Suicidal Narrative in Modern Japan: The Case of Dazai Osamu

by Alan Stephen Wolfe

Overview

Dazai Osamu (1909-1948) is one of Japan's most famous literary suicides, known as the earliest postwar manifestation of the genuinely alienated writer in Japan. In this first deconstructive reading of a modern Japanese novelist, Alan Wolfe draws on contemporary Western literary and cultural theories and on a knowledge of Dazai's work in the context of Japanese literary history to provide a fresh view of major texts by this important literary figure. In the process, Wolfe revises Japanese as well as Western scholarship on Dazai and discovers new connections among suicide, autobiography, alienation, and modernization. As shown here, Dazai's writings resist narrative and historical closure; while he may be said to serve the Japanese literary establishment as both romantic decadent and representative scapegoat, his texts reveal a deconstructive edge through which his posthumous status as a monument of negativity is already perceived and undone. Wolfe maintains that cultural modernization pits a Western concept of the individual as realized self and coherent subject against an Eastern absent self—and that a felt need to overcome this tension inspires the autobiographical fiction so prevalent in Japanese novels. Suicidal Narrative in Modern Japan shows that Dazai's texts also resist readings that would resolve the gaps (East/West, self/other, modern/premodern) still prevalent in Japanese intellectual life.

Originally published in 1990.

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Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691636351
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	04/19/2016
Series:	Studies of the East Asian Institute , #1077
Pages:	280
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.40(h) x 0.80(d)

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Suicidal Narrative in Modern Japan

The Case of Dazai Osamu

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By Alan Wolfe

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1990 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-06774-2

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CHAPTER 1

FROM SEPPUKU TO JISATSU: SUICIDE AS NATIONAL ALLEGORY

Nation and Antihero

All third-world texts are necessarily ... to be read as ... national allegories.

— Fredric Jameson, "Third-World Literature"

Nationalism itself is not some unitary thing with some predetermined essence and value.

— Aijaz Ahmad, "Jameson's Rhetoric of Otherness"

Japan's position in the world today is probably unique in that it is the only non-Western nation to be a major world economic power. In a sense, this contemporary "fact" may be seen as the culmination of Japan's modern quest for power against the all-powerful West. It is a story of both dramatic "success" and dramatic defeat. From the arrival of Commodore Perry's "black boats," which forced the Japanese to "open their doors" in 1854, followed by the imposition of the "unequal treaties" that were the stock in trade of Western imperialists, to the building in a mere three to four decades of an industrial military complex able to defeat the Empire of China in 1895 and the Empire of Russia in 1905, and no less in its faithful emulation of Western imperialism (colonizing Taiwan and Korