’s very nature,” the author writes at the very end of this collection, and this balanced interplay forms the source of Dazai’s strength as a writer—it is the sadness hidden behind the joke that proves the most emotionally affecting. In “Memories”, the narrator describes himself as wearing so many masks that he could no longer tell “how sad any one of them really was,” and readers, too, are left to gauge for themselves the heaviness that hides behind each smile. It is in reproducing these melancholic jests that translator O’Brien excels, his unembellished use of language allowing the comically dry but fraught moments of Dazai’s prose to flourish.
Inherent in Dazai, then, is a shifting mix of tragedy and humor that defies a homogeneous interpretation. While this collection aims to give readers a glimpse at the “real” Osamu Dazai, the author (in his literary persona) seems always in flux between laughter and tears. What Dazai certainly does, however, is grant access to a deeper sense of self that, while not necessarily true to his own life, taps into a universal self-doubt that for many comes with living in a society: a feeling of self as imposter, caught in a trap. “It was all a mad dance,” Dazai writes early on in this collection, “the night before death,” but it is in the author’s practised balance of existential despair and hilarity that these darker themes become palatable and that mad dance enjoyable. Dazai’s true genius, then, is not the literary equivalent of wailing as you tear your hair out in front of the mirror, but the depth of insight to access the shadowy parts of human existence and bring them to the fore in a frank and humorous manner. Whether “real” or not, that is Dazai’s version of the world, and of himself.