It’s like entering a chaotic tunnel crowded with confessions, absurd humor, and existential pain, all at once. I can’t think of a better way to explain what my first foray into the world of Osamu Dazai (1909-1948) felt like, forcefully dragged into No Longer Human, the novel that made him a legend. It’s easy to assume this is also the starting point for many others, as it is his most celebrated work.
My journey through this fascinating world took me into everything that runs through the mind of a neurotic teenager for a single day in Schoolgirl, and along the bitter path to perdition of an aristocratic family fallen on hard times in postwar Japan in The Setting Sun. Social portraits that reveal a timeless darkness and bewilderment to the point that they still feel relevant today.
Recently, I had Retrograde in my hands, a volume of early short stories translated into English for the first time by the translator and poet Leo Elizabeth Takada, and published by One Peace Books. These pieces allow us to look from a different angle while letting us see the genesis of what Dazai’s later work would become. It’s a reverse itinerary that makes me reconsider the reading order — begin with the shock of the masterpiece, or build up with these pages that reveal the author still in the making.
Dazai: Between the Sublime and the Ridiculous
These three youthful stories show an author in active pursuit: emerging here the ironic student, the desperate young lover, and the backward glance of a nostalgia-ridden older narrator, without the heavy bitterness of his final novel. The first story, Retrograde, gives the book its title and surges as a bittersweet torrent, tracing a life in reverse from the deathbed back to the protagonist’s turbulent youth. It helped place him among the era’s literary rising stars, even though the Akutagawa Prize eluded him that time. Das Gemeine is a scathing, absurd, comically self-referential portrait of a university literature student and a well-heeled, pleasure-seeking musician. Blossom-Leaves and the Spirit Whistle recounts an old woman’s tragic memories of her younger sister, a delicate meditation on death and the beauty of the ephemeral.
Dazai’s playful touch in blending the grotesque with the intimate is one of the ways he entraps you before an uncomfortable mirror, one you can’t help but keep inspecting. His narrators brazenly mock their own failures, call themselves thieves or clowns, stumble into scrapes, and lampoon themselves with outlandish lines. Here, far from a burden, pathos becomes a humorous tool that draws uneasy laughter, and at times it disarms, revealing the beauty in the pathetic. Dazai lets us into his world and his thoughts, inviting us to laugh with him as he shamelessly lays his imperfections bare.
Rediscovering Dazai
If No Longer Human is a devastating confession, these stories work like notes that sketch his emotional universe with less weight and more irony. Here we find the seed of alienation, the clown’s mask, broken ties, and sympathy for failure. The author himself peers through the lines in Das Gemeine, parodying himself with utter irreverence; his narrator speaks in bitterness and sarcasm, while another voice seems to collapse under the burden of its own memories. These pieces expand one’s reading of his signature novel: they add shade and contour, clarify his habit of mixing life and literature, and leave the reader with the sense of having watched the author at work. By the end, the later Dazai comes into clearer view.
That’s why meeting this younger Dazai made me question the route I would have suggested otherwise. I had always seen No Longer Human as the unavoidable door: it’s his best-known work, leaving a mark through sheer ferocity. Now, after reading Retrograde, I think about what it would have meant to begin with these stories; perhaps I would have had a better understanding of his evolution, his humor, his sensibility, before approaching the depth of the abyss. Regardless, the awareness of Dazai’s own tragic end was impossible to ignore while reading, to the point that I kept recalling the underlying dread of García Márquez’s novel Chronicle of a Death Foretold.
I suggest the reader choose according to temperament: for shock, open No Longer Human at once; for a gentler approach, with room to laugh and breathe, Retrograde can serve as an ideal prelude. In any case, both readings complement each other and remain in conversation.
If you want to read more about Japanese literature, check out our Kawabata Literary Journey in Shizuoka Prefecture.
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