A Shameful Life

by Osamu Dazai

  It is here that the central irony of the text reveals itself. On the one hand, A Shameful Life is a novel that begs, if not demands, that the reader make the obvious connections leading from Yōzō to Dazai and thence to Shūji. Through his journals, Yōzō ostensibly provides the reader with an unfiltered, utterly candid window into his mind, a view that he says he has assiduously concealed from anyone and everyone throughout his life. The authenticity and immediacy of the narrative is emphasized further by the structure of the novel. That is, it is “framed” as three private journals that were sent, anonymously, to an acquaintance. It is only after they are handed to a writer that they are put before the public. Thus, not only were they not written for public display, the mediator—the writer who publishes them—makes a point of stating that he has not in any way altered the journals, further emphasizing their authenticity.

  Yet, even as the novel presents itself as an unmediated window into the mind of Yōzō, and by extension Dazai and Shūji, it actively undermines that narrative. The journals themselves, after all, tell us time and again that the protagonist is “incapable of telling a single word of truth.” This message is reinforced throughout the novel. Yōzō has, he tells us, “no faith whatsoever in the language of human beings.” He believes that all people, himself included, “spend their entire lives deceiving and lying to one another.” Yōzō’s writings are portrayed as “nothing more than a simple form of clowning,” and his cartoons—his primary artistic vehicle, just as writing is Dazai’s—are simply a way to earn enough money to buy booze and cigarettes. The only “true” art he has created and the only “true” depictions of himself are located in his “monster paintings”—concealed from all but the halfwit Takeichi and paintings that, before long, are lost even to himself.

  What are we to believe? It is akin to the Liar’s Paradox. Do we believe that Yōzō is, as he says, incapable of telling the truth? Or do we believe that the journal (in which he says that he is incapable of telling the truth) is true? Or is he only telling the truth to the intended reader, presumably the Madam of the Kyōbashi bar, since that is the person he sent the journals to—and not to anyone else? Yet the novel, unlike the journals, is not private correspondence or an extended diary. It is, quite clearly, written for public consumption. It is just as clearly intended to allude to, if not directly chronicle, elements of Dazai’s life and, through them, events in Shūji’s life. Is it still, at this point, an unmediated window into the author’s mind? Or has it become yet another mask?

  Yōzō says that he was “. . . ignored when I was serious and only when I was clowning and deceiving . . . did my words seem to carry a ring of truth.” Perhaps his words, in this context at least, are true. His words are certainly ignored by the Madam of the Kyōbashi bar. Despite having read the journals, she dismisses them out of hand. “It was all his father’s fault,” she claims. The Yōzō she knew, she says, “was an angel.”

  As readers, we risk falling into a similar trap. We risk seeing only half of the novel, just as the Madam has only seen half of Yōzō. We risk seeing in this novel the story of Dazai Osamu and, through him, the story of Tsushima Shūji. We risk looking for answers to such questions as why Tsushima Shūji committed suicide with Yamazaki Tomie. Yet in doing so we also ignore the overarching message of the novel. The impossibility of knowing another. That is, the impossibility of understanding and the impossibility of being understood.

  Tsushima Shūji’s suicide, coming so soon after completion of the manuscript and in a manner so similar to one described in the novel, cannot but have had a tremendous impact on the work’s reception. It would have been all but impossible for people at the time to read the work without searching for clues or insights into the mind of Tsushima Shūji. Of course, it is this very same suicide that also made it impossible for the mind of Tsushima Shūji to ever be known. Here, too, then, are echoes of Yōzō and his journals. Both novel and journals are delivered to the reader only after the author had been irrevocably removed from the stage, making it impossible for us ever to know for certain where the truth lies. Perhaps this is the source of the novel’s enduring appeal. Caught like the kite entangled in the wires outside of Shizuko’s apartment, both Yōzō and the novel twist and writhe, trapped between the terror and desire of being understood, between the need to confess and the irresistible impulse to lie.

