Chapter 7 Osamu Dazai: Cowardice and Pride

Ask God, is non-resistance a sin? —— Osamu Dazai I have nothing to say, I wish you happiness! —— Jarman (British director) Camus once said that there is only one really serious philosophical problem: suicide. The matter of death and life is also very important to a writer.Imagine a writer who dedicated his life to destroying lives, committed suicide five times from the age of twenty, and finally ended his life before the age of forty; imagine a writer who wrote all his life in an autobiographical style based on himself Memories run through the text; imagine such a writer, with mixed reputations during his lifetime, who has been remembered for nearly sixty years after his death, and even the anniversary of his death has become a festival... He is Osamu Dazai, a master of Japanese rogue school, who was in Japan with Yasunari Kawabata and Yuki Mishima Husband is tied for the pinnacle of postwar literature.

one Osamu Dazai, whose real name is Shuji Tsushima, was born in 1909 in a noble family in Kitatsugaru County, Aomori Prefecture, Japan. His father was a local important figure. He was a member of the House of Representatives and the House of Peers. Osamu Dazai, who ranks ninth in the series, was taken care of by his aunt and nanny since he was a child. The strictness of his father and the absence of his mother made Osamu Dazai small and sensitive from a young age.Osamu Dazai started to create fan publications after he was in junior high school, and since then he has decided to pursue literature as a career. In 1930, he studied at the French Department of the University of Tokyo under the tutelage of Masuji Ibushi.Osamu Dazai actively participated in the left-wing movement in college, and at the same time began to live a bohemian life. He once lived with a geisha, and became negative after graduation. During this period, he attempted to die in love four times. In 1935, Osamu Dazai made his debut in the literary world with "Dance of Harlequins". The short story "Retrograde" was also shortlisted for the Akutagawa Prize. Later, he continued to publish many collections of works, among which the late works were praised as the pyramid of post-war Japanese literature. work.

Japan has always had a tradition of "private novels". Looking at Osamu Dazai's important works, no matter short stories such as "Tokyo Eight Views", "Flower of the Clown" or novels such as "Late Years", they are all portrayals of one's own life, and there are many themes coincide.Most of them describe the road to destruction of a down-and-out protagonist, who is often a writer or painter by profession, and even the location, time, and reason of suicide often overlap with his personal experience.According to the classification of "private novels" in 1945 by Ito Takara and Hirano Ken: expressing the sense of "survival crisis" is the disillusionment type; overcoming the "existence crisis and disillusionment" is the reconciliation type.Although Osamu Dazai may not approve of "private novels" and its classification, but in terms of style, Osamu Dazai undoubtedly belongs to the former. He is powerless and unwilling to reconcile reality. This is his cowardice, and his refusal to compromise is also his pride.

two Osamu Dazai's most important novel is his posthumous work. After finishing this book, he threw himself into the water immediately. The noun "Renjian" is synonymous with "person" in Japanese and does not have the meaning of "society", so "Renjian Disqualification" means "a person who loses his qualifications to be a human being".The whole book is composed of prelude, epilogue and three letters, which is a typical Osamu Dazai-style box-set structure.The protagonist in the book, Oba Yezang, considers himself a "marginal person" by nature, so he used to actively participate in illegal Marxist associations. Later, when he committed suicide with an actress, the woman died but he was rescued, so he entered the prison for a short time on the charge of abetting murder. He became a prisoner and became a sinner; after marriage, his pure wife was tainted because of his trust, causing him to completely collapse; finally, Daba Yezang, a person who lost his qualifications as a human being, acted entirely on emotion, step by step from sickness and powerlessness to a depraved life, From indulging in drugs, buying sex, committing suicide to not understanding others at all, while fearing and abandoning the world, he was finally sent to a mental hospital.The Japanese critic Takeo Okuno said that in terms of literature, Ango Sakaguchi is his father and Osamu Dazai is his mother, so he is also a bosom friend of Osamu Dazai.He explained that "Osamu Dazai wrote only for himself, and the inner and true content is self-narrative".

