Alina Yuan - 2022 Mitra Scholar by The Harker School

2021-22 Mitra FAMILY GRANT Recipient Life Goes On: Osamu Dazai’s Postmodernist Legacy Alina Yuan

Life Goes On: Osamu Dazai’s Postmodernist Legacy

Alina P. Yuan 2022 Mitra Family Scholar Mentors: Dr. Beth Wahl, Mrs. Lauri Vaughan April 13, 2022

Yuan 2 On the bank of a river flowing into modern day Yokohama, a young man in academic attire with bandages wrapped around his neck and arms is hauled out of the water by Atsushi Nakajima. When the mysterious man wakes up and realizes that he is on dry land, he promptly clicks his tongue in annoyance, to the bewilderment of Nakajima. “Are you the one who interrupted my submersion?” he questions Nakajima, irritated. “Submersion?!” “That’s right. I was trying to commit jisatsu,” the young man responds nonchalantly. “But you just had to interfere…” And so, the first episode of popular Japanese anime Bungou Stray Dogs (2016) begins. The young man is later revealed to be Osamu Dazai, a detective with a special ability called No Longer Human that nullifies others’ superpowers. This name might ring a bell to those who enjoy Japanese literature. The anime character Dazai is actually based on someone who actually existed, Osamu Dazai, one of the most well-known Japanese writers of the modern era, who produced famous novels such as No Longer Human and The Setting Sun.1 In fact, Dazai’s literary career has proved so influential that characters in various anime, manga, and even video games are modeled after him. Specifically in Bungou Stray Dogs, Dazai is one of the most popular characters, widely regarded as the comedic relief. Dazai often makes a fool of himself by getting into compromising situations in his attempts to commit suicide. His flamboyant personality masks the dark undertones of his depression and suicidal impulses, alluding to important aspects of the real Dazai’s life.

Alan Stephen Wolfe, Suicidal Narrative in Modern Japan (Princeton University Press, 1990), 3, JSTOR.

Yuan 3 The influence that the character of Dazai, who appears in various popular culture incarnations, has garnered in recent years speaks to his overwhelming popularity both among Japanese and Western audiences. Yet, the attention that Dazai received was not always positive. During the time when his novels were first published in the early to mid-1900s, Western critics and readers responded to Japanese postmodernism with ignorant disappointment. Books written by authors such as Dazai were not even considered as decent novels but rather as failures.2 However, in Japan, Dazai’s novels No Longer Human and The Setting Sun rose to the status of classic texts, becoming some of the best-selling books in Japan. Reading his books has been elevated to a rite of passage in the Japanese education system. These completely opposite and seemingly paradoxical reactions to Dazai’s books and life in the Eastern and Western hemispheres of the world beg the question: what is it about Dazai’s novels that Japanese society found so engaging but Western society missed? It is found that although most Western critics view Osamu Dazai’s No Longer Human and The Setting Sun as failures in the history of the modern novel, Dazai’s books and life engage important changes in how post-WWII Japanese society has interacts with the concept of death, closure, and the notion of a metaphorical life after death. Establishing the Mood and Context In order to grasp the nature of Dazai’s personality, the dichotomy between his charismatic mask and nihilistic core, as well as the contradictory nature of how he was viewed, one should examine the unique era that Dazai lived through. After the United States’ entry into World War II, the conflict continually escalated, and the bloodshed reached a climax when the

Masao Miyoshi, Accomplices of Silence: The Modern Japanese Novel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), 137.

Yuan 4 United States dropped two atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki.3 The devastation of the bombings shocked the Japanese public, ultimately sending them into a spiral of despair that permanently altered their view on mortality and morality. The American Occupation of Japan ensued. Although Japan rebuilt itself from ruins in 1945 into a major economic power, this transformation occurred at the cost of traditional Japanese customs and cultural values being covered with Western ideals. 4 The zeitgeist of late 1940s Japan was that of a country and a culture desperately searching for an identity after the war as the Japanese tried to redefine themselves as a society, even as they faced the limitations of the American Occupation and a newly imposed political system. At the same time that Japan was reimagining its cultural identity, the publishing industry resurrected itself. As the mandated censorship of writers was lifted after the war, Stephen Wolfe finds that a “cacophony of voices” demonstrated the varying opinions vying for public attention within the rebirth that was taking place.5 Writers produced works prolifically, freely commenting on the shift from aristocracy to industrial society, the broken ethics of war, and the general turmoil that Japan was left to deal with after the atrocities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.6 Hence, the postmodernist literary movement in Japan was born. With Western countries casting a new spotlight on Japan, the time period immediately after WWII was crucial for the development of

"World War II (1939–1945)," in Gale Encyclopedia of U.S. History: War (Detroit, MI: Gale, 2008), Gale eBooks. 4

"World War II (1939–1945)."

Wolfe, Suicidal Narrative, 172-3.

Wolfe, 174.

Yuan 5 the field of Japanese literature.7 It is important to elaborate on the cultural shifts that affected the Japanese public after the war to further illuminate the true motivations behind postmodernism. Vast rows of agricultural produce that once spanned the predominantly rural landscape transformed into a sprawling map of paved streets lined with bright neon lights and street lamps all within a few years. Japan was now home to urban metropolises, which placed the country at the forefront of modernity and Western ideals of progress. However, the bright lights that spanned across the cityscapes only artificially illuminated hope for the nation that harbored dark, inner psychological turmoil. As Wolfe finds, this pessimistic sentiment manifested itself “in the works of writers and intellectuals whose initial warm welcome of the enlightening canons of Western knowledge was giving way to deep anxiety” as they grappled with the violence that Japan and other countries had exhibited during the war years.8 The rise of the Japanese publishing industry took place in tandem with increasing postwar sentiments of aimlessness and despair, but Japanese novels of the period were still held to the standards of the Western bildungsroman. The bildungsroman, a literary genre focusing on the spiritual or intellectual transformation that a protagonist goes through during the formative years of adolescence, had attained immense popularity in the Western world during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Miyoshi finds that novels produced during this period in Japan shared common traits of the bildungsroman, but they were also shaped by their own culture, and therefore can be considered more like anti-bildungsromans.9 With Japanese culture so intimately connected to the Western world, especially after its experience of the United States

Humanities Commons, "Postwar Japanese Literature, a Brief Survey of the Field," Teaching Postwar Japanese Fiction. 8

Wolfe, Suicidal Narrative, 30.

Miyoshi, Accomplices of Silence, xi.

