by Osamu Dazai
The final scene of “Memories” shows Dazai using a photograph for symbolic effect, a tactic more widely employed in his novel No Longer Human. By this stage of the game the loss of the maid Miyo should have taught the narrator a lesson about himself. In the company of his brother and putative rival, however, he seems still imprisoned by the inward nature of his outlook. Dazai concludes on a characteristic note of uncertainty: Will his narrator, that figure who represents in some measure his own youthful self, break free of his confining introspection? Or will he, as the graveyard scene and fortune-telling episode early in the narrative portend, stay trapped in his habit of self-dramatization and in his belief that he is a victim of fate?
I
I was standing by our front gate as twilight fell. My aunt was there too in a quilted wrap, the kind a nursemaid Often wears when carrying an infant strapped on her back. The road before our house had grown dim and everything was hushed. I have never forgotten that moment.
She was speaking of the emperor, and I can still remember bits and snatches of what she said—His Majesty . . . gone into seclusion . . . a true living god. Filled with wonder, I repeated certain words— A . . . true . . . god . . .
Then I must have said the wrong thing. No, my aunt scolded, you should say, Gone into seclusion. I knew exactly where the emperor had gone, but I asked about it anyway. I still remember how she laughed at that.
Emperor Meiji had been on the throne forty-two years when I was born. When he passed away, I was only three years old.
I guess it was about then that my aunt took me to visit some relatives. Their village was about five miles away, near a broad waterfall in the mountains. I remember how white the water looked against the green moss as it cascaded down the cliff. I didn’t know the man who held me on his shoulders to watch. When he showed me the votive pictures in the shrine below the falls, I became very lonely. Eventually I broke into tears and called out, “Auntie! Auntie!”
In a hollow some distance off, my relatives and my aunt had spread rugs on the ground. They were making lots of noise when I cried out, but my aunt heard and jumped up immediately. She must have slipped just then, however, for she stumbled as though making a bow. The others couldn’t resist teasing her. “Look!” they cried, “she’s already drunk.” As I watched these things occurring far down in the hollow, I felt so ashamed that I finally began screaming at the top of my lungs.
While still a child, I dreamed one evening that my aunt was going away and leaving me behind. I saw her standing in our front entranceway, totally occupying it with her bulk. Her breasts seemed large and red, and perspiration trickled down her skin. I can’t stand you, she hissed, prompting me to run over and press my cheek to her breasts. No, I begged, please don’t leave. Sobbing, I pleaded with her again and again. When my aunt shook me awake, I hugged her right there in bed and kept on crying. Even after I was fully aware, I wept quietly for a long time. Afterward I didn’t tell anyone of my dream, not even my aunt. I remember plenty of things about my aunt from those early days. But I don’t remember anyone else, even though there were surely many people in the house besides my father and mother. That’s because our family included my great-grandmother and grandmother, my three older brothers and four older sisters, and my younger brother too. Then there was my aunt and her four daughters. Except for my aunt, however, I was hardly aware of anyone. Not, at least, until I was four or five years old.
We must have had five or six tall apple trees in our big garden out back. I remember a cloudy day when some girls were climbing about in those trees. The garden had a chrysanthemum patch as well, and I vaguely recall a crowd of girls gazing at the flowers in full bloom. They were standing in the rain with umbrellas. I suppose they were sisters and cousins of mine.
From the time I was five or six years old my memories become quite definite. Around that time a maid named Také taught me how to read. She really wanted me to learn, and we read all kinds of books together. Since I was a sickly child, I often read in bed. When we ran out of books, Také would bring back an armful from places like the village Sunday school and have me read them. I learned to read silently too. That’s why I could finish one book after another without getting tired.