In fact, no matter in troubled times or in peacetime, the biggest chaos is disillusionment in the end. "Man is born for love and revolution", this is the viewpoint of Kazuko, the protagonist of Osamu Dazai's masterpiece in his later years. After Osamu Dazai has experienced the failure of revolution and the fall of love, he cannot be cynical. Even if he is familiar with the "Bible", it is difficult to find a home .Nothingness is the only way to alleviate suffering.Nietzsche emphasized that he would rather pursue nothingness than nothing, so even if he anti-Christ, he carried out within the larger framework of Christianity. In a sense, he classified Nietzsche as a "strong" nihilist, showing that he is a strong person. But Osamu Dazai is a "weak" nihilism, manifested as a coward—the strength and weakness here are just a gesture floating above existence, and they are still the same in essence.Therefore, Osamu Dazai's novels often deliberately express a cowardly aesthetics. It is said: "Cowards are afraid of happiness, and they will be hurt when they touch cotton." Unable to bear it, the protagonist blames himself every day, "To live is the seed of evil! My misfortune is the inability to refuse the misfortune of others. Once I refuse, there will always be an irreparable white crack in the heart of the other party or myself. I was This kind of fear is intimidating. Ask God: Is it a sin not to resist?" In the end, the body and soul are annihilated together.Because of the crime of non-resistance, he lost his qualifications as a human being. This crime of non-resistance is actually pride: he refuses all forms of compromise, and expresses his position by giving up resistance. In another book, even at the end of the suicide note, the protagonist section, also write "I am an aristocrat".Unfortunately, pride is the first of the seven deadly sins.

three The rascal literature, the sound of haggard and dilapidated souls.As the name suggests, rogue literature in Japan mainly refers to expressing the double exhaustion of post-war Japan's defeated society and the spiritual and sensory world of modern people with a self-deprecating attitude. It is alienated from the mainstream and resists socialization with decadence, and modern people are caught in it The alienation that is difficult to get rid of has been repeatedly resisted, so the "rogue faction" has a profound impact on post-war Japanese literature.Osamu Dazai has a passage in "Tokyo Eight Views" that vividly expresses the helpless situation of the rascal: "I am an ignorant and proud rascal, I am also an idiot, inferior, cunning, lecherous, a fraudster pretending to be a genius, and I live a luxurious life. He threatened to commit suicide when he was short of money, scaring his relatives in the countryside. He abused his virtuous wife like cats and dogs, and finally kicked her out." "I deeply understand that the so-called warlords are not the only ones who are like beasts. The Japanese are a big problem for mankind." ("Currency") When society has become a strict organization of punishment and admonishment, the protagonists of Osamu Dazai often show strong borderline personality disorder, tired of society, Osamu Dazai The protagonist in the book or himself is often out of tune with the society, "Illegal, it's a bit fun for me. To put it more clearly, it makes me feel good. The so-called legal in the world is terrible" (); At the same time, because of being powerless to resist and tired of self, so he resisted the unified universal value with the decadence of inaction, but rational thinking and irrational behavior are constantly getting out of touch and see-saw self-blame, and finally life falls into ruin in self-destruction and exile. Reduce extinction.

The evaluation of Osamu Dazai's works is often very controversial. There are many lovers and detractors. Among them, Yukio Mishima is probably the most serious. He criticizes Osamu Dazai for being "weak" and people hate him.However, he later analyzed in the article that he hated reading Dazai's works, perhaps because he revealed his feelings that he didn't want to reveal.In fact, even if Mishima didn't say anything, some people paid attention to the internal consistency of their styles at the time. Mishima saw Osamu Dazai's uneasiness, which may be similar to seeing another me in a mirror.Or what Takeo Okuno said is the most pertinent, "Whether you like Osamu Dazai or hate him, whether you affirm him or deny him, Dazai's works always have an incredible magic power. For a long time to come, Dazai's vivid depictions They will hit the readers' souls, making it impossible for people to escape." Because there is a cowardly part in our heart, whether it is open or dark, which is silently attacked by him, and there is no way to avoid it.

