To Be Modern: On Osamu Dazai’s “The Flowers of Buffoonery”
Osamu Dazai, transl. from the Japanese by Sam Bett | The Flowers of Buffoonery | New Directions Publishing | March 2023 | 80 Pages
Osamu Dazai scoured Japanese society for an antidote to the collapse of the empire and its morality. He found only abject alienation, and depicted this in his best-known novels The Setting Sun (1947) and No Longer Human (1948). Given Dazai’s leitmotifs of suicide, masculinity, addiction, and the relationship between art and politics, it is unsuprising that his work is the subject of renewed interest in the Anglophone world (No Longer Human emerged last year as a trend on BookTok). This year, in concert with that resurgence, Dazai’s heretofore obscure novella The Flowers of Buffoonery (1935) is finally available in English translation. The collection of vignettes, which shares a narrator with No Longer Human, contains the first traces of Dazai’s distinct approach to fiction. The narrator is endearing, uneven, and darkly humorous. As an early artifact in Dazai’s oeuvre, Flowers raises compelling questions about his work, a descendant of the I-novel and precursor to autofiction, as well as his heterodox politics, which blurred the line between revolutionary and reactionary.
Dazai was born in 1909 as Shūji Tsushima, the tenth of eleven children. His maternal relatives were wealthy landowners in Kanagi, a remote village at the northern tip of Honshu, Japan’s largest island. With his mother frequently ill and his father serving in the House of Peers, a position secured by virtue of his marriage, Dazai was raised by servants and aunts in the Tsushima family mansion, where he lived with nearly thirty relatives. In boarding school, the young author was known for his prodigious intellect, erratic behavior, and journalistic involvement in a successful student strike. By the time he enrolled in Tokyo Imperial University’s French Literature Department at the age of twenty, he had already made his first of four suicide attempts.
The Setting Sun, Dazai’s best-known novel, is narrated by Kazuko, a young woman from a declining aristocratic family modeled after one of the author’s mistresses. Published just a year later, No Longer Human became Dazai’s most popular work outside of Japan, establishing his reputation as a literary sadboi. The semi-autobiographical novel is narrated by the charming degenerate Yozo Ōba, who shares Dazai’s lifelong vices: “drink, cigarettes, prostitutes, pawnshops, and left-wing thought.” Primarily composed of three journal written by Ōba, No Longer Human is bookended by brief statements from a man who inherited the journals from Ōba’s former lover. This framing is one of several devices that elevate the journals’ debaucherous accounts into more than the sum of their parts. As Dazai’s original translator, Donald Keene, writes, “Even if each scene of No Longer Human were the exact reproduction of an incident from Dazai’s life—of course this is not the case—his technique would qualify the whole of the work as one of original fiction.”
The Flowers of Buffoonery is based on a particularly formative incident from Dazai’s life. After his first year at Tokyo University, expelled for his failure to attend a single class, Dazai attempted suicide for a second time, leaping into the ocean with the nineteen-year-old who inspired the custodian of Ōba’s notebooks in No Longer Human. She drowned, but Dazai was rescued by a fishing boat. While Dazai’s family had recently disowned him for running away with a geisha, charges stemming from the incident threatened his brother Bunji’s political career, inclining their father to intervene. As part of the agreement, Dazai was to recover at a nearby sanatorium. Flowers chronicles his ensuing seaside convalescence.
Compared to Dazai’s postwar writing, Flowers is amateurish. The book has no plot—only exaggerated literary pretensions. Hida, a “no-name sculptor” and friend from middle school, and Kosuge, a relative studying law, come to stay with Ōba at the sanitorium. The majority of the action involves the three friends joking and playing cards. Occasionally Ōba receives less amicable visitors, including nurses, police officers, and the straight-laced Bunji. In between these short scenes are self-deprecating digressions on art, suicide, and narrative point of view: “I’ve been exploiting my narrative position to hoodwink readers,” Ōba confesses midway through the novella. He oscillates between calling the book a masterpiece and a hack job, a metajoke rumored to have been inspired by the work of André Gide.
Reversing the usual expectation of youth, Flowers has a softer edge than Dazai’s later work, both in its politics and its humor, but these quiet scenes of recovery are full of subtle psychological insight. While the metafictional asides become tediously hokey, there is an aching tenderness in Ōba’s descriptions of his relationship with Hida and Kosuge: “One might say that these two friends were not actually artists, so much as works of art,” Ōba says. When the nurse checks in on them they literally “strike a pose.” Ōba’s self-awareness extends to his friends: “to them, laughing was safe, but not laughing posed a serious risk . . . even as they doubled over, they took notice of the way they looked to one another.”
