There is no obvious throughline that runs through this new collection of Osamu Dazai stories; only a series of Dostoevskian protagonists—young men who smoke too many cigarettes, cower in social situations, and who are consumed by deep insecurity. Written in the second half of the 1930s, Retrograde has been arranged and translated by Leo Elizabeth Takada, who has previously subtitled the Oscar-winning Japanese film Perfect Days for English audiences.
In these six stories of varying length, a young woman dying of kidney failure writes letters to herself—posing as a dashing man—to feel love for the first and last time. A man who watches too many Westerns stumbles through the streets of Tokyo looking for his own fight. A university student attempts to scorn academia—and then pays for it. The longest of the stories, “Das Gemeine”, is troubled and nostalgic, peppered with memorable characters that are easily the heart of the collection.
The style of the I-novel, as employed here, feeds fiction with experiences pulled from the author’s own life to enrich the story with realism.
In “Das Gemeine”, a man reeling from his first love befriends an eccentric violinist, Baba, who convinces the protagonist to start up a literary magazine, “Le Pirate”. Each character in the story is beautifully crafted, with eccentricities that add up to a peculiar yet enjoyable whole. For example, the protagonist “would only present [his] left profile to women, in a desperate effort to sell [his] manhood,” while Baba is a frequent teller of tall tales and carries an empty violin case—is his claim to be a violinist yet another lie? As Baba assembles a group to lead the magazine to its conception, personalities clash, and the story ends without a single published issue.
One of these personalities is Osamu Dazai himself, a young writer whom Baba finds to be “terribly annoying”. It’s a classic Dazai trope of extreme self-insertion—“a master manipulator of the semi-autobiographical I-novel genre”—where fiction reads like a biography, coupled with intense self-hatred and despair. The style of the I-novel, as employed here, feeds fiction with experiences pulled from the author’s own life to enrich the story with realism. A scene in which Dazai, the character and perhaps author (the line blurs to a degree that a difference between “author” and “character” is deliberately conflated), is described with fierce distaste: “An insufferable person… I have a physical aversion to him… He’s a dime novelist!”.
It is not only Dazai’s writerly skills that are critiqued, but his entire body, particularly his “dangerously grotesque nose” and “horrendous hunchback”. The discomfort of this scene serves as a strange foreshadowing to an event that would occur a decade later, when Yukio Mishima developed an immediate and strong dislike for Dazai, commenting on both his physical appearance and skills.
The title of “Das Gemeine” has long been a frequent source of confusion. Most readers tend to think that it’s a German phrase, and while no clean translation is possible, it could mean “the (bad) common thing”. In Multiethnic Japan, John Lie claims it “is in fact a phrase in Tōhuku dialect, which therefore means ‘no good’”.
Retrograde serves as both an entry point to new readers of Dazai—who, in this case, don’t have to commit to an entire novel—and to those who are already fans of his work, readers who would jump at the opportunity to read new translations of early stories. Even if it’s just for the author-character twists of “Das Gemeine”, Retrograde is a worthy addition to Dazai’s modern classics in translation.