Yuan 6 occupation and Western pressure to modernize, Japanese postmodern novels show signs of adopting aspects of the bildungsroman, but then embedding them in a completely different culture and socio-literary landscape. Japanese writers could not simply accept the Western bildungsroman as the standard that would represent their literary landscape; they were determined to invite their own novelistic form. The Western concept of the novel, particularly a bildungsroman, requires certain criteria, including a strong young protagonist with a fleshed out personality and complex yet logical explanations for why he acts the way he acts.10 Additionally, according to Morgensten, a bildungsroman involves a plot in which the protagonist “striv[es] toward a higher morality,” where he becomes a better, more well-rounded, and complete version of himself.11 Out of all of these aspects that Western society accepts as the gold standard for good writing, Dazai’s writing fits none of them. Yet, his books were wildly popular in Japan. It is through observing the stark differences between how the West and how Japan admonished or praised Dazai’s writing that the disparity between East and West becomes increasingly apparent. The West may have believed that they were drawing differences between the good and the bad, or the successes and failures, by comparing Japanese literature to their own. However, perhaps the West simply misunderstood Dazai’s books. There is something different about the readers across various countries, the target audience, and also the space that the author himself existed in to be able to produce such a work. The criteria that unconsciously permeates throughout literature as a whole should not be used as the ultimate deciding factor in a novel’s quality.

Karl Morgenstern and Tobias Boes, "On the Nature of the 'Bildungsroman,'" PMLA 124, no. 2 (2009): 647, JSTOR. 11

Morgenstern and Boes, 651.

Yuan 7 Postmodernism, the time period that Dazai existed in, is in a sense a misreading of the bildungsroman of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. To take it one step further, Miyoshi explains that Japanese postmodernism is a new take on the movement that is juxtaposed by the unique circumstances of the post-WWII situation. 12 Therefore, Dazai’s No Longer Human and The Setting Sun are both texts that engage with questions of the moment for Japanese readers, but are also a medium for Dazai to respond to the elements of postmodernism he finds attractive in the West. A Closer Look at post-WWII Society and Literature The American Occupation marked a major turning point in the evolution of Japanese society, customs, and traditions. One result of the American military forcing itself into the governing body was the fragmentation of Japanese culture. Should the Japanese embrace the individuality that was so highly valued in America, or should they continue to focus on a sense of community and patriotic duty to their country as before the war? At this point, was Japan even Japan any more, or had its identity become subsumed within a sense of an external demand that it become westernized? The Japanese faced a number of choices: Tradition or modernity? Monarchy or democracy? And thus, the dilemmas facing Japan as a country, “(individual/collective, East/West), [led] to the elusiveness of those ideals of an ‘individual’ self, a ‘modern’ society, and a ‘modern’ language and literature.” Postwar Japan faced an identity crisis.13 Because of the fracturing of Japanese culture, writers began to document a process of alienation through their novels. According to Wolfe, with the psychological pressure brought on by the tension between modernity and the lingering persistence of traditional structures, the 12

Miyoshi, Accomplices of Silence, ix.

Wolfe, Suicidal Narrative, 161.

Yuan 8 alienated writer struggled with the “loneliness of the anonymous urban jungle . . . against a familial rural environment.”14 Other effects of the catastrophes of WWII included the resurgence of absurdism and nihilism that imbued itself within the intellectual community in Japan. The overwhelming level of death and destruction that occurred during WWII caused average citizens to ponder, “What does it mean to be a human in this time and age?” The notion of what it meant to be a person, a human being with a moral compass and goal to do good, during wartime when the actions of those in power seemed to indicate the very opposite of humaneness, was called into question. To take it one step further, at what point does someone become disqualified from being human? These are questions that Dazai grapples with in his novel No Longer Human. If there is a metaphorical paradigm that best characterizes historical fiction focused on the 1940s in Japan, it is that of death and rebirth in a completely new moral environment. Literature during this time attempted to categorize the chaotic events of human existence: “the pre-1945 era was a dark and ‘barren’ valley prior to a bright ‘renaissance’ under American auspices . . . many Japanese perceived . . . the end of wartime devastation as a rebirth into a new world.” 15 Furthermore, to espouse the metaphor of rebirth, one must efface prewar Japanese history, ignoring all previous traditions and social customs in order to truly be born anew. And that is exactly what the American Occupation attempted to achieve. This phenomenon of “dying in order to live” conveyed itself in the literary narrative in postmodern Japan. 16 Destruction to the degrees of magnitude never anticipated must be explained and narrativized in order to be overcome.

Wolfe, 49.

Wolfe, 167.

Wolfe, 171-2.

Yuan 9 This aimless sentiment is no better expressed than in the creation of the Buraiha and the genre called I-novels. According to Orbaugh, the Buraiha, also known as the Decadent School, was a group of nihilistic, nonconformist writers who wished to create a mirror or “antihero” image to challenge the “self-righteousness” and “self-serving” opportunism of bourgeois selfhood.17 Members of the Buraiha were iconoclasts and included Osamu Dazai among their ranks. The Buraiha phenomenon allowed the bundan, or literary guild, to generate its own postwar renaissance in a manner that focused on integrity and purity, traits essential to its viability.18 Yet, the standard of integrity is so ironic due to the decadent and depraved nature of its participating authors. Buraiha is a symbol of decadence, subversion, and negativity, yet it is still somehow able to transform the literary landscape to adhere to moral righteousness. The disjunction between the themes of Buraiha literature and the lives of the authors involved is difficult to grasp, especially for Western audiences, and perhaps that is why the reactions to their works and personalities were so varied. The Buraiha novelists utilized the style of writing called I-novels, or I-shōsetsu’s. The I-novel is an extremely personal style of writing, as denoted by the “I” in the name, and the self-revealing narration, in which the author is also the narratorprotagonist, is to the level of confessional literature.19 In a sense, through writing an I-novel, the writer professes their own immorality or wrongdoing, pleading guilty for existing in such a depraved age. Although I-novels, and especially those of the Buraiha, have a purely Japanese

Sharalyn Orbaugh, "Suicide and Dazai," The Journal of the Association of Teachers of Japanese 24, no. 2 (1990):193, JSTOR. 18

Wolfe, Suicidal Narrative, 95.

Miyoshi, Accomplices of Silence, ix-x.

