mtime: 2023-09-12
N.B.: There are spoilers ahead! Read ahead only if you know for sure you don’t intend on reading these stories or if you’ve already read them!
I’ve known about Junji Ito for a while and I’ve been interested in his No Longer Human manga. I’ve found the manga in one local bookshop the other day and it prompted me to research the manga a bit more. I found out it’s an adaptation of a short novel by a Japanese author called Osamu Dazai. Dazai (that’s only his pseudonym) had lived a crazy life and the wikipedia page about him is a wild ride, I recommend reading it.
Anyway, this is how I became curious about Dazai, and I’ll probably be reading his work for a short while now.
The first work by him that I chose to read is a short anthology of short stories from the title of this post. You don’t have to read ahead if you’re looking for a recommendation, I can recommend it already. There are much worse ways you could spend an hour.
The six short stories included in the anthology are:
All but the last story were written while Dazai was in high school. So, there is a decent time span between the writing of the first five and the last story, but some themes and motives repeat through all of the stories.
His older brother was weaker than him, and now he stood there biting back tears after losing to his younger brother. Seiji began to feel a contempt akin to despair. His sorrow kept deepening. What a useless brother.
This is the first and maybe the shortest story in this anthology, written when author was 16 and first published in October 1925. The protagonist, Seiji, is a young boy, and the story is about his two sumo fights with his older brother and his internal monologue and experience surrounding those two fights.
He wins the first fight, and after a short period of enjoying it, he starts feeling disgusted at his brother’s uselessness. He wishes he had a brother who could beat him at a sumo fight at any time. He decides that his brother can’t get any stronger, but he himself can become ‘weaker’. He decides to challenge his brother to another fight and to throw that fight.
He does so, but as he loses the second sumo fight, his and his brother’s friends start making fun of Seiji for losing, taunting him. He regrets having lost this fight. He wishes he had a brother he could rely on.
After everyone leaves, Seiji’s best friend, Shin, approaches him and asks him if he threw the last match. Seiji cheers up, glad that someone understands him, but then his friend asks him why he threw the match, and Seiji returns to sulking.
So, yeah, Seiji feels misunderstood and unhappy with both his successes and failures. His success is marred by his brother not being a good enough fighter to provide a good challenge, and his brother’s victory is marred by Seiji throwing the fight. It’s a very short, odd, and likeable story.
Seiji’s cold, shivering fingertips had turned a dreadful blue, but he was so worried that he didn’t notice at all. Actually, he wasn’t worried: he was scared.
This story is supposed to be a sequel to the previous one. It was published a month after the Sumo (1925-11).
I won’t write the synopsis of this story, there isn’t much plot in it, it’s more about Seiji’s experience.
This story is a bit harder to understand for me. There are themes of fear, regret, shame, justice… The thing that I like about this story is that Seiji experiences such intense emotions, even though they all end up being unjustified in the end. He is tortured more by his imagination and assumptions than in reality. The reality stops his suffering in the end, he’s absolved of the fault he thought was his, even though he’d already taken responsibility for the wrong that’d happened; and he doesn’t seem to mind taking responsibility for things he hadn’t done, as long as he knows he hadn’t done them.
But there was something else to Keiju, something even more significant that not even Taemon had caught onto; Keiju had a massively inflated ego. He was the textbook definition of an egoist.
This story seems to be quite different from the others. It’s similar in the strangeness of the protagonist, but there doesn’t seem to be the thread of shame and self-doubt in this protagonist, rather he’s distinguished by a seeming lack of both.
Keiju had been rejected by all other than his teacher in acupuncture, Taemon, who seemed to have an appreciation for Keiju’s attributes everyone else despised him for.
Taemon grows old and sickly, and Keiju does all he can to help him and get him better, all out of pure self-interest.
Keiju at some point suggests going to a hot spring, and Taemon takes his advice. One night, the resort catches on fire and both characters die, Keiju in his effort to save Taemon… The day after, a newspaper seller is yelling out the events of the tragedy, and mentioning a kind soul that died trying to save his master.
The way I am understanding this story is that it’s questioning sincere altruism. It’s demonstrating the rift between the reality and the propagated narrative. It’s a very cynical story, the thought isn’t too original, but the way it’s conveyed is pretty good.
I was 18 at the time. My mother had come to visit the boarding house where I was staying. I hadn’t seen her in 10 years.
This story is about a young man getting visited by his mom. The visit is unannounced, and he’s struck by some panicked thoughts as his landlord calls for him to come downstairs and meet his mum, who’s in a rush and has to catch a train at 5.
