Crackling Mountain and Other Stories

Introduction

I

Osamu Dazai had tried to take his own life on a number of occasions, two of these attempts assuming the form of jōshi, the traditional Japanese suicide pact entered into by a pair of lovers. But when he disappeared with his mistress on a rainy night in mid-June of 1948, the signs that he was thoroughly prepared to die were unmistakable. Dazai and his companion, Tomie Yamazaki, left behind a series of farewell notes to friends and kin, the author conscientiously composing a last will and testament for his wife, Michiko. Photographs of Dazai and Tomie stood next to one another in Tomie’s lodging in the Tokyo suburb of Mitaka, along with the traditional water offering to the deceased. Also nearby was a small pile of ashes, all that remained of the incense that the lovers had lit before departing.

After the police began an intensive search for the couple’s whereabouts, they eventually found a suspicious-looking place along the Tamagawa Canal, midway between Dazai’s own home and Tomie’s residence. A strip of wet grass lay flattened from the top to the bottom of the bank, as if something heavy had slid down into the water. The ground nearby was strewn with several objects—a small bottle or two, a glass plate, a pair of scissors, and a compact. A little ways downstream, two pairs of wooden clogs were found against the lock of a dam. Despite these ominous signs, an intensive search along the canal failed to turn up anything more. It was almost a week later—on July 19, the author’s thirty-ninth birthday—that a passer-by happened to notice two waterlogged corpses in the canal tied together with a red cord. This discovery occurred less than a mile from where the couple had evidently entered the water.

During this period of uncertainty, a few of Dazai’s friends reportedly entertained hopes that he was merely in hiding. After all, they could remember those earlier occasions, including the two attempts at jōshi, when Dazai had gone away to commit double suicide only to return safe and sound. Perhaps, they reasoned, he would hesitate, or miscalculate, before again taking the fatal step—not merely to survive but, as usually happened, to write about his experience. In any event, given this history of abortive attempts upon his own life, it is only natural that certain friends might have held out hope even as they felt the deepest misgivings.

This life of desperation and tragedy seems wholly out of keeping with the favorable circumstances of Dazai’s birth. His family had risen to a position of wealth and authority in the northern prefecture of Aomori through land acquisition and moneylending during the three generations preceding his own. By the time Dazai was born in 1909, his father owned the bank in the family village of Kanagi. Eventually Dazai’s father would move into national politics, occupying a seat in each of the houses of the Japanese Diet at different times in his career.

Quite early in his life, however, Dazai began to see himself as a child of misfortune. The tenth of eleven children, he was more or less ignored by his frail mother. And the aunt and the nursemaid who did attend to him both went away while Dazai was still a child.

As the most intelligent of the family sons, Dazai did occupy the center of attention during most of his years of schooling. In the end, though, his intelligence proved to be detrimental, at least by his own estimation. Pressured to excel at school in order to uphold the family honor, Dazai came to hate his studies. After compiling an exemplary record in the local elementary school, he lapsed into mediocrity in the upper grades, and, shortly after enrolling at Tokyo University, he gave up altogether on his formal education. As schoolwork gradually became secondary, Dazai interested himself in the activities of radical students and worked at becoming a writer. His family became understandably upset by this turn of events, for its status and wealth were rooted in traditional social arrangements. One can readily imagine the family’s indignation when Dazai published a tale evoking the cruelty and indifference of a landlord toward his tenant farmers, the landlord being a thinly disguised version of the author’s father, already deceased at the time.

Even after Dazai left his home region in 1930 to enter university, he continued to plague his family. He insisted on marrying a low-class geisha, and he accepted a substantial monthly allowance from his family on the pretext that he was still attending the university and working toward his degree, a deception bound to have severe repercussions once it was discovered. Subsequently, Dazai was formally disowned by his oldest brother, who had succeeded his father as the head of the household. The emotional shock of this action was compounded a few years later when the allowance he had continued to receive was terminated, leaving him in desperate financial straits. Dazai had a taste for personal extravagance, and he was generous too in subsidizing his radical friends, many of whom lived in poverty. His early years in Tokyo were wild ones, with lots of drinking and, for a time, even drug addiction to contend with. Such a life could only exacerbate the propensity for tuberculosis that Dazai shared with certain other family members.

