Every year on 19 June a small crowd gathers at a temple in Mitaka, on the western edge of Tokyo, to keep a birthday and an anniversary on the same afternoon. The man they come for was born on that date in 1909, and his body was found on it in 1948, which would have been his thirty-ninth birthday. The gathering has a name, Ōtōki, and I understand that the name plays on the title of one of his last stories, Ōtō, or Cherries. People bring flowers and stand about in the damp of early summer. I cannot think of another novelist whose death is observed with such ceremony by readers who were not born when it happened. The arrangement is strange. A grave has become a place of pilgrimage for the author of a book about a man who could not join the human race, and that strangeness is where I should like to begin.
The book at the centre of the ritual is Ningen shikkaku. Donald Keene rendered it in 1958 as No Longer Human, and as he explains in his preface, the title means something close to “disqualified from being human”. Osamu Dazai, born Tsushima Shūji in Aomori, wrote it in 1948. It ran in the magazine Tenbō that year and came out in book form from Chikuma Shobō, and by the usual accounts the volume reached the shops about a month after he had died. As I understand it, only Sōseki's Kokoro outsells it among the novels of its publisher, Shinchōsha. A book of that kind arrives in the reader's hands already wrapped in its author's death, and a sensible critic begins by taking the wrapping off. I propose to read it here as a piece of construction, not as a note left on a table, and the construction, I shall argue, is built to dispute the very verdict its title announces.
The first thing to notice is who speaks first, and it is not Yōzō Ōba. An unnamed narrator opens the book by describing three photographs of one man at three ages. The child's smile is wrong in a way the narrator struggles to name. The young man's smile, as I read it, is lighter than a smile ought to be, a surface with nothing behind it. The last face is one the narrator admits he cannot hold in his memory even after a second look. Only then do the notebooks begin, three of them, in Yōzō's own first person. The narrator returns at the end with an epilogue. The photographs and the notebooks, he explains, came to him from the proprietress of a bar in Kyōbashi. A reviewer in the Asian Review of Books calls the result a double I-novel, since Dazai speaks in two first persons at once, and I think the phrase exact. The effect is that of a deposition handed up to a court by a witness who is also the accused, with one clerk's note stapled to the front and another to the back.
The notebooks themselves follow a long descent that Dazai takes care never to make theatrical. Yōzō is born into a wealthy provincial family in the north and is sent by his father to an ordinary university when he would have preferred art. At a drawing class he meets Horiki, who introduces him to the pleasures of the city. From then on he is passed from one sheltering room to another, drawing cartoons for a living and sinking into drink and morphine. Readers of Korean fiction may hear an echo of Yi Sang's The Wings, whose narrator also lives in a room that a woman pays for. His family cuts him off after an attempt on his own life. Told baldly, it is the biography of a wastrel, and a lesser writer would have made it the biography of a victim. Dazai does neither. He keeps the telling flat. The speaker's attention stays fixed on a single question: what do other people want from me, and how can I give it to them before they notice that I am afraid?
The book belongs to its year. Japan in 1948 was defeated, occupied and busy deciding which of its elders had forfeited the right to speak, and Keene's introduction places the hero between a decaying inherited order and imported Western ideas. A story about a man who disqualifies himself, in a society that never formally strikes him off but never quite admits him either, could hardly have found a better moment. I do not want to press the parallel, and the world beyond Yōzō's rooms remains a blur of bars, landlords and pawnshops. But the question of who holds the authority to pass sentence on a human being was not abstract in that decade. A Japanese reader of 1948 would have heard the title with an ear that a reader in Edinburgh must work to acquire.
The second thing to notice is the title, and here a reader with some Korean has a small advantage. The characters of Ningen shikkaku are read in Korean as ingan silgyeok. Silgyeok is the word one meets when an athlete is struck from the results or a candidate fails the conditions of entry. So far as I can see, it is the vocabulary of rules and referees, and not of sin. Whatever Yōzō decides about himself, the word the book chooses is not wicked but ineligible. A man has been entered for a contest he never signed up for, and he marks his own paper and fails it before anyone else has been asked. The interesting question is the one the title does not ask: who set the examination, and who is entitled to sit as examiner?
The English titles make a useful small experiment. Keene's No Longer Human, which reached American readers in 1958 from New Directions and British readers the year after from Peter Owen, announces the verdict as a fact: the man is out. Mark Gibeau retranslated the book in 2018 for Stone Bridge Press and called it A Shameful Life. He later discussed that choice, along with the novel's lasting appeal to younger readers, in a conversation with his publisher. A reviewer in the Colorado Review observed that the older title draws a line between the human and the not-human. The newer one leaves Yōzō where the book itself leaves him, stranded between what he does and what he means. Both are defensible, and each gives away a reading. The first notebook opens, in Keene's version, with “Mine has been a life of much shame”, which already contains Gibeau's title, so the two translators are less opposed than they look. Keene, for his part, thought the book gloomy but never cruel to its reader, since it does not wound for the sake of wounding. I would add that part of the reason is the frame.