Také also taught me about right and wrong. Often we went to a temple where she would show me Buddhist hell paintings and explain the punishments they depicted. Sinners condemned to hell for arson carried flaming red baskets upon their backs, while those who had kept mistresses writhed in the grip of a green snake with two heads. The paintings depicted a lake of blood and a mountain of spikes, as well as a bottomless pit called “The Abyss” that gave off white smoke. Thin, pale wretches, wailing through barely opened mouths, were strewn over all these regions. Tell a lie, Také said, and you’d end up the same way—a sinner in hell with your tongue plucked out by devils. Hearing this, I screamed in terror.
The temple graveyard was on a small hill out back, with requiem posts1 clustered along the hedge-rose border. Besides the usual prayers in brush writing, each of the posts carried a dark, metal wheel. Fastened in a slot high on the post, each wheel seemed to me then about the size of the full moon. Spin the wheel once, Také explained, and if it clattered round and round and came to a stop without turning back, then you would go to heaven. But, she warned, if the wheel started back, you’d end up in hell.
Také would give a push and the wheel would spin smoothly until it slowed to a complete stop. When I tried, however, the wheel sometimes turned back. I think it was in the autumn that I went alone to the temple to test my luck. The wheels seemed to be in league with one another, for they all turned back regardless of which one I pushed. Though tired and angry, I kept myself under control and stubbornly pushed them time after time. As dusk fell, I finally gave up and left the graveyard in despair.
My parents must have been living in Tokyo about that time, and I was taken by my aunt for a visit. I’m told we were there a long while, but I don’t remember much about my stay. I do remember an old lady who came to the house every so often. I couldn’t stand her and cried each time she showed up. Once she brought along a toy postal truck painted red, but it merely bored me.
Then I started going to the village grade school, and that left me with different memories altogether. Suddenly Také was no longer around. I learned that she had gone off to marry someone from a fishing village. She left without telling me this, apparently out of fear that I might follow her. It must have been the next year that Také came to visit us during the Festival of the Dead.2 She seemed rather cold toward me, however, and when she asked how I was doing at school, I didn’t answer. I suppose someone else told her. She didn’t really compliment me. She just said, Don’t get too big for your britches.
At about the same time certain events led to my aunt’s departure as well. Having no son to carry on the family name, my aunt decided that her oldest daughter would marry a dentist who would be adopted to continue the family line. Her second daughter got married and left, while the third died while still young. Taking along her oldest daughter and the new husband, as well as her fourth daughter, my aunt established a separate branch of the family in a distant town. The move occurred in the winter, and I was to go along. As the time to leave drew near, I crouched in a corner of the sleigh next to my aunt. That’s when my next older brother came up and slapped my rump right where it pressed against the lower end of the hood. “Hey there, little bridegroom!” he sneered, thumping me time and again. Gritting my teeth, I put up with his insolence. Indeed I thought my aunt was adopting me as well as the dentist. But when school began once again, I was sent back to my village.
I ceased being a child soon after entering grade school. It was then that my younger brother’s nurse taught me something that took my breath away. It was a beautiful summer day, and the grass by the vacant house out back had grown tall and dense. I must have been about seven, and my brother’s nurse could not have been more than thirteen or fourteen. My brother was three years younger than I, a
nd the nurse shooed him off. She said, “Go get some leaf-grass”—that’s our word for clover back home. Then she added, “And make sure it’s got four leaves too.” After he left, she put her arms around me, and we started rolling around in the tall grass.
Thereafter we would play our secret little game in the storehouse or in one of the closets. My younger brother was always in our way. He even started howling one day when we left him outside the closet, an event that put my next older brother on to us. Having found out from my little brother what the trouble was, my older brother opened the closet door. The nurse did not get upset; she merely said that we were looking for a lost coin.
I was always telling fibs too. On the Girls’ Festival3 day of my second or third year in grade school, I told the teacher that my family wanted me home early to help arrange the doll display. Having lied my way out of class, I went home during the first period and told everyone school was out for the Peach Festival. My assistance wasn’t needed, but I got the dolls from their boxes all the same.