Yuan 10 core, on the outer layers the genre is developed in “close acquaintance with Western literature,” as found by Miyoshi.20 Before focusing on the life and writing of Dazai, the forefront of the I-novel movement and one of the most influential members of Buraiha, it is important to establish the overall mood and style of the writing. Wolfe comments that “the sense of increasing deep cynicism and wry despair that young readers shared with writers like Dazai points to a tendency to see the vision of liberation and democracy as a bubble about to burst.” 21 After the war, all faith in government and the new world ideologies that started the war to begin with quickly shattered and gave way to hopelessness. Such hopelessness often translated into depression and acts of suicide among Japanese citizens, and especially authors. Wolfe further finds that “in the case of Japan in the twentieth century, the paradigm is modernity, and the subtext of suicide in its modern prototype, represented by the alienated writer, may be seen as a narrative material reflecting the value of Japan as a modern capitalist nation.” 22 Buraiha authors such as Dazai formed intimate relationships with the concepts of death, suicide, and self-destruction. When examined in tandem with literary narratives documenting the failure of the individual to adapt to modern society, Dazai’s suicidal narratives provide a revealing shift in Japan’s cultural mood. The dilemma Japanese intellectuals faced in a postwar, rapidly changing, modernizing society under American Occupation was how to define Japanese culture in a conceptual language, better understood as Western literary criticism and theory, that is not considered Japanese. This process has included efforts to transform Japanese society into a more democratic

Miyoshi, x.

Wolfe, Suicidal Narrative, 175.

Wolfe, 53.

Yuan 11 political entity. 23 Because they perceived the models and values for achieving these goals as foreign or alien, these writers faced a daunting task to establish an authentic Japanese identity for themselves. Dazai, Born From the Ashes From the wreckage of WWII and the nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Dazai, the ultimate anti-hero of Japanese literature and history arose. Born in 1909 as Shūji Tsushima, eighth surviving child of a wealthy landowner in northern Japan, Dazai was never able to form a close bond with his parents. 24 In fact, his works implicitly criticize his own family. From his alienated vantage point as a younger son, he gives the impression of a neglected child who suffered from the deprivation of receiving little affection from his parents.25 This absence of parental love in his life as well as abuse from a female servant, as reflected in the narrative of Yozo, the protagonist of No Longer Human and the literary persona of Dazai, suggests that young Dazai developed a deep rooted fear of people, especially women.26 Dazai in turn made up for his extreme social anxiety by acting like a clown or a fool to gain people’s favor and ironically to protect himself from scrutiny. Before the war, Dazai was a relatively prolific writer, although his works did not gain much attention. In fact, members of the Japanese writing community looked down upon his books for being “tasteless, ignorant, and an overall bore to read.”27 He constantly partook in rebellious activities such as student strikes and left-

Wolfe, Suicidal Narrative, 156.

James O'Brien, Dazai Osamu (Twayne Publishers, 1975), 58.

Wolfe, Suicidal Narrative, 124.

Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human, trans. Donald Keene (New York: New Directions, 1948), 63.

Wolfe, Suicidal Narrative, 103.

Yuan 12 wing politics and eventually engaged in self-destructive experiences of alcoholism and drug addiction.28 However, after WWII, Japanese public opinion of Dazai’s stories took a drastic turn. During this time, he began to write with a new fervr. The prolific nature of his new passion for writing, set in a completely new time period, caused Japanese society to view him in a different light. While his prewar writing was denigrated by his Japanese peers, his postwar works became overwhelmingly popular, and his decadent lifestyle was admired and viewed as iconic rather than shunned.29 Meanwhile, his writing also gained attention from the Western literary world, and his iconoclastic persona created a heated discussion on the implications of WWII on Japan. Throughout his life, Dazai attempted suicide multiple times, finally succeeding in 1948 shortly after publishing his masterpiece No Longer Human. His death was an occurrence that greatly shook Japanese society and generated much discourse over his qualifications as a writer or even a human being. As his writing became more and more relevant to his personal life, demonstrating the growth of Dazai as an author and historian of postwar Japan, his physical and mental condition deteriorated at rapid levels. O’Brien finds that the inability to overcome his addiction to morphine-based painkillers as well as his need for alcohol was also the catalyst of his productivity.30 Dazai and His Writing Dazai’s writing style is a good indicator for the psychological movements that Japan was undergoing after the war, and an even better representation of the alienated individuals’ experiences can be seen in his semi-autobiographies. Dazai's turbulent intensity coincided with

O'Brien, Dazai Osamu, 33.

Wolfe, Suicidal Narrative, 37.

O'Brien, Dazai Osamu, 148-9.

Yuan 13 Japan's immediate postwar turmoil, and The Setting Sun, and No Longer Human are the climax and the conclusion of his writing career. Furthermore, Miyoshi argues that Dazai himself constitutes both the “climax and conclusion of the I-novel tradition.”31 Thus, Dazai is the epitome of the deeply personal, confessional writing that prevailed through postwar Japan. His first novel that truly exhibited the personal style of writing in I-novels, and arguably his most famous novel, is called the Setting Sun. The Setting Sun was published in 1947, and like other postmodern Japanese novels, has very little plot. Miyoshi criticizes the novel by noting that “events occur, but with no explicit moral or causal interpretations to account for them . . .[Yet], the Japanese novel celebrates the hero's victory or glorifies the anti-hero's defeat . . . in a heroless age.”32 The reader follows Kazuko, the female protagonist, who regards her mother as the last aristocrat in Japan, since postwar Japan, under the American Occupation, has been forced to transition from a feudalistic, aristocratic rural society to a modern democratic one. Due to financial issues, Kazuko and her family make the move from being aristocrats to simply being commoners in a new age. Naoji, Kazuko’s brother, is much like the author, Dazai, as he takes drugs and drinks alcohol in unhealthy amounts. Kazuko’s love interest, Uehara, is similar to Dazai as well. He is regarded by the community as decadent, immoral, and repulsive. In the end, Naoji commits suicide and leaves behind notebooks documenting his descent into depravity. 33 By this point, Kazuko is tormented by the death of her mother, the rudeness of Naoji, and her forbidden love affair with Uehara, who is a married man. Kazuko eventually comes to an understanding that “[t]o give birth to the child of the man [she] love[s], and to raise him, will be

Miyoshi, Accomplices of Silence, 131.

Miyoshi, xiii.

Osamu Dazai, The Setting Sun, trans. Donald Keene (New York: New Directions, 1947), 151.

Yuan 14 the accomplishment of [her] moral revolution.”34 The Setting Sun and the ultimate awakening that Kazuko gains is reminiscent of a bildungsroman in Western literature although there is no defined plot, and this concept is juxtaposed with the revelation that Naoji, much like Dazai, is but a victim of Japan, the war, and the modernization process. In addition, Dazai appears to be dividing himself into fragments among the various characters, representative of the various identity crises that many in postwar Japan faced.35 Themes that govern The Setting Sun are the disparity between aristocracy and the modern working industry, the prevalence of death and suicide in postwar Japan, decadence and immorality, as well as a reinvention of what morality means to people in a morally deficient society. Dazai’s second most famous work, and arguably the one that is the most illuminating for his life, career, and beliefs about postmodernism, No Longer Human, was published in 1948. This book is essentially his autobiography. Yozo, the narrator, can be equated to Dazai, as there are large amounts of overlap between Yozo’s recounting of his life and Dazai’s actual life. The reader follows Yozo through three notebooks of his personal recollections of his life. In the first notebook, Yozo is a child who calls himself a clown, or a jester, “seeking to please.” 36 This need to make a fool of himself reflects Dazai’s own experiences living in a household in which he felt alienated from his family members and unsafe when in social situations.37 Young Yozo also expresses his complete lack of understanding of how human minds work, and he also has no concept of individuality. As a child, Yozo questions what human truth is, and takes issue with

Dazai, The Setting, 173.