Dazai masterfully depicts the insecurity and bravado of these young men. The first time Kosuge dares to ask Ōba why he wanted to die, he lists for the reader the dozen fierce emotions he feels (“Haughtiness. Sloth. Flattery. Guile. Vice. Fatigue. Ferocity.”) before bottling them up and playing “the role of the heartsick man,” continuing with pitch-perfect ambivalence: “To be honest, I don’t know myself. Feels like everything’s to blame.” Near the end of the book the boys hike to the cliff where Ōba jumped, and for once they are silent.
This self-contained story offers a different pleasure than the unhinged men in Dazai’s later work, offering emotional realism that isn’t undercut by depraved humor or veiled social commentary. For most of The Flowers of Buffoonery, these friends desperately jab back and forth without saying much of substance. By limiting the scope of the story to a few friends chatting in a sanatorium, this prequel achieves depths sometimes absent in No Longer Human. To use today’s critical buzzwords, the depressed, overeducated boys of Flowers are representative of and relatable to readers in a way the true incel or madman is not.
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In his translator’s introduction to No Longer Human, Donald Keene responds to the curious critique that Dazai’s sensibility is too Western for a Japanese writer: “If, however, we do not wish to resemble the Frenchman who finds the detective story the only worthwhile part of American literature, we must also be willing to read Japanese novels in which a modern (by modern I mean Western) intelligence is at work.” A load-bearing parenthetical at any time, Keene was writing in 1958, thirteen years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki and seven years after the Treaty of San Francisco ended the Allied occupation of Japan. As the critic Jun Etō lamented in a 1964 essay on the Western tendency in Japanese fiction, even literature departments at Japanese universities once considered modernization and Westernization synonymous. Either way, what does it mean to say that a sensibility is Western? Reading Dazai’s work, the first adjective that comes to mind is suicidal. A charitable interpretation is that Keene intended “modern” as Dazai surely meant it: in a derogatory sense.
At the turn of the twentieth century, as Japanese politics retreated into nationalistic fervor, Japanese writers took inspiration from Western ideas of individualism. The early Meiji era of the mid-1800s first opened the dialogue between Japanese artists and their Western counterparts, heralding a departure from the highly stylized Kabuki influence in Japanese fiction, with its stock characters and traditional morality. A favorite topic of critics was the transmutation of European naturalism into the Japanese I-novel: the emergence of the first-person novel, then, was a Western import. In Flowers of Buffoonery, Ōba is “arrogant enough to think that [he] could be the first Japanese author to employ such a sublimely Western style.” Actually, it was as early as 1907 when Katai Tayama and Tōshon Shimazaki pioneered the I-novel, a genre characterized by introspective works wherein the author closely resembles the first-person narrator. The movement was also called Japanese naturalism, and its works dramatized the struggle of an individual against societal expectations.
The Japanese I-novel was often treated by Western critics as entirely subjective. As Etō writes, in contrast to the Baudelarian struggle of man versus society, foundational works such as Shimazaki’s The Broken Commandment and Katai’s Futon were discussed as if the author’s “sensibility or passion is the main point.” Thus, we end up in a peculiar situation: for allowing his first-person narrators to situate themselves acutely in history, avatars for the changing morality of postwar Japan, Dazai is deemed Western. Keene’s meaning becomes clear: Dazai’s modernity comes from his point of view. Yet Dazai’s life and fiction were marked by their vicious opposition to the modern world: “Just as a writer of great moral concern like Dostoevsky could be fascinated with things immoral and morbid,” Etō states, “so a Japanese writer can be interested in things Western and at the same time be critical of the West.” This was certainly true of Jun’ichiro Tanizaki, a contemporary of Dazai’s whose early fiction was reprimanded by Japanese critics for his Western fascination despite its evident disdain for cultural homogenization. The modernization of Japan heralded an acute sense of crisis that persisted long after the official occupation, a spiritual and generational upheaval that served as the backdrop for Dazai’s life and work.
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Soon after his convalescence, fictionally documented in Flowers of Buffoonery, Dazai was arrested for his involvement in the Japanese Communist Party. He lived in hiding for nearly two years before he was found by his brother Bunji. Dazai agreed to turn himself in and renounce all Party activities in exchange for a reinstatement of his allowance. Soon after he published The Flowers of Buffoonery, which betrays glimpses of Dazai’s heterodox politics, a Marxism of the head but not the heart: “I was working for the left. Handing out leaflets, staging demonstrations, all kinds of things I wasn’t cut out to do. It was absurd. . . . What kept me going was this fantasy of being some kind of an enlightened person.” In No Longer Human, Ōba’s college pal Horiki drags him to a secret Communist meeting. Listening to the lecture on Marxian economics, Ōba has mixed feelings: “Everything he said seemed exceedingly obvious, and undoubtedly true, but I felt sure that something more obscure, more frightening lurked in the hearts of human beings . . . something inexplicable at the bottom of human society which was not reducible to economics.” Far from being turned off by the absurdity of his “comrades,” he finds their irrationality “faintly pleasurable” and continues to attend the meetings, playing the clown the same way he did for his schoolmates.
