SELF-PORTRAITS

Snapshots from a worldly Japanese writer’s troublesome life.

Born in 1909 to a powerful, landed family in Aomori prefecture, Dazai lived a rambunctious socialite’s life—one marred by quarrels, suicides, adulteries, and addictions. He survived the communal traumas of World War II and the atomic bombings before dying, by suicide, in 1948. All this is summarized neatly in translator McCarthy’s introduction, where he praises Dazai as “the one Japanese author who consistently turned out entertaining and worthwhile literature…when the entire nation was toeing the ideological line of militarism and fanatic patriotism.” While the introduction can only hint at Dazai’s interior life, the “self-portraits” collected here present it in colorful, thinly fictionalized detail. Together, they depict a figure at once melancholy and sardonic; a self-serious artist and self-aware butt of every joke. The narrator begins one story analyzing the angles of Mount Fuji’s slopes, only to decide, iconoclastically, that it’s “pathetic, as mountains go.” Still, he spends several months at a secluded teahouse with a Fuji view, hoping for inspiration to finish his novel but tormented by “interminable wavering and agonizing over my view of the world.” The double meaning suggests that, for Dazai, contempt is both a pathology and a point of pride. Another narrator entertains himself by pranking a young businessman, pretending to mug him. But, with his rent due, the narrator decides to keep the money after all. Buoyed by the thrill of the windfall, he ends the piece by saying, “My suicide was postponed for another month.” Many early stories double as confessions; later ones chronicle wartime traumas. As a tranquil scene turns violent, one narrator’s literary collaborator says: “Stop right there. You’re not just making this up.” No, he’s not.

A vivid collection of stories—as sophisticated as they are mundane.