O'Brien, Dazai Osamu, 148.

Dazai, No Longer, 23.

O'Brien, Dazai Osamu, 146.

Yuan 15 postwar society’s definitions of morality and righteousness. In Notebook 2, Yozo refers to himself as an actor, a social outcast. However, paradoxically, he also attracts women. 38 His involvement in alternative cultures such as drinking, smoking, and left-wing politics suggest Dazai’s invocation of the central beliefs of Buraiha and decadence. It is in this notebook that Yozo first attempts a double suicide with a woman he meets at a restaurant. In the third notebook, Yozo calls himself a “parasite” and “lunatic”. 39 His ponderings about human truth evolve into his questioning of what society is, and how the concept of an individual fits into society.40 In the final part of the third notebook, mental health and depression become the forefront issue. As Yozo continuously manipulates people to let him take more opiates, and as he descends into incoherence and addiction, he is admitted to a psychiatric ward.41 Since he is no longer treated like a full human being, but rather as a semi-ghost of his failed suicide attempts and a dysfunctional member of society, at this point in the novel Yozo thinks to himself that he has been “disqualified as a human being.”42 However, in the epilogue, his notebooks are discovered, and other people read them several years later. As they conclude that Yozo was “an angel,” his legacy and life continue.43 Thus, No Longer Human brings the reader face to face with a problematic narrator and an indeterminate text. Wolfe notes that Dazai's practice of

Dazai, No Longer, 49.

Dazai, 99.

Dazai, 120.

Dazai, 167.

Dazai, 177.

Yuan 16 suicidal autobiography comes to its fullest realization in this novel, which is “an account of selfdestruction and a self-destructive account.”44 Reactions to Dazai’s Writing Common reviews of Dazai’s writing made by past Western critics include: “tasteless,” “without taste,” “requir[ing] that we be interested in what the author had for breakfast,” and more.45 When looking at such reviews while also conscious that Dazai’s books are the most popular and best-selling novels in Japan of all time, these results seem incongruous. The West and Japan had and still have vastly different writing styles and cultures. Thus, when viewed through a Western lens of literary theory and criticism, Japanese writing, and especially the type that Dazai produced, is easily misunderstood. Another crucial element of the Western bildungsroman is also the prevalence of strong characters.46 Does the Japanese postmodernist movement contain a plethora of such characters? Absolutely not. Instead, they are real characters—to a fault, according to the West. What one sees in Dazai is an effort to create not necessarily a strong personality, but instead a real one by “revealing [its] often inconsistent and contradictory nature.”47 The illogical and incoherent thought processes of the characters include Yozo’s perpetual and partially unfounded hatred for humanity, his confusing reasoning for joining a communist reading group, and his multiple double suicide attempts with women he has not formed entirely meaningful connections. Perhaps

Wolfe, Suicidal Narrative, 196-7.

Edward Seidensticker, "Recent Trends on Japanese Literature," The Oriental Economist 27 (January 1959): 35. 46

Morgenstern and Boes, "On the Nature," 647.

Wolfe, Suicidal Narrative, 140.

Yuan 17 Western readers cannot grasp the actions taken by Yozo in No Longer Human since they fail to understand Japan’s disordered society. Well-written characters in stories, especially in bildungsromans, must also develop throughout the story, ultimately bettering themselves or learning something in the process.48 However, as Lyons finds, it is precisely the area of character development that Western critics sometimes feel the most disappointed in when dealing with Japanese fiction. A major Western artistic accomplishment which has had great influence for the development of fictional characters, as found by Lyons, is “the production of the visual illusion of well-roundedness."49 However, as one sees in Yozo, he does the very opposite. He is given multiple chances by kindhearted people and his family to make himself anew, he picks up a hobby and a job in cartooning, he finds love and enters a relationship, he is urged desperately to quit his self-destructive suicidal tendencies and drug addiction—to no avail. Dazai, writing through Yozo, stands against any form of moral or spiritual development. In fact, his only goal through writing No Longer Human is to avoid closure or any sense of completeness. The Western writer utilizes a coherent plotline, message, or interpretation in general. No Longer Human, as well as The Setting Sun, have quite the opposite. In both novels, there seems to be an absence of coherent unity, and instead a fragmentary quality, reduced to reinterpretations and reevaluations of traditional Japanese protagonists, with results that are almost unreadable. Dazai is lost as a person with no developed sense of his own place in society.50 Due to Dazai/Yozo’s inability to fit into his community, family, and society as a

Morgenstern and Boes, "On the Nature," 651.

Phyllis I. Lyons, "'Art Is Me': Dazai Osamu's Narrative Voice as a Permeable Self," Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 41, no. 1 (1981): 93-4, JSTOR. 50

Miyoshi, Accomplices of Silence, 125.

Yuan 18 whole, it then logically follows that Yozo’s autobiography lacks a sense of belonging or direction as well. Yozo drifts from one memory to the next, without pursuing an end goal, such as recovering from drug addiction, or truly having a loving, non-manipulative relationship with a woman. Similarly, in The Setting Sun, Kazuko also ambles aimlessly through the streets, cares for her mother, and visits Uehara. Nothing more, nothing less. Naoji also has no purpose in life, as he rambunctiously devolves from his crippling depression. One can argue that there is an end goal in The Setting Sun, as Kazuko believes that caring for her soon-to-be-born child with love and affection will be her moral revolution. However, the reader never sees Kazuko realize her dreams, since the book ends abruptly after her epiphany. The conclusion of The Setting Sun is a fitting representation of the uncertainty of achieving one’s goals in postwar Japan, or whether or not people even should have goals in the first place. Western readers also appreciate logical characters since they can empathize and relate to the characters. Once again, Western readers ultimately find that Dazai and his characters are the antithesis of logic and coherence. The most illustrative example of Dazai’s illogical mindset is a quote from his short story Leaves: “I planned to die. In January I received a New Year's gift of a gray-striped robe. It was clearly a summer kimono. I thought I might as well go on living until summer.”51 The protagonist’s decision to commit suicide is displaced by his decision not to commit suicide, with such nonchalant dismissal of a very serious issue. Wolfe emphasizes that the complete lack of causal or logical sequence between a small gift of a kimono and a life-ordeath decision can be alarmingly confusing. It is the gap, the space, the absence of logic that baffles readers. It is that which is not and cannot be expressed that structures the experience of

Osamu Dazai, Leaves, vol. 1, Dazai Osamu Zenshū (Tōkyō: Chikuma Shobō, 1958), 5.