Reading Dazai’s slim, ironic, plot-averse novels, I couldn’t help but notice parallels with the current popularity of so-called “alt-lit.” Dazai’s quotable emo clichés, simple grammar, and disillusioned twenty-something characters would be at home in anti-establishment magazines like Forever, Hobart, and Tao Lin’s Muumuu House, themselves indebted to Giancarlo DiTrapano’s Tyrant Books and his affection for first-person narrators and Lishian sentences. As Donald Keene wrote of No Longer Human, “There is nothing of the meandering reminiscer about Dazai; with him all is sharp, brief, and evocative.” The resemblance is not merely stylistic. Though he died long before the public fascination with Lee Harvey Oswald or the Unabomber, Dazai’s sensibility was ahead of its time: the post-modern, self-pitying zealot, a character recognizable from Scorsese’s Taxi Driver or a Houellebecq novel. Never mind his well-connected family and relative safety during the war; Dazai’s narrators are “victims of a transitional period of morality,” as Kazuko mourns in a letter to her beloved.
Dazai’s ironically detached politics recall a defining image of recent American political theater: future Red Scare host and inveterate poster Dasha Nekrasova in a blue and white sailor suit, sipping iced coffee through a plastic straw and compulsively checking her phone, telling an interviewer from Alex Jones’ InfoWars that she “just wants people to have healthcare, honey.” She can hardly contain her laughter at the idea that free healthcare has anything to do with people allegedly eating rats in Venezuela, just as Ōba finds the self-serious debates of his comrades “uproariously amusing.” Dasha and Ōba are both actors, after all, “striking a pose,” and Dazai’s aristocratic upbringing prevented him from ever feeling at ease in the workers’ movement. “It is true that I dread poverty, but I do not believe I ever have despised it,” Ōba says upon seeing the squalid apartment Horiki shares with his mother.
Divorced and living with her ailing mother in a house they can no longer afford, The Setting Sun’s Kazuko encounters a line in her brother’s notebook: “I wonder if there is anyone who is not depraved.” The words make her feel depraved herself. “Perhaps by depravity he actually meant tenderness,” she muses, and with this her ideological transformation is complete. To borrow a term from Dasha’s reply guys, she is blackpilled. In a common thread between The Setting Sun and No Longer Human, the blackpill lends no clarity, only confusion. Kazuko lives with “the feeling that the actual world was an unfamiliar organism utterly unlike the world of my imagination,” while Ōba laments that “the manner of speech of everybody in the world held strange, elusive complexities.” Yet if the source of this confusion is undefined, it is because Dazai’s characters only subscribe to the first half of the trad’s mantra: they reject modernity, but they do not embrace tradition. The best Kazuko can say of her mother’s generation is that they’re “the last of those who can end their lives beautifully and sadly . . . in the world to come, there will be no room for such people.”
To be modern is not merely to be Western, but to be detached from feeling, and if Dazai was misanthropic, then he was no more so than the society he wrote against. Early in The Flowers of Buffoonery, Ōba explains his populist philosophy of art to Hida, telling him that “a painting is a glorified poster . . . even the greatest masterpiece is no more than a commodity, just like a pair of socks.” Soon after he offers something like an aesthetic mantra: “beautiful feelings make bad literature.” But Dazai openly ridicules his alter ego’s “vague generalizations,” and his political commitments in the context of a momentous period in Japanese history make clear that he did not hold detachment in high regard. Describing Kosuge’s manner of friendship, Ōba says that “his fondness was that of a bystander . . . once he found himself rolling his eyes, he took a step back and watched him from the sidelines. One might say that Kosuge was more modern than Yozo or Hida.”
Far from unfeeling, Dazai’s work betrays a desperate urgency. In No Longer Human, it was that of a last will and testament; Dazai died by suicide shortly after the book was published, at the crest of his popularity. He writes in that book of painters he admired as a boy, who “plainly saw monsters in broad daylight, in the midst of nature, and they did not fob people off with clowning; they did their best to depict these monsters just as they had appeared.” This is what Dazai achieved in his fiction, and while Ōba is frequently monstrous, he is never only that. Near the end of No Longer Human, Ōba reflects on his life with religious earnestness: “God, I ask you, is non-resistance a sin?” His characters may call themselves victims, but Dazai sees things differently. “He was an angel,” begins the epilogue to Ōba’s depraved notebooks, and if Ōba weren’t already dead he might have used the word Dazai chooses for the three young men in The Flowers of Buffoonery: “I’ll just say it, they’re my heroes.”