  1 Edward Fowler, The Rhetoric of Confession: Shishōsetsu in Early Twentieth Century Japanese Fiction (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988), xvi.

  2 Nakamura Murao makes this claim in his 1924 essay, “Honkaku shōsetsu to shinkyō shōsetsu to.” Cited in Ogasawara Masaru, “Honkaku shōsetsu,” in Nihon kindai bungaku jiten, ed. Odagiri Susumu (Tokyo: Kodansha, 1977), 4:486.

  3 Nakamura Murao, “Honkaku shōsetsu to shinkyō shōsetsu to,” cited in Tomi Suzuki, Narrating the Self: Fictions of Japanese Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 49.

  4 Ibid., 49.

  5 Fowler, The Rhetoric of Confession, xviii.

  6 Ogasawara Masaru, “Shinkyō shōsetsu,” in Nihon kindai bungaku jiten, ed. Odagiri Susumu (Tokyo: Kodansha, 1977), 4:223.

  7 Cited in Ino Kenji, “Watakushi shōsetsu,” Nihon kindai bungaku jiten, ed. Odagiri Susumu (Tokyo: Kodansha, 1977), 4:540.

  8 Phyllis Lyons, The Saga of Dazai Osamu: A Critical Study with Translations (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1985), 82.

  9 Cited in Matthew Fraleigh, “Terms of Understanding: The Shōsetsu According to Tayama Katai,” Monumenta Nipponica 58, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 46.

  10 Lyons, The Saga of Dazai Osamu, 79.

  11 Ibid., 81.

  12 Usui Yoshimi, “Dazai Osamu,” in Nihon kindai bungaku jiten, ed. Odagiri Susumu (Tokyo: Kodansha, 1977), 2:331.

  13 Cited in Lyons, The Saga of Dazai Osamu, 32.

  14 John Dower, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999), 88–89.

  15 Usui Yoshimi, “Dazai Osamu,” 2:332.

  16 Lyons, The Saga of Dazai Osamu, 186.

  NOTE ON THE CURRENT TRANSLATION

  Why? That was the first question asked when I proposed a new English-language translation of Osamu Dazai’s masterpiece, Ningen shikkaku. After all, Donald Keene translated the novel (published under the title No Longer Human) over fifty years ago. It is still in print, and it sells well. Keene is, indisputably, one of the most important translators of Japanese literature into English, and this new translation is certainly not intended as a criticism of his work. In a way it is a product of Keene’s work, as it is through Keene’s translations that I first came to know, and eventually to love, Japanese literature. For that I owe him and the other incredibly prolific translators of his generation a tremendous debt. I am very cognizant of this debt.

  Despite the obviousness of the question, the first time I was asked, “Why?” I had to struggle for an answer. This translation was not so much as planned as it was a somewhat self-indulgent accident. I had read the novel—in Keene’s translation—some decades ago, and, not being a terribly sensitive reader at the time, I had put it down and didn’t willingly go back to Dazai. It wasn’t my cup of tea, or so I thought. A few years ago, however, students in my Japanese literature reading group asked for something a bit more demanding than what we had been reading, so I printed out a few pages of Ningen shikkaku from the Aozora Bunko edition. I was immediately struck by Dazai’s vivid, wandering, shifting, endless, labyrinthine sentences. How in the world does one translate something like this? Our reading group became translation practice sessions with a graduate student over beers at the Wig & Pen. The novel gradually turned into something of an obsession with me, and a few years and many, many drafts later, the translation was finished. Only then, with a completed manuscript, did I consider the question “Why?”

  Each translation is an interpretation. For me, that is the most compelling answer to the question “Why?” Each translation, if successful, is a distillation of the translator’s understanding of the
work. It is the result of hundreds and thousands of decisions, large and small. The cumulative effect of these choices is enormous. Naturally, one cannot (or should not) choose to interpret the word “shoes” as the word “tiger,” and in that respect the translator is bound in ways that the author is not. Yet, when translating between languages that are very different—and it is difficult to imagine two languages less alike than Japanese and English—the translator’s interpretation plays an enormous role in the translation process.