Yuan 19 the text and narrative qualities. Leaves does not offer the reader the “voice” of Dazai or any narrator but rather the impossibility of determining voice, intention, and meaning.52 Readers understandably struggle with the fact that sometimes authors like Dazai do not create a distinct voice in the story and within their characters. Dazai, as a postmodernist author, does not strive to adhere to the standards of the bildungsroman but rather he aims to do away with any structure or logical flow whatsoever. Paradoxically, Dazai’s style is an absence of style. A similar phenomenon of illogicality can be seen in No Longer Human. Yozo’s intense and morbid dread of humans seemingly manifests itself from thin air, anchoring itself into Yozo’s psychological and cognitive state immediately. Perhaps his most revealing perspective on human nature is a quote in Notebook 1: “If my neighbors manage to survive without killing themselves, without going mad, maintaining an interest in political parties, not yielding to despair, resolutely pursuing the fight for existence, can their grief really be genuine?”53 This moment is one of the first instances when readers become aware of Yozo’s personality and usually develop a strong distaste for his attitude. It is implausible for the reader—and sensibly so—to understand why Yozo is the way he is, why he has such overwhelming pessimism in the first place, why he believes that going mad or committing suicide is the ultimate fate of all humans, and why he should even be allowed to determine if one’s grief is genuine or not. A bildungsroman or autobiographical book typically must accurately and fairly represent the political and social landscape at the time. Surprisingly, Dazai, who is regarded as one of the best representations of an average postwar Japanese citizen, did not possess an analytic mind or adequate knowledge of his society. Miyoshi disapproves of the fact that “his books lack 52

Wolfe, Suicidal Narrative, 133.

Dazai, No Longer, 25.

Yuan 20 sufficient scale and the sort of developed attitude toward its society that would provide a powerful and comprehensive vision of postwar Japan.”54 This absence of understanding can be seen in The Setting Sun since Kazuko, the narrator, cannot provide a complete picture of the aristocracy that her mother belongs to, and the transition from the aristocracy to a new economic democracy that was modern Japan. Kazuko also seems to have a flawed view of modern Japan: “I thought that Mother might well be the last of those who can end their lives beautifully and sadly, struggling with no one, neither hating nor betraying anyone. In the world to come there will be no room for such people. The dying are beautiful, but to live, to survive—those things somehow seem hideous and contaminated with blood.”55 She believes that modern Japan would be a country in which backstabbing, chaos, ugliness, and sin would be rampant. To live in such a society would be to constantly suffer and to turn to vices in order to not succumb to ubiquitous cruelty. However, what Kazuko, and in turn Dazai, fail to see, is that while the new cities that sprouted from the rural lands of farms might seem cold and foreign, the American Occupation was not hell bent on causing pain to their Japanese citizens. The reforms that MacArthur under the Occupation implemented in order to establish a democracy are still upheld by Japan today, and are thus vital to the growth and progression of the country. 56 However, many Japanese intellectuals describe the Occupation exclusively in negative terms, and this negativity is reflected in their writing. Additionally, in No Longer Human, while Yozo and his friend attend a communist reading group and are exposed to left-wing thought that dominated postwar society, Yozo refuses to focus on the new ideals of Marxism and how it influences the way he earns

Miyoshi, Accomplices of Silence, 137.

Dazai, The Setting, 124

"World War II (1939–1945)."

Yuan 21 money or interacts with his local communities. Instead, Yozo enjoys visiting the reading society “ . . . because those people pleased [him]—and not necessarily because [they] were linked by any common affection derived from Marx.”57 To Yozo, nothing in life has meaning, and political affiliations are simply a tool for him to waste time in a hopeless existence. According to Miyoshi, “in the traditional Western novel, the plot coheres by virtue of the carefully laid network of causal relationships” which are predictable and reasonable in the complete and believable fictional world, applying to everyone universally, regardless of circumstance.58 The Japanese I-novel contrasts rather sharply with the Western bildungsroman because it views a commonsense explanatory system with scorn. The Japanese novel, then, does not conform to the specifications of the Western novel on which it is modeled. 59 All of the factors that go into a classic bildungsroman, from strong characters and their consequent developments in the story, historical accuracy, a cohesive plot, and much, much more, can be discarded when trying to analyze a Japanese I-novel. The I-novel starkly contrasts with and actively attempts to demolish the standards of a Western coming-of-age story. Judging Dazai on a Western Standard A reason why Western readers might feel as if they are capable of properly judging an Inovel is most likely because postwar Japan was inseparable from the American Occupation. Under the control of General MacArthur, Japanese society could not escape from the Western ideals that were forcibly thrust upon them. As noted by Miyoshi, somewhere in the substance of each modern piece of Japanese literature “lies an element native to the core and as such utterly

Dazai, No Longer, 67.

Miyoshi, Accomplices of Silence, xiii.

Miyoshi, xvi.

Yuan 22 intransigent and unreconstructible.”60 Thus, beneath the Western veneer there is something impenetrably Japanese. Rather than continually criticizing the Japanese of this period for their inability to write a proper Western novel, it would seem preferable to treat the literature on its own merits and unique qualities.61 As Bowring points out, “to assume that Japanese writers even wanted to write such novels betrays at best a rather parochial attitude and at worst a species of cultural arrogance.”62 Rather than focusing on the areas in which the I-novel diverges from the common conceptions of what a bildungsroman should look like, it was time for Western critics to embrace Japanese fiction with a blank slate and more open mind. Dazai’s Writing: What Makes it so Good? To Dazai, fiction is truth. Dazai always believed he was being absolutely honest. Fiction “was the truth for him, that is, non-fiction.”63 Again, we see Dazai’s numerous attempts to go against every construct that literature has provided. The revolutionary style of writing that Dazai as well as his peers forced into the literary scene of fiction should only be highly acclaimed, rather than disregarded as a product of poor skills. Dazai’s undying honesty and being true to himself and his perspective on writing has helped transform Japanese literature and document the transition from an imperial to modern nation, but it has also attracted the very critical attention of the West.

Miyoshi, x.

Wolfe, Suicidal Narrative, 103.