Having fallen on hard times, Dazai resolved to change his ways. Separated from his first wife, he made overtures toward a reconciliation with his family back in the Tsugaru region of Aomori. Eventually a second marriage was arranged for him through the good offices of the novelist Masuji Ibuse,¹ one that the family privately sanctioned. Following the wedding in January 1939, Dazai settled down to a stable life with his bride, Michiko Ishihara. Several months after the marriage, he took Michiko back to Tokyo from her home in Kōfu. A daughter was born in 1941, the first of three children.

During the years of World War II, Dazai gradually established his reputation as a leading writer of the time. He thereby achieved a degree of financial independence, and, just as important, he could now hope that the family might overlook his academic failure and even his youthful radicalism. Dazai openly cultivated the good will of his family, returning to his Tsugaru birthplace several times during the war. When his house in Tokyo was severely damaged in a bombing raid, he went back home with his wife and children, and there he remained until November of 1946.

Returning to Tokyo, he soon became lionized as the writer who best expressed the desperation of a society in chaos. Exhausted by illness and besieged by everyone from opportunistic editors to maternalistic women, Dazai was simply unable to cope. It was almost inevitable that he would revert to his earlier life of dissipation. At the time of his death he was writing a comic novel about a bon vivant who tries to rid himself of a whole stable of mistresses. Critics of Dazai occasionally suggest that the author was expressing his own wish to rid himself of Tomie Yamazaki, whose insistent efforts to lure him into that final suicide pact are well documented.

II

The works translated in this book have, for the most part, been deliberately chosen as representative of writing by Dazai that is little known outside of Japan. Since his most significant postwar works, The Setting Sun and No Longer Human, are widely read in Donald Keene’s translations, only one additional work has been selected from this period. This is The Sound of Hammering, whose young protagonist exemplifies the mood of hopelessness evoked in the two novels.

The Sound of Hammering consists almost entirely of a letter written to an unnamed author. In fact, Dazai himself received a letter that provided him with the basic structure for his story. Strictly speaking, then, the story cannot be called autobiographical. And yet, the desperate and somewhat confidential tone of the letter in The Sound of Hammering is quite similar to the manner of certain works by Dazai that qualify in some measure as autobiographical. One can hardly doubt that the actual letter struck a deeply sympathetic chord in Dazai.

Two works in this volume, Memories and On the Question of Apparel, would certainly be regarded by most Japanese critics as primarily autobiographical. Memories recounts the childhood and adolescence of a figure whose circumstances closely resemble those of the young Dazai, while On the Question of Apparel describes with deadpan humor a number of mishaps that occur to an author with Dazai’s drinking habits. While the degree of personal revelation present in any Dazai work is difficult to gauge with precision, both of these compositions ask the reader to accept the narrator’s word that the events actually happened to him. Like The Sound of Hammering, Memories and On the Question of Apparel together suggest the range of Osamu Dazai when he writes in a mode of personal revelation.

The remaining eight stories in this book show Dazai as an inventive storyteller, rather than as a craftsman of reminiscence. With the exception of Undine and Monkey Island, these works were all composed between the time of Dazai’s marriage to Michiko in 1939 and the end of the war in 1945. As mentioned earlier, these years were relatively quiet ones for Dazai, a period when he worked to consolidate his writing skills, learning above all to diversify the autobiographical impulse by integrating his personal obsessions with fairly orthodox methods of storytelling. Dazai’s own personal involvement in the tales will sometimes be obscure to the reader unfamiliar with his writings. It might be remarked here that, in order to provide some guidance on this and other matters, each of the tales in this volume has a prefatory note.