  All conscientious literary translators seek to stay true to the original. But what is the “original”? If a text has as many meanings as it does readers, how much truer does that hold in translating? What is the text trying to achieve in a certain passage? What impact does a particular expression, a particular phrasing, a particular structure have on the reader? What impact did it have on a Japanese reader in 1948? How does one recreate that for an English-language reader seventy years later? This is why we see—and should see—multiple translations of works worthy of the attention. Each translation enables us to see different elements of the original.

  This translation is my attempt to answer the questions above as best I can. After finishing my translation, I reread Keene’s version for the first time in many years. My answers, I think, differ significantly from Keene’s answers. I do not say that they are better or worse than Keene’s—they are simply different. After all, this is literature, not mathematics.

  In my translation, and in my interpretation, of the text I have tried to emphasize Yōzō’s voice. The intimacy and directness of that voice are, I believe, central to the novel. I have attempted to convey a voice that will pull the reader, effortlessly, into Yōzō’s heart and mind—or at least as much of the heart and mind Yōzō decides to reveal.

  At the same time, I have also tried to avoid “editing” Dazai’s novel, even when doing so might have made it easier for me to convey the voice that I think is so critical to the text. Where Dazai is inconsistent or confusing in the original, I have tried to replicate this in the English. I have tried to retain cultural particularities even when they do not have a ready English equivalent. Where Dazai uses Japanese translations of foreign poems, I translated the Japanese translations Dazai used rather than using the originals. The result is perhaps less graceful in places, but I believe it to be truer to the original. Though I was sorely tempted, I chose not to use footnotes to explain the various references to poems, literary journals, and so on that litter the work. In the end I think that the benefit of these notes, of interest to only a small number of readers, did not justify the disruption in the narrative that they would cause.

  Beyond providing a different interpretation of the novel, I hope that this translation will help to renew interest in Dazai and to encourage readers to explore his works more widely—and in different translations. He is truly one of the great writers of twentieth-century Japan.

  Acknowledgments

  I would like to acknowledge the support and help of people without whom this translation would not exist. Meredith McKinney was kind enough to read drafts of the translation. I am grateful, too, to Orion Lethbridge, one of the original reading group members, a translation practice participant, and a thoughtful reader of drafts. I am very grateful to the University of Chicago’s Center for East Asian Studies Committee on Japanese Studies for supporting my translation by selecting it for the William F. Sibley Memorial Subvention Award. I would like to thank the staff of Stone Bridge Press for all of their work on behalf of the translation. Peter Goodman’s painstaking copyediting of the translation, in particular, was invaluable. I would also, of course, like to thank my wife Miyako for her support, advice, encouragement, and superhuman patience.

  —MG

  DAZAI OSAMU (1909–48) retains an enormous following in Japan today and is as famous for his darkly introspective novels as for the light-hearted children’s stories that are a staple of many Japanese textbooks. Son of a wealthy family in northern Japan, Dazai was a top student who showed an early penchant for literary writing. He led a troubled, unstable life and suffered from drug abuse and alcoholism; he attempted suicide and had numerous affairs, even as his literary fame grew. A Shameful Life (Ningen shikkaku), is said to be a close approximation of his lifestyle and struggles. Shortly after its publication in 1948, Dazai and his lover drowned themselves in the Tamagawa Canal in western Tokyo.

  MARK GIBEAU is a literary translator and scholar of postwar Japanese literature. His previous translations include fiction by Kawabata Yasunari, Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, Yamamoto Shūgorō, Tayama Sakumi, Kakuta Mitsuyo, and Komatsu Sakyō among others. He is currently a Senior Lecturer in the College of Asia and the Pacific at The Australian National University, Canberra.

  Stone Bridge Press books are available

  from booksellers worldwide and online.

  sbp@stonebridge.com • www.stonebridge.com