Richard John Bowring, Mori Ogai and the Modernization of Japanese Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1979), 223. 63

Miyoshi, Accomplices of Silence, 123.

Yuan 23 Furthermore, Dazai’s writing is immersive even without plot or strong characters. Though many find fault in his lack of well-rounded or complete characters with sophisticated logical processes and actions, the reader’s role of filling in the gaps and inserting their own assumptions creates a more interactive reading experience. According to Lyons, readers slip into so many personae that they become a part of this artwork, accomplices of its style. At a much deeper level, something else is happening, “where the reader begins to participate instead of just observe.”64 When commenting on Dazai’s I-novels, Western critics seem to focus on the superficial reader experience, one that only involves the reader becoming a sponge to absorb the novel’s various characters and plot points. Reading too can be a two-way street: while readers gain knowledge and feel emotions from the book, they can also input their own thoughts and feelings into the book to help the author create something larger and deeper than what meets the eye. The author and the reader work together to elevate seemingly simple words on a page, one of the core tenets of reader-response literary criticism. 65 Thus, the word permeable is most accurately used to describe Dazai’s style when narrating a story and creating characters. Dazai invited his readers to actively merge with him, the narrator Yozo, or even Kazuko. The reader is given permission to enter into his mind, similar to how fluids pass through a permeable membrane. “There is something organic about the relationships he sets up.” 66 Readers feel as if they have experienced their own raw emotions personally and directly when reading Dazai’s truth. After all, there is nothing more relatable than truth. Since Dazai is truth, then Dazai, previously regarded as an inaccessible, incomprehensible failure of an I-novelist, can be

Lyons, "Art Is Me," 104-5.

Angela Eward-Mangione, "Reader-Response Criticism," Writing Commons.

Lyons, "'Art Is Me,'" 109.

Yuan 24 described as a transparent and interactive writer, to the ignorance of Western critics. One note of caution is that Dazai has the rare ability to draw the reader in and narrativize them as an acting character in his novels. However, Wolfe finds that there is a healthy and a not-so healthy approach to Dazai.67 A common response of a first-time, or even veteran reader of Dazai struggles with a few decisions to make: prefer not to see Dazai in oneself? Derive vicarious pleasure, pain, or confirmation from universal prototypes of human behavior? There are many different reactions to his writing, but they are all very, very powerful. While the West criticizes the imperceptible and confusing logic that flows through No Longer Human and The Setting Sun, it is important to realize that Dazai is the victim of the shift to modernity, and readers hopelessly watch his descent. As found by Markus and Kitayama, “the Japanese nightmare is exclusion.”68 Dazai is the prime example of the alienated writerintellectual phenomenon that occurred in Japan after the war.69 He experienced the worst possible fate, not only by living through the war and postwar era, but also in his childhood and youth as an individual who felt so isolated from his family and society as a whole—and the reader is the witness. Dazai’s creation of his characteristic pervasive feeling of shyness and shame reflected the absurdity he perceived.70 In addition, Miyoshi asserts that “the gap between the spoken and the written language is still a very serious problem for the Japanese writer, and Dazai managed to show at least one direction for a possible coming together of the two,” which

Wolfe, Suicidal Narrative, 119.

Hazel Rose Markus and Shinobu Kitayama, "Culture and the Self: Implications for Cognition, Emotion, and Motivation," American Psychological Association 98, no. 2 (1991): 228. 69

Wolfe, Suicidal Narrative, 102.

Miyoshi, Accomplices of Silence, 139.

Yuan 25 is definitely commendable.71 In Japan, the disconnect between written words and speaking out loud is much more prevalent than in other languages, and thus books written in Japan are characterized as unnatural, insincere, and overall not reflective of the author’s true intentions. However, writing allows Dazai to reveal his true self, and thus his novels demonstrate the extent to which he can push language and defy its boundaries. Miyoshi found that Dazai was not prepared to write a book that would accurately and holistically portray modern Japanese society, and that his settings and political beliefs were underdeveloped and lacked scale. Contrary to Miyoshi, Dazai is actually a great writer when put into the context of his historical period. He expresses with exemplary coherence the inherent absurdity of the modern predicament. His contradictory writing and career mirrors the backwardness of modernity in Japan.72 Postwar Japan is characterized by fragmentation of identity, crisis, a kaleidoscope of contradictions and inconsistencies, as well as a struggle to identify what is right or wrong. It is no surprise that Dazai’s writing would reflect the backwardness of this time period. Rather than discredit him for having a narrow worldview or lacking a developed attitude, it is better to understand that Dazai’s writing style is intentional and his mindset is the most accurate representation of modern Japan since it was the era of antithesis and opposition, but also a lack of understanding of a paradoxical world. Reaction to Dazai’s Life Alongside His Books Dazai is regarded as the paradigm of negativity, and the prototypical alienated victim of modern Japan. Analyzing his life and death, as well as public reaction to his suicide (and attempts) gives historians valuable insights into how society evolved after WWII. Dazai's death 71

Miyoshi, 139.

Wolfe, Suicidal Narrative, 14.

Yuan 26 occurred at a critical juncture of the postwar period. Dazai's negativity was immediately enshrined via the mass media and Japanese literary establishment as a naturalized component of the postwar literary scene under the American Occupation. 73 His widely publicized death reduced him to a writer who was only an alienated and weak individual who was pitted against a strong, brutal, and cold society. His life was much, much more than just a large struggle, but this widely accepted perception of Dazai is what carried through Japan and eventually to the West as they discovered Japanese fiction. In a sense, his reception as a writer was reduced to the reception of his suicide. Instead, it is more adequate to view Dazai’s death in terms of his work. As theorized by Miyoshi, the autobiographical I-novel, “by its own logic, will not close until the writer’s life closes. And Dazai himself had to bring it to its conclusion.” 74 Dazai’s suicide, rather than a product of the postwar modernization syndrome that swept through Japan, is instead demonstrative of the tenacity of a writer who was true to his craft until the very end. Another contradiction to note is if he was viewed as a depraved decadent or as a relatable human. Wolfe believes that Dazai's writing is filled with monsters, ghosts, but above all human paradoxes. Thus the reader is persuaded into viewing the no longer human ghostly persona of Dazai as “all too human.”75 The initially negative view of Dazai was transformed into one of admiration and appreciation, but such a shift only occurred because of the nature of his death and the publicization of his struggles with a hopeless existence under modernization. Fast forwarding to the present, Japanese literature is now worth desiring for its humanistic and universal qualities (in other words, familiar to an educated Western reader). Yet

Wolfe, 130.

Miyoshi, Accomplices of Silence, 139.

Wolfe, Suicidal Narrative, 135-6.