Though impelled to embody his personal concerns in these tales as well, Dazai was not bound by certain natural limitations of his semi-autobiographical mode. In these more fictional tales, he could evoke realms of fantasy, juxtaposing them in some instances with the real world. In addition, he was able to give his characters greater scope for individual initiative than he was willing to permit the autobiographical figures. Characters in these less realistic tales are often beset with difficulties, but they sometimes attempt to surmount them. Doubts and uncertainties in the latter group of stories come more from the author breaking into his narrative to voice an opinion than from the characters acting out the story. As the prefatory notes will make clear, a number of these non-realistic tales are based on such diverse sources as the New Testament and the medieval Otogi Zōshi tales. Perhaps Dazai used these sources as offering scope for action which his own experience would not validate.

Dazai frequently ends a tale on an inconclusive note—most obviously when he has a narrator confess to bewilderment concerning the significance of the very tale he has just told. Although this might be regarded as a technical feature—the author’s way of prompting the reader to dwell on the work—it seems more likely that Dazai was giving vent to his own sense of things. How fitting for an author who flirted so with suicide to hesitate in writing Finis to end a story as well.

III

It remains only to remark that the translations that follow try to convey, in some measure, the highly idiosyncratic flavor of Osamu Dazai. In pursuing this goal, I have generally followed the author’s practice of frequently omitting quotation marks for what appear to be direct quotations. Though violating standard English practice, such a procedure helps, in my judgment, to preserve something of the author’s idiosyncratic quality.

Beginning in 1912 with the death of Emperor Meiji, this account is closely tied to the circumstances of the author’s own life. Just three years old at the time of his earliest memory, the narrator goes on to relate episodes from his childhood and adolescence in a fashion both piecemeal and informative. The memories come to his mind with apparent spontaneity, evoked by free association and unrelated to any design other than that of a loose chronology. By the time Memories is over, a decade and a half has elapsed and the narrator is about to enter college.

In his abrupt style of recollection, even those people intimately involved in the narrator’s early life come and go with alacrity. An aunt occupies the center of attention for several paragraphs, only to be succeeded by a nursemaid. A few characters from the earlier sections of the narrative are recalled later, but most of them never return. Those that remain in the reader’s mind do so by virtue of a striking detail or vivid turn of phrase from their moment in the narrative. Dazai typically subordinates his cast of secondary characters to his autobiographical self; in Memories the lesser characters serve mainly as agents of the narrator’s upbringing.

In the final stage of this account, references to a curious affair of the heart coalesce into an ongoing episode. Smitten in mid-adolescence, the hero is bedeviled by two problems. His love, a mere maid in the household, would hardly make a welcome match in the eyes of his prestigious family. And, to complicate matters, his younger brother also seems taken with the same girl.

Readers might wonder why the author, after recounting so many fragmentary recollections, ends his narration with this more sustained episode. In the story, the affair emerges quite naturally; and, in retrospect, it seems to confirm the portrait of the narrator suggested by earlier events. From almost the very beginning, many of the narrator’s important gestures occur only in his imagination. The affair in question is no exception, and thus one might argue that it ends in self-delusion rather than in thwarted love.

The final scene of Memories shows Dazai using a photograph for symbolic effect, a tactic more widely employed in his novel No Longer Human. By this stage of the game the loss of the maid Miyo should have taught the narrator a lesson about himself. In the company of his brother and putative rival, however, he seems still imprisoned by the inward nature of his outlook. Dazai concludes on a characteristic note of uncertainty: Will his narrator, that figure who represents in some measure his own youthful self, break free of his confining introspection? Or will he, as the graveyard scene and fortune-telling episode early in the narrative portend, stay trapped in his habit of self-dramatization and in his belief that he is a victim of fate?

I

I was standing by our front gate as twilight fell. My aunt was there too in a quilted wrap, the kind a nursemaid Often wears when carrying an infant strapped on her back. The road before our house had grown dim and everything was hushed. I have never forgotten that moment.

She was speaking of the emperor, and I can still remember bits and snatches of what she said—His Majesty . . . gone into seclusion . . . a true living god. Filled with wonder, I repeated certain words— A . . . true . . . god . . .

