This makes of poetry—true poetry—either a task that is more difficult even than sainthood, or else simply a fool’s errand altogether. There is a dignity specific to either option.

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.

They’re a potent reminder that we still live in the long, dark shadow of the twentieth century—the bargains made therein, the general Faustian demeanor accepted as a national character—and that a certain kind of serious, Modernist fiction still has a place and resonates.