Yōzō's method of survival is the clown, and Dazai gives it a beginning that I find almost unbearably neat. When his father asks what present he would like from Tokyo, the boy cannot say. Afterwards, if I read the episode correctly, he writes his wish in the man's notebook in secret, and the wish is for a mask, the kind worn in the New Year lion dance. The father, who laughs aloud in the shop when he discovers who wrote the entry, cannot know what he is about to put into his son's hands. At school a classmate sees through the performance, and the notebook records the panic of it plainly: to be seen is the one danger the mask was made against.
The third thing to notice is the epilogue, where the frame earns its keep. The narrator reports what the proprietress of the bar said when he asked about the man in the photographs, and her account does not match the notebooks. The Yōzō she knew, as I read her, was gentle and easy to be with, and the trouble lay in the drink and not in the man. While Yōzō thinks of his own existence as wretched, the people around him, it turns out, do not. I do not take the epilogue as a correction that cancels the notebooks, because Dazai is too good a craftsman for that. It is a second reading entered in the margin in a different ink. A reader who has just been persuaded of a man's disqualification is asked to hold two documents at once, the examinee's marking of himself and a stranger's mark beside it. If the candidate was failed, the book seems to say, he was failed above all by his own invigilation.
There is a further turn that Dazai allows only a reader who has been paying attention. If the clown's whole art is to give people what they appear to want, then the notebooks may be one more performance. They are written for an unseen audience, a last turn offered to strangers he has never met. The photographs in the prologue push us towards believing the confession entire. The epilogue pushes away. Critics have asked how far we can trust the self-portrait that Yōzō draws, and they are right to ask, though I notice that the book supplies no instrument for settling it. We are left holding a confession whose sincerity cannot be audited, written by a man whose talent was for sincerity of exactly that kind. That is a better trap than any plot twist, and it is the one Dazai's frame was built to spring.
I have been circling the biography and ought to face it. The novel is often called its author's will, and it is easy to see why. By his biographers' accounts he had tried to end his own life more than once before. He was ill and drinking heavily, and he was at the height of his postwar fame when he wrote it. He died within days of the last instalment appearing in the magazine. Readers have made of that a coincidence too good to leave alone, and the annual gathering at the temple is partly its monument. I would not insult the pilgrims, but I would observe that the book they carry is arranged against its own reading as a farewell note. A note has no epilogue. A will has no third-person witnesses. Whatever was happening to Dazai as he built it, what he built is a document that puts its author's own sentence on trial. The cult of the death tends to flatten that into a single gesture. The novel is a good deal more articulate than the legend.
I came to the novel late and in English. The copy on my shelf is the Peter Owen printing of Keene's translation, soft at the corners from a previous owner I never met. In the Scotland of my childhood, a man who announces that he is a failure is generally answered with a dram and a change of subject. One of the odd consolations of this book is that it dramatises both responses and trusts neither. Everyone in it is kind to Yōzō in some fashion, and nobody ever asks him the question that might help. I have read it three times now, each time arriving at a different total when I came to add it up.
In Korean bookshops the novel sits in the Minumsa world literature series, as number 103, in Kim Chun-mi's translation, according to the booksellers' own listings. That placing tells the browser to take it as a classic and not as a case history, and I find the placing correct. It is said to be especially loved by the young, which seems to me right for a book about the terror, at fourteen or at forty, of being found out. For a reader trained to look at Asian literatures across borders, there is a satisfaction in watching the same four characters travel from Tokyo to Seoul with their meaning intact and their bureaucratic chill undiminished.
That brings me back to the temple in Mitaka. The gathering keeps a birthday and a death on a single date, which is exactly what the novel declines to do: it will not let a verdict and a life be one document. A man was entered for an examination he never chose to sit. The book hands us the paper with two sets of marks on it, his own and a stranger's, and leaves the adding up to us. Those who stand there each June are, whether they know it or not, keeping the birthday of a man who spent a book arguing that he was not eligible to have one.
Recommended Resources
☞ Purchase (Korean Edition): Ingan Silgyeok (인간 실격), Osamu Dazai, Aladin Bookstore
☞ English Edition: No Longer Human, Osamu Dazai (translated by Donald Keene), Amazon
'Ex Oriente, Lux.'
— James L. Fleming, Edinburgh
※ Published under the author's editorial persona. See the About page for how this comes to be.
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