![]() ![]() ![]() A great deal of ink was expended by critics and authors at the time in debate over which of the two forms embodied the true essence of literary expression.Īs Dazai voices both Yozo and the unnamed physician in the first person, N ingen becomes a “double I-novel”. The ‘I-novel’ was typically contrasted with the honkaku shosetsu-’authentic novel’, the ideal manifestation of which one Japanese critic located in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. The ‘I-novel’ emerged as the dominant force in Japanese letters in the early twentieth century, and only a very few Japanese writers of the time managed to resist its lure entirely, whether they were devoted practitioners of the form or not. In his Translator’s Afterword, Gibeau explains. ![]() With his masterpiece, Dazai completed his last of a number of explorations of what in Japan is called the shishosetsu-“I-novel”-intensely personal and usually disturbed, and in first person. It seems that I will end my days having never understood anything at all about the lives of human beings … This fear consumes me, sometimes making me twist and turn at night, groaning in agony, driving me to the brink of madness. I can’t understand how this thing called ‘human life’ is supposed to work.Īnd later in this first of three sections of Yozo’s diary, Yozo’s first diary sentences speak for themselves. Salinger too signaled with his first words-he too aimed at something rather different than a literary version of a Norman Rockwell painting. If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it. For those who are, this prologue compels reading on, similar to the first sentence of Toni Morrison’s Paradise: “They shoot the white girl first, but the rest they can take their time.”Ĭatcher famously opens with Holden’s dismissive, We may think that Dazai raised a warning sign with this prologue-“here be dragons” -read on only if you’re prepared for such a ride. In any case, a vague sense of revulsion shivers up my spine.Ī Shameful Life: (Ningen Shikkaku), Osamu Dazai, Mark Gibeau (trans) (Stone Bridge, November 2018) But this, maybe this is what it would be like if the head of a carthorse were sewn onto a human body. It is as though he were already dead … Even the face of someone slipping into death holds some kind of expression, leaves some kind of mark. The last photo is the most disturbing … He sits in the corner of a filthy room (behind him the wall crumbles in three places), … His face is empty of all expression. The physician’s reflections on the diaries and Yozo form the prologue and the epilogue-in the prologue, the physician describes the only three pictures he’s ever seen of Yozo. Catcher, however, pales beside Ningen as a literary achievement.ĭazai crafts Ningen as Yozo’s diary, discovered by an unnamed physician. The Catcher in the Rye still sells a million copies per year, in dozens of languages, while in Japanese only a few novels, notably Natsume Soseki’s Kokoro, routinely outsell Ningen Shikkaku. Oba Yozo, the central character and anti-hero of Dazai Osamu’s Ningen Shikkaku, is as familiar to Japanese readers as Holden Caulfield is to English readers. ![]()
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