I had lots of fun collecting bird eggs too. There were always plenty of sparrow eggs right under the tiles of our storehouse roof. But starlings and crows didn’t nest there, and I had to turn to my classmates for these eggs. (The crow eggs were green and seemed to glow, while the starling eggs were covered with strange speckles.) In return for the eggs, I would hand over a bunch of my books. Wrapped in cotton, the eggs in my collection eventually filled an entire drawer of my desk.
My next older brother must have suspected something. One evening he asked to borrow two books, a volume of Western fairy tales and a work whose title I’ve forgotten. My brother did this from spite, and I hated him for it. The books were gone, for I had traded them both for eggs. If I admitted this, my brother would have gone to reclaim them. So I told him the books were around somewhere and I would look for them. Lamp in hand, I searched my own room and then went all over the house. My broths laughed as he followed me about. He kept saying, They’re not here, are they? And I kept insisting, They are too. I even climbed up to the highest kitchen shelf for a look. Finally my brother told me to forget it.
The compositions I wrote for school were mostly hokum. I tried to portray myself as a model boy, for I believed people would applaud me for that. I even plagiarized. The essay entitled “My Younger Brother’s Silhouette” was a masterpiece according to my teacher, but I actually lifted it word for word from a selection of prize stories in a magazine for youngsters. The teacher had me make a clean copy with a brush and enter the work in a contest. When a bookish classmate found out what I had done, I prayed that he would die.
“Autumn Evening,” composed about the same time, was also praised by my teacher. I began this sketch by mentioning a headache I got from studying, and then went on to describe how I went out on the veranda and looked at the garden. I gazed entranced upon the quiet scene, the moon shining brightly, the goldfish and the carp swimming about in the pond. When a burst of laughter came from a nearby room where my mother and some other people were gathered, I snapped out of the reverie and my headache was suddenly gone—that’s how the sketch ended.
There wasn’t a word of truth to this. I took the description of the garden from my older sister’s composition notebook. Above all, I don’t remember studying enough to get a headache. I hated school and never read a textbook. I only read entertaining books. My family thought I was studying as long as I was reading something or other.
But when I put down the truth, things always went wrong. When I wrote that Father and Mother didn’t love me, the assistant disciplinarian called me into the teachers’ room for a scolding. Assigned the topic, “What If a War Breaks Out?” I wrote how frightening war could be—worse even than an earthquake, lightning, fire, or one’s own father.4 That’s why I said that I would flee to the hills, at the same time urging my teacher to join me. After all, my teacher was only human, and war would scare him just like it would me.
This time the assistant disciplinarian and the school principal both questioned me. When asked what prompted these words, I took a gamble and said I was only joking. The assistant disciplinarian made a note in his book—Full of mischief! Then a brief battle of wits ensued between the two of us. Did I believe, he asked, that all men were equal? After all, the assistant disciplinarian went on, I had written that my teacher was only human too. I hesitated before replying that, Yes, I thought so. Really, I was slow with my tongue.
If, the assistant disciplinarian continued, he himself was equal to the principal, why didn’t they get the same salary? I thought about that awhile and said, Isn’t it because your work is different?
His thin face set off by the wire frames of his spectacles, the assistant disciplinarian immediately recorded my answer in his book. And then this man whom I had long admired asked whether or not he and I were equal to my own father. That one I just couldn’t answer.
A busy man, my father was seldom at home. Even when he was, he usually didn’t bother about his children. I once wanted a fountain pen like his, but was too afraid to ask for one. After wrestling with the problem, I fell back on pretending to talk in my sleep. Lying in bed one evening, I kept murmuring, Fountain pen ... fountain pen ... Father was talking with a guest in the next room, and my words were meant for him. Needless to say, they never reached his ear, let alone his heart.
Once my younger brother and I were playing in the large family storehouse piled high with sacks of rice when Father planted himself in the doorway and shouted, Get out of here! Get out, you monkeys! With the sunlight at his back, father loomed there like a dark shadow. My stomach turns even yet when I recall how frightened I was.