He thinks about what he’s supposed to think of her. He starts heading downstairs, but he catches a reflection of himself in a large mirror and notices he looks horrendous, so he starts thinking about what his mother might think of him. He’s very unsatisfied with his reflection, he describes himself as a man ‘With a heavy slump and this hideous little face… This rather grotesque version of a man…’
So he decides to barge into a neighboring room of a teacher who isn’t at the house at that moment, to try putting on her makeup. He frantically and clumsily puts the powder all over his face, unsatisfied with the result, he puts on blush as well, but it doesn’t improve anything. His landlord tells him to hurry up, but he’s indecisive about putting on lipstick. He finally decides not to put on lipstick and starts running downstairs, only to find out his mother had just left. Coming back up the stairs, he catches his reflection in the same mirror from before and starts crying.
This story is short and pretty weird. The discomfort of meeting someone supposedly important to you after not seeing them for such a long time is easy to understand, but the way the protagonist acts isn’t. His shame about the reality, his inability to live up to the standards he imagines his mother would have for him, seems to confine his actions to something that seems crazy.
Again, the theme might not be that original, it’s a story about fear and shame getting in the way of life, but the way it’s told is pretty original.
The hint of whiteness in the evening showed that the moon was out. The leaves of plants wet from the evening dew twinkled pale in its light.
Insects chirped.
And Shagen lost all sense of hope in life.
This is the longest story in this collection, it’s around 8 pages long. It’s about Shagen, Lord of Shuri, from the kingdom of Ryukyus. I’ll attempt to keep the synopsis of this story short.
Shagen is celebrating his conquest of Ishigaki island, forgetting 5 years of battles and ‘three horrific defeats’ at least for one night.
Two Dutch men who’ve been saved by Shagen after their ship sunk years before come to the celebration with a gift. Shagen unpacks the gift and finds it’s a map of the world. The only thing he’s interested in is where his country is on the map. The Dutchmen tell him it’s not on the map; drunk and insulted, Shagen lashes out by swinging his sword and ends up decapitating both of the foreigners.
After that, Shagen became bitter and cruel. His subjects feared and despised him. He started hunting people of the Ishigaki island. His prime minister, Kakuko, committed seppuku. The people of the island feared and hated the king, they assumed he’d become vain and arrogant, and that this was the reason for the way he tortured them.
The story ends with the army of Ishigaki invading Shuri in revenge, and Shagen just abandoning the island in a small boat never to be seen again. Eventually, the map of the world gets discovered by Ishigaki King’s officer. ‘The King of Ishigaki thought it unusual and kept it.’
Alright, so that’s the whole story, in short. My first comment is that there’s a similar feeling of the protagonist to the one from Sumo. Here’s the beginning of the paragraph after the first quote I’ve shared from this story:
He was stunned at the utter uselessness of his own power that took five years to subdue a small island that does not even appear on the map. He felt ultimate loneliness in this moment when his own power brought him nothing but disgust. He wept aloud.
The protagonist here is unable to enjoy his own victory because he feels the challenge he’d surmounted is insignificant. This is in a way an irresolvable conflict, and he chooses to succumb to his bitterness and inflict it on the outside world.
Somewhat tangential, when looking up the names from this story, I found Gerard van Schagen. He was a famous cartographer from Amsterdam, but he lived from 1642 til 1724, and this story is supposed to have taken place in 1614. So, a map of his couldn’t have reached Japan nearly 30 years before he was born, but Dazai might’ve named his protagonist after this famous cartographer.
I am a one-hundred-yen note, serial number 77851. Take a look at the one-hundred-yen note in your wallet because maybe it is me.
This story was published in 1946, so about 20 years after most of the other stories in this collection. It’s the best story in the collection, at least in my estimation. I won’t write the synopsis here, I’d prefer if you read it yourself. But, I’ll write a couple of comments here.
First, as you’ve noticed from the picked out quote (it’s the introduction of the story), the protagonist of this story is a one-hundred-yet note. So, another unconventional protagonist with another unconventional perspective.
The story is told retrospectively, a similarity shared with Keiji the Acupuncturist (not something I mentioned in my notes on that story, sorry). The note tells us the stories of the people who’d traded it for goods, so it’s a small anthology of short stories in itself.
Even though I wouldn’t call Dazai’s writing optimistic, this story seems to be optimistic. The note, even though she witnesses the ugliest parts of humanity, also witnesses some of the best, and chooses to remember them.
This short collection of short stories really is short, you can read it in under an hour. I recommend reading every story at least twice, though. Dazai obviously showed promise as a writer from a young age, and the brevity of these stories shouldn’t be taken as a sign of their lack of substance. Additionally, the intentional strangeness of the protagonists of these stories requires more ‘work’ for understanding. I was honestly confused after my first reading, and I think I’ve managed to make some sense out of them after re-reading the stories with the intention of understanding the protagonists.
I definitely like these stories, though. My intention is to read Dazai’s A Shameful Life next. Short story writing is a completely different beast from longer forms (PKD wrote about the different challenges and approaches with regards to this), so I’m looking forward to finding out how an older Dazai writes longer stories.
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