Then I must have said the wrong thing. No, my aunt scolded, you should say, Gone into seclusion. I knew exactly where the emperor had gone, but I asked about it anyway. I still remember how she laughed at that.

Emperor Meiji had been on the throne forty-two years when I was born. When he passed away, I was only three years old.

I guess it was about then that my aunt took me to visit some relatives. Their village was about five miles away, near a broad waterfall in the mountains. I remember how white the water looked against the green moss as it cascaded down the cliff. I didn’t know the man who held me on his shoulders to watch. When he showed me the votive pictures in the shrine below the falls, I became very lonely. Eventually I broke into tears and called out, Auntie! Auntie!

In a hollow some distance off, my relatives and my aunt had spread rugs on the ground. They were making lots of noise when I cried out, but my aunt heard and jumped up immediately. She must have slipped just then, however, for she stumbled as though making a bow. The others couldn’t resist teasing her. Look! they cried, she’s already drunk. As I watched these things occurring far down in the hollow, I felt so ashamed that I finally began screaming at the top of my lungs.

While still a child, I dreamed one evening that my aunt was going away and leaving me behind. I saw her standing in our front entranceway, totally occupying it with her bulk. Her breasts seemed large and red, and perspiration trickled down her skin. I can’t stand you, she hissed, prompting me to run over and press my cheek to her breasts. No, I begged, please don’t leave. Sobbing, I pleaded with her again and again. When my aunt shook me awake, I hugged her right there in bed and kept on crying. Even after I was fully aware, I wept quietly for a long time. Afterward I didn’t tell anyone of my dream, not even my aunt. I remember plenty of things about my aunt from those early days. But I don’t remember anyone else, even though there were surely many people in the house besides my father and mother. That’s because our family included my great-grandmother and grandmother, my three older brothers and four older sisters, and my younger brother too. Then there was my aunt and her four daughters. Except for my aunt, however, I was hardly aware of anyone. Not, at least, until I was four or five years old.

We must have had five or six tall apple trees in our big garden out back. I remember a cloudy day when some girls were climbing about in those trees. The garden had a chrysanthemum patch as well, and I vaguely recall a crowd of girls gazing at the flowers in full bloom. They were standing in the rain with umbrellas. I suppose they were sisters and cousins of mine.

From the time I was five or six years old my memories become quite definite. Around that time a maid named Také taught me how to read. She really wanted me to learn, and we read all kinds of books together. Since I was a sickly child, I often read in bed. When we ran out of books, Také would bring back an armful from places like the village Sunday school and have me read them. I learned to read silently too. That’s why I could finish one book after another without getting tired.

Také also taught me about right and wrong. Often we went to a temple where she would show me Buddhist hell paintings and explain the punishments they depicted. Sinners condemned to hell for arson carried flaming red baskets upon their backs, while those who had kept mistresses writhed in the grip of a green snake with two heads. The paintings depicted a lake of blood and a mountain of spikes, as well as a bottomless pit called The Abyss that gave off white smoke. Thin, pale wretches, wailing through barely opened mouths, were strewn over all these regions. Tell a lie, Také said, and you’d end up the same way—a sinner in hell with your tongue plucked out by devils. Hearing this, I screamed in terror.

The temple graveyard was on a small hill out back, with requiem posts¹ clustered along the hedge-rose border. Besides the usual prayers in brush writing, each of the posts carried a dark, metal wheel. Fastened in a slot high on the post, each wheel seemed to me then about the size of the full moon. Spin the wheel once, Také explained, and if it clattered round and round and came to a stop without turning back, then you would go to heaven. But, she warned, if the wheel started back, you’d end up in hell.

Také would give a push and the wheel would spin smoothly until it slowed to a complete stop. When I tried, however, the wheel sometimes turned back. I think it was in the autumn that I went alone to the temple to test my luck. The wheels seemed to be in league with one another, for they all turned back regardless of which one I pushed. Though tired and angry, I kept myself under control and stubbornly pushed them time