I’ll admit I screwed up a little. After ordering two of Osamu Dazai’s books, a collection of short stories called “Blue Bamboo” and his famous “No Longer Human”, I couldn’t decide which to read first. I chose “Blue Bamboo”. Most of the tales in this book are somewhat upbeat, if a little sorrowful at times, in keeping with their gothic romantic roots. The stories were insanely readable, and although the stories themselves are maybe a little on the forgettable side, the ones that stick with me most are two of the longer stories in the collection, “Blue Bamboo” and “Lanterns of Romance”. “Blue Bamboo” is a retelling of a traditional Chinese folk story from a Japanese point of view, and is an interesting study in character. “Lanterns of Romance” involves a group of three brothers and two sisters as they chain write a story, based on Rapunzel. Each segment of the story gives a little bit of insight into the personalities of one of the siblings, and by the end, what comes out is an interesting piecemeal story.
“Blue Bamboo” is good if you want a window into the Japan of the 1920’s, when the traditional culture was still present in Japanese society despite the moderation. The stories seem somewhat old-fashioned and modern at the same time, and the result of this mixute makes a very readable collection.
Unfortunately, the romantic views in the first book really made “No Longer Human” a little bit more bleak. The story, from the narrator’s point of view, starts: “Mine has been a life of much shame. I can’t even guess myself what it must be to live the life of a human being.” This was a short book, 180 pages in a large, 1950’s serif font that was only written on about 2/3 of the page, and using modern typesetting, would probably come in at about 120 pages. Despite its brevity, it’s a powerful book that condenses one man’s thoughts and feelings of alienation into a short two or three hours of reading.
It follows a man as he remembers the life behind him. It documents how from the very beginning, he felt congenitally different from the rest of humanity. Through it, he discusses how he adopted the role of a clown to cope with this difference, and how he felt his acting was fooling people into believing he was a member of society. He talks about how his dream is to become a painter to capture the horrors of day to day social interaction. He talks about meeting another artist in Tokyo and wandering the streets, finding his only solace in booze and woment. He talks about how he joins the Communist Party and rises to high rank despite having no real interest in Marxist theories, but instead hanging around because he finds the sheer insanity of it all to be amusing. He talks about an attempted lovers suicide, and how his failure to his lover’s success affected his life. He talks about his finding a new wife, her rape, and his slow descent into morphine addiction despite a newfound success as a cartoonist. His story ends, having convinced the reader that he was an absolute monster, definitely distinct from humanity. But, when the author who writes the prologue and epilogue of the story asks a bartender who figures heavily in the story if the man in the story gave her a lot of hell, she replies, “The Yozo we knew was so easy-going and amusing, and if he hadn’t drunk–no, even if he did drink–he was a good boy, an angel.”
“No Longer Human” is a bleak book, but strikes a balance between making the point of how bad the narrator felt about himself without becoming excessively bleak. This story is a lot more modernist than the stories in “Blue Bamboo”, and would have parallels in Kafka’s work that was being written in 1920’s Germany. “No Longer Human” takes a look at a painful time in Japan, as modernisation occurred and the country militarized for war, and the narrator is a seeming cauality of the times. It’s a powerful work, and a great read.
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