Yuan 27 it remains inaccessible, not only through the mystification of the Japanese language, which is translatable but not transparent, but, more significantly by appeal to that “irascible inscrutability hidden beneath the veneer of modern respectability.” 76 Previously, Western readers frowned upon the I-novel because of their frustration with their inability to comprehend the deeply Japanese ideologies that governed the genre. However, the appreciation of Japanese art and writing that the West has transitioned to in the present day is why Dazai’s writing is only just now being recognized for its artistry and display of literary prowess. The most revealing information that can be drawn from Dazai’s death emerges when it is compared with the death of Mishima Yukio in 1970. Very briefly, Mishima Yukio was another modern writer who also committed suicide, though the suicide is viewed as traditional since he committed seppuku, which is self-disembowelment, instead of jisatsu, the “self-deconstructive” type that Dazai pursued.77 The death of Mishima Yukio, however, was not taken in a positive manner whatsoever. Instead, Marías finds that it “was so spectacular that it ha[d] almost succeeded in obliterating the many other stupid things he did in his life, as if his previous nonstop exhibitionism had been merely a way of getting people’s attention for the culminating moment.”78 Mishima’s death was met with public outrage, while after Dazai’s death, he was viewed in a much more sympathetic and pitiful light. The sole explanation for this phenomenon is that Dazai’s death took the form of a purely postmodern and therefore relatable act of self-destruction, as well as opposition to Mishima's

Wolfe, 194.

Miyoshi, Accomplices of Silence, 59.

Javier Marías and Margaret Jull Costa, "Yukio Mishima in Death," The Threepenny Review, no. 104 (2006): 1, JSTOR.

Yuan 28 “atavistic [traditional] suicidal gesture.” 79 Thus, even though Dazai’s death took place before Mishima’s, the differing responses to their respective deaths exemplifies that postwar Japan was in a stage of resistance against what the American Occupation sought to accomplish. Additionally, Mishima’s seppuku was marked as out of date, signaling Japan’s departure from its feudal years and movement toward modernity. As a result, there is no better representation of the shift in how Japan viewed death and closure than to see how they reacted to Dazai’s death and to his writings after his death. The notion of success or failure with regards to Dazai as a human being and Dazai as a novelist also come to light. Dazai was a failure of modern society, through and through, just like Mishima; however, unlike Mishima, his failure was met with commiseration from fellow alienated individuals of postwar Japan. Life Reinvented After Death Although Dazai committed suicide in order to destroy his being and to promptly end his story by taking destruction into his own hands, the postmodern suicidal narrative persists today. On the contrary, Wolfe argues that his “suicide represents [his] capacity to resist without resisting, to undermine emptiness itself, to preempt death and destruction, or undo the end of history itself.” 80 Although Dazai attempts to control the closure of his life, such an undertaking is still fundamentally dependent upon the reader-observer’s identification of the author’s intent in committing suicide.81 The “Japanization of the Westerner” that occurs when one experiences Japanese postmodernism for the first time thus requires seeing oneself with the world as having

Orbaugh, "Suicide and Dazai," 186.

Wolfe, Suicidal Narrative, 222.

Orbaugh, “Suicide and Dazai,” 189.

Yuan 29 died and still continuing to exist as part of a living dead. 82 Such a phenomenon of life after death can actually be observed in many of Dazai’s works, contradictory to his initial perceived attempt to erase himself from existence with jisatsu. In The Setting Sun, Naoji leaves behind written testaments for Kazuko to read after his suicide.83 As mentioned before, all characters in The Setting Sun represent one limited aspect of Dazai’s life and personality. To have Naoji, the part of Dazai that is the helpless and depraved victim, leave behind a testament for Kazuko, Dazai’s survivor persona, the author effectively creates a situation in which one fragment of his personality is observing and experiencing aspects of another.84 Naoji still lives on in the form of paper and words, and Kazuko will take his story and his proof of existence with her forever until she dies. Even after her death, her child, which she bore for the sole purpose of achieving her moral revolution, which was also motivated by Naoji, will live their own life, and so will their children, and so on. Life goes on, even after suicide, and Naoji leaving behind a testament ensured that he will never fully disappear from existence. Similarly, in No Longer Human, which is divided into sections called notebooks, takes the form of physical copies of these notebooks. Although the reader never finds out if Yozo died or continued living after the events in the third and final notebook, that is the beauty of the story. In the epilogue, a madam of a bar that Yozo frequented gives his notebooks to a man who visited the bar ten years after the recounted events and encourages him to write a story about Yozo.85

Wolfe, Suicidal Narrative, 220.

Dazai, The Setting, 153.

Wolfe, Suicidal Narrative, 197.

Dazai, No Longer, 173.

Yuan 30 She discusses Yozo’s life with the man, and they come to the conclusion that “he was a good boy, an angel.”86 Yozo may have died a nameless and seemingly inconsequential death, since no one knows his whereabouts anymore. Even if he was still alive at the time of the epilogue, the notebooks still abruptly cut off the path of Yozo’s life on paper. However, the fact that his notebooks have been distributed to a fellow author points to a possibility that Yozo’s legacy will not meet the same fate. His story will be rewritten, reinterpreted, and reexperienced by countless people, and Yozo, who tried so hard to take control of his own life and death, will never succeed. Even after his jisatsu, he has unknowingly experienced a life after death. His story very much mirrors that of No Longer Human, as both Westerners and Japanese people alike are reading his novels, writing articles and books about him, and I myself am writing this research paper. I myself am perpetuating his existence long after he has gone, and thus the postmodern Japanese Inovelist will never truly be dead. Dazai has made one of the most powerful comebacks in all of literature. Although his books have been considered classics in Japanese literature, he has also gained an almost cult following among Western literary fanatics and youth all across the world. It is worth exploring the changing times of the modern world and how the development of new cultural constructs has contributed to the immense posthumous success that Dazai experienced. While Western readers who are familiar with Japanese I-novels and fiction are continuously rediscovering his books today, Dazai’s popularity also took a different turn in recent years. His popularity transcended to modern day pop culture, so it comes to no surprise that a popular manga/anime series has a character inspired by him: Bungou Stray Dogs.87 The 86

Dazai, 177.

"Osamu Dazai: A Great Japanese Author with a Tragic Life," Yabai..