I didn’t feel close to Mother, either. I was first raised by a nursemaid, then by my aunt. Until the second or third year of grade school, I didn’t really get to know my mother. Some years later, as she lay in her bedding next to mine, Mother noticed how my blanket was moving about. What was I up to? she asked suspiciously. Well, two of the manservants had taught me something, and Mother’s question put me on the spot. I managed to say that my hip was sore, however, and that I was rubbing it. You needn’t be so rough about it, Mother replied. Her voice sounded drowsy. I massaged my hip awhile, without saying anything.
My memories of Mother are mostly dismal ones. There was the time I got my older brother’s suit from the storehouse and put it on. Then, strolling among the flower beds in the garden out back, I hummed a mournful tune that I had made up and then shed a few tears besides. Suddenly I felt that, while wearing this particular outfit, I might try fooling around with the student who did our household accounts. So I sent a maid to call him. He didn’t come, though, even though I waited a long time. In my anxiety I ran the tip of my shoe along the bamboo fence. Finally my patience gave way and, with both fists thrust into my pockets, I let out a wail. When Mother found me, she got me out of that suit and, for some reason or other, gave me a good spanking. I felt utterly ashamed.
Even as a child I wanted to be well dressed. My shirts had to be made of white flannel, and I wouldn’t even wear one unless it had buttons on the cuffs. My undershirt collar must be white too, for I let it show an inch or two above my shirt collar. During the Full Moon Festival5 the students in the village all dressed up in their Sunday best for school. I always chose my flannel kimono with the wide brown stripes for this occasion. Arriving at school, I would glide along the corridor with tiny steps, just like a girl. I made sure no one was around, since I didn’t want people knowing what a fop I was.
Everyone kept saying that I was the ugliest boy in the family. And if they had known how fussy I was about clothes, they would surely have had a good laugh at my expense. I pretended not to care about my appearance, and this seemed to do the trick. I gave the impression of being dull and uncouth, no doubt about it. At mealtime my brothers and I sat on the floor, a tray before each of us. Grandmother and Mother were also present. It was awful hearing them remark over and over how ugly I was.
Actually I was quite proud o
f myself. I’d go down to the maids’ quarters and ask offhandedly who was the best boy in the family. The girls usually said that my oldest brother was. Then they added that Shūcha—that’s me—was second best. I resented being second, but blushed to hear it all the same. Indeed, I wanted them to say I was better than my oldest brother.
It wasn’t just my looks that displeased Grand-mother. I was clumsy as well. At every meal she cautioned me about holding my chopsticks properly. She even said that the way I bowed made my rump stick out indecently. I had to sit properly in front of her and make one bow after another. No matter how often I tried, she never once complimented me.
Grandmother was a headache for me in other ways too. When a theater troupe came from Tokyo to celebrate the opening of our village playhouse, I went to every performance without fail. My father had built the playhouse, so I always had a good seat for nothing. Each day when I got home from school, I hurriedly changed into a soft kimono. Then I ran off to the playhouse, a narrow chain dangling from my sash with a pencil attached to the end. That’s how I first got to know about Kabuki. While watching the performances, I would shed one tear after another.
Even before this time I had been something of a performer myself. I really enjoyed calling the manservants and maids together and telling old stories or else showing films and slides. After the Tokyo troupe had left, I rounded up my younger brother and my cousins to put on my own show. I arranged three Kyogen pieces for the program—Yamanaka Shikanosuke, The House of the Dove, and a comic dance known as Kappore. The first had a teahouse scene set in a valley, during which Shikanosuke gains a follower named Hayakawa Ayunosuke. Adapting the scene from a text in a young peoples’ magazine, I took infinite pains to cast the words in Kabuki rhythms: “Your humble servant/A man known to the world as/Shikanosuke.” From The House of the Dove, a long novel that I had read over and over (and never without crying), I selected an especially pathetic section to render as a two-act play. Since the Tokyo troupe always ended its program with the entire cast performing Kappore, I decided to include the dance as well.