🅢🅔🅢🅤🅖🅘

“I composed my last will and testament, my suicide note. One hundred pages that I entitled “Memories.” “Memories” is now considered my maiden work. I wanted to set down, without the least ornamentation, all the evil I’d done since childhood. This was in the autumn of my twenty-fourth year. I sat in the cottage gazing out at an abandoned garden overgrown with weeds, utterly devoid of the ability to laugh or smile. It was, once again, my intention to die. Call it affectation if you will. I was full of myself. I regarded life as a drama. Or, rather, I regarded drama as life. I was no longer of use to anyone…I hadn’t a single thing to live for. I resolved that I, as one of the fools, one of the doomed, would faithfully play out the role in which fate had cast me, the sad, servile role of one who must inevitably lose…I had written my suicide note, the testament of my infancy and boyhood, the first-hand account of a hateful child, but that testament, rather than freeing me, became a burning obsession that cast a faint light into the empty darkness. I couldn’t die yet. “Memories” alone wasn’t enough. Having revealed that much, I now wanted to set it all down, to make a clean breast of my entire life until then, to confess everything. But there seemed no end to it. First, I wrote about the [double suicide] at Kamakura, No good. That didn’t say it all, somehow. I wrote another piece, and still I was unsatisfied. I sighed and began another. It was a series of little commas; the final period never came.”

“Now that I harbored doubts about the one virtue I had depended on, I lost all comprehension of everything around me.”

“I was depressed… At such times I always sought refuge in a bookstore. There was one close by, and I hurried there now. Just to see all the books lining the shelves would lighten my mood as if by magic… I went because any book gave me comfort and solace at the time.”

“It was a series of little commas; the final period never came.”

Dazai Osamu’s “The Flowers of Buffoonery”

“I am afraid because I can so clearly foresee my own life rotting away of itself, like a leaf that rots without falling, while I pursue my round of existence from day to day.”

“…my heart gets choked with emotions and I just about suffocate from pain. I feel the floor dropping out from under me, as if not knowing whether I were alive or dead, as if dreaming in broad daylight; the comings and goings of the people in front of the station, too, seem small and far away, as though I have peeked through the wrong end of a telescope; and the world is completely hushed. What on earth am I waiting for?”

“Another type of critic, reflecting on a sense of futility, yields a transcendent, apostolic Dazai as ‘saint of negativity.’ In sum, the critic invariably relies on a psychological analysis derived from Dazai’s quasi-autobiographical writings… Tracing Dazia’s literary endeavors from his high school days of socialist realism through to his nihilistic novels of the late 1940s, the critical process erects a model of negative sensitivity, a refined esthetic turned against whatever the dominant trend happens to be. Dazai the man, like the historical Buddha, becomes an overdetermined sign, laden with past, future, and transcendent incarnations. Like the cosmic Buddha, Dazai is both extrinsic, as a guide to a wayward, youthful flock, and immanent, within the negativity in each and all of us. As such, he comes to have meaning beyond his actual life and writing, becoming an allegorical hero of revolt, part of a modern myth of negativity. The myth is complex and has important ramifications in contemporary images of Japan, not the least of which is the privileged status of the ‘alienated writer’ as paradigmatic of the modernization process.”