Four Because Osamu Dazai committed suicide many times in his life, he disappeared before his last and fifth suicide. On June 15, the "Asahi Shimbun" also published a small news "Has Mr. Osamu Dazai gone away?" "; On June 19th, Osamu Dazai and his lover died in Tamagawa Kamishui, because this day is also his thirty-ninth birthday, so if he lives and dies on the same day in Japan, it will be called "cherry bogey" ", referring to Osamu Dazai's work "Cherry" in his later years. Kato said on Monday that suicide is very important in the Japanese view of life and death.The Japanese believe that life is like a cherry blossom, and it has a very aesthetic meaning to quickly wither at the peak of its splendor. The painter Koga Xiange directly said, "There is no higher art than death, and death is life!" Therefore, modern Japanese literati often commit suicide. For example, apart from Osamu Dazai, Toya Kitamura, Ryunosuke Akutagawa, Yasunari Kawabata, Shinichi Makino, Yukio Mishima, etc. are all in this generation.Among the writers who committed suicide, if we delve deeper into the reasons, I am afraid that apart from culture, there are too many scars cut by history.Many writers committed suicide during the Showa era, because of the turmoil and the changes from the old to the new. The Showa era was really painful for writers. The conflict between Japan’s “overcoming” and modernization in the past 100 years is even more confusing. For example, Yukio Mishima wanted to awaken the spirit of the army. In front of live TV broadcasts all over Japan, he cut open his lean abdominal muscles that he had exercised for more than ten years. This suicide act obviously has considerable externalities and is extremely political.As for Osamu Dazai, the Japanese commentator Ken Hirano said: "The death of Dazai can be said to be caused by such historical scars."As a rising writer after the war, Osamu Dazai took Showa 12 as the boundary. The changes before and after the war were enough to destroy too many things. He had great enthusiasm for the left-wing movement in college. Afterwards, the left-wing movement was suppressed and Japan was defeated. , the compromise of the left wing after the war, the disintegration of Japanese civilization, and the forced transformation of the country. Although these turbulences are not much in his novels, they are fatal to the destruction of life beliefs; Sensitivity, nervousness, aversion to family and a lifetime of financial difficulty in being away from family support, all of which eventually drove him to nothingness.

Fives As far as I can see, the works of Osamu Dazai have been published in mainland China, except for Beijing Normal University Press, which was published by Shanghai Translation Publishing House and Shandong Literature and Art Publishing House. Anniversary So New Star published the novella "Farewell" by Osamu Dazai based on Lu Xun. "Farewell" was written by Osamu Dazai at the request, commission and funding of the Japanese Cabinet Intelligence Bureau and the Japanese Literary Diet. The purpose of the latter two was naturally to serve the Great East Asian thought at that time. independent.It is a pity that this book is not highly evaluated among Dazai Osamu’s works. First, because Japan’s evaluation of Lu Xun after the war is basically Takeuchi’s good point of view, which unifies the academic circle. This book is gradually unknown.

Ogawa Yoko believes that writers must stand on the boundary between the living and the dead, and the perspective is often the dead, and Osamu Dazai is no different.But unlike other masters who look down on life from the perspective of God, Osamu Dazai’s deep gaze on the world is always affectionate, and even irony and hatred are often given warmth, so his writing style is full of affection and nostalgia. The flowers in the corner, the girl swimming naked, the running Melos, the shrubs in the garden, and the shadow of the sun on the ground are not things that he cannot appreciate.Because of cowardice, I escape from life, and because of non-resistance, pride is born in the darkest sinking. Because of pride, I don't choose life, so I reject crude optimism.Perhaps just like the ancient Greek poet Sappho he wrote: "Thinking that you can forget your thoughts by jumping off the cliff", after the soul is broken, we continue to live in the noisy singing and dancing, he chooses death, who is better, only God Know.

[日] Dazai Osamu:, translated by Li Xinxin, Asia Book Co., Ltd., October 2003. [日] Dazai Osamu: "Late Years", translated by You Xiuyue, Asia Book Co., Ltd., May 2004. [Japanese] Dazai Osamu:, translated by Shen Manwen, Asia Book Co., Ltd., September 2003. [Japanese] Dazai Osamu: "Run!"Melos", translated by Ye Wanqi, Asia Book Co., Ltd., June 2004. [日] Dazai Osamu: "Farewell", translated by Yu Xiaozhi, Xinxing Publishing House, January 2006, 24 yuan. Source: [Reading] Issue 13