Yuan 31 characters in this hit anime show include iconic writers that are familiar to many, such as Mark Twain, Edgar Allan Poe, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Created by an artist-writer dubbed “Kafka Asagiri,” Bungou Stray Dogs as a manga was published in 2012, and the anime adaptation aired in 2016.88 Anime/manga as a subset of popular culture has not only achieved widespread popularity in Japan, but also in Western youth as well, especially in America. In fact, No Longer Human became the bestselling Japanese literary work in the United States thanks to Bungou Stray Dogs as well as popular artist Junji Ito’s identically-named manga based on the novel.89 TikTok also contributed in making Dazai’s No Longer Human so popular, and even the public relations officer of New Directions, a publishing company, commented on the novel’s rising fame, saying that this boom started around 2020. 90 More and more young people are being drawn in by Dazai, especially around the beginning of the pandemic when social media such as TikTok was being increasingly used among the youth. Thus, it is worthwhile to further investigate the significance of Dazai’s popularity as a character and pop culture personality. Nihilistic End, Hopeful Continuation Dazai should not be viewed as a failure, as his societal impact and the lessons that can be learned from his life and writing are notable. To this day, Dazai’s influence can be seen everywhere, suggesting the notion of a cultural afterlife that authors and intellectuals may develop. Dazai’s popularity has come truly full circle and will continue to expand as the new age of postmodernism births writers like Kazuo Ishiguro, Hanya Yanagihara, and Haruki Murakami, and as TikTok, anime, and manga disseminate Dazai and his writing to the youth at large.

"Osamu Dazai," Yabai.

"Manga Boosts Popularity of Dazai's No Longer Human in United States," Anime Hunch.

"Manga Boosts," Anime Hunch.

Yuan 32 However, this present-day revolution raises the question of why Dazai is only just now returning to the youth, to Generation Z specifically, and why in the year 2020. It may be because members of Generation Z are growing up in an age of increased stress and anxiety. In fact, the Annie E. Casey Foundation finds that 70% of teens say that anxiety and depression are significant problems among their peers.91 Moreover, COVID-19 has had a significant impact on GenZ, and the pandemic was especially tough at its beginning. The pandemic has radically changed the youth’s educational and social experiences, and rates of depression and anxiety have risen by more than 25% in 2020.92 The confusion of living in an age of a global pandemic and being deprived of vital social interactions definitely took its toll on GenZ, and when paired with the fact that GenZ is an overall more depressed group than others, the sense of despair instilled in the youth is magnified further. The number of young people who cannot find a place in society is increasing in the United States, and Dazai’s message of alienation towards and from society is becoming easier to accept.93 To put a different spin on Dazai and his exceedingly pessimistic, depressing tone of writing, postmodernism can be reimagined in terms of the reader-response critical theory. Postmodernism pushes its audience to transcend its own fears by going beyond death, or at least controlling death, by fantasizing life after death while still undead. In literary terms, the reader is being asked to narrate their own story after the story is over.94 Such a story that the author Dazai

Annie E. Casey Foundation, "Generation Z and Mental Health," The Annie E. Casey Foundation. Last modified October 16, 2021. 92

Annie E. Casey Foundation, "Generation Z and Mental," The Annie E. Casey Foundation.

"Manga Boosts," Anime Hunch.

Wolfe, Suicidal Narrative, 220-1.

Yuan 33 wills his readers to create after consuming any of his works, but most importantly No Longer Human, since it is in a way his suicide note, can take any turn the reader would like, thus pushing the stance that life always prevails over death. Dazai did not die a real death. Wolfe explains that Dazai’s “struggle to create a post nuclear, post-Holocaust vision of love and life provides hope that the narrative will not result in ‘real’ death or suicide but will continue to be open-ended with a world of infinite storytelling possibilities.” 95 Even after one finishes reading Dazai, their intertwined stories do not end. The reader takes what they want from the story, learns from it, and applies it to their own life. After one reads Dazai, one has come close to touching the very truth of human life, death, and suffering, and come so close to their most raw emotions and intrinsic nature of human personality. Treasure it.

Wolfe, 223.

Yuan 34 Bibliography Annie E. Casey Foundation. "Generation Z and Mental Health." The Annie E. Casey Foundation. Last modified October 16, 2021. https://www.aecf.org/blog/generation-z-and-mentalhealth. Bowring, Richard John. Mori Ogai and the Modernization of Japanese Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1979. Dazai, Osamu. Leaves. Vol. 1 of Dazai Osamu Zenshū. Tōkyō: Chikuma Shobō, 1958. ———. No Longer Human. Translated by Donald Keene. New York: New Directions, 1948. ———. The Setting Sun. Translated by Donald Keene. New York: New Directions, 1947. Eward-Mangione, Angela. "Reader-Response Criticism." Writing Commons. https://writingcommons.org/section/research/research-methods/textual-methods/literarycriticism/reader-response-criticism/. Humanities Commons. "Postwar Japanese Literature, a Brief Survey of the Field." Teaching Postwar Japanese fiction. https://teachingpostwarjapanesefiction.mla.hcommons.org/about-this-volume/postwarjapanese-literature-a-brief-survey-of-the-field/. Lyons, Phyllis I. "'Art Is Me': Dazai Osamu's Narrative Voice as a Permeable Self." Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 41, no. 1 (1981): 93-110. JSTOR. "Manga Boosts Popularity of Dazai's No Longer Human in United States." Anime Hunch. Last modified February 9, 2022. https://animehunch.com/2022/02/09/manga-boostspopularity-of-dazais-no-longer-human-in-united-states/. Marías, Javier, and Margaret Jull Costa. "Yukio Mishima in Death." The Threepenny Review, no. 104 (2006): 9-10. JSTOR. Markus, Hazel Rose, and Shinobu Kitayama. "Culture and the Self: Implications for Cognition, Emotion, and Motivation." American Psychological Association 98, no. 2 (1991): 224-53. Miyoshi, Masao. Accomplices of Silence: The Modern Japanese Novel. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974. Morgenstern, Karl, and Tobias Boes. "On the Nature of the 'Bildungsroman.'" PMLA 124, no. 2 (2009): 647-59. JSTOR. O'Brien, James. Dazai Osamu. Twayne Publishers, 1975.

Yuan 35 Orbaugh, Sharalyn. "Suicide and Dazai." The Journal of the Association of Teachers of Japanese 24, no. 2 (1990): 185-200. JSTOR. "Osamu Dazai: A Great Japanese Author with a Tragic Life." Yabai. Accessed February 18, 2022. http://yabai.com/p/3137. Seidensticker, Edward. "Recent Trends on Japanese Literature." The Oriental Economist 27 (January 1959): 34-35. Wolfe, Alan Stephen. Suicidal Narrative in Modern Japan. Princeton University Press, 1990. "World War II (1939–1945)." In Gale Encyclopedia of U.S. History: War. Vol. 2. Detroit, MI: Gale, 2008. Gale eBooks.

The Harker School | 500 Saratoga Ave., San Jose CA 95129 OofC: 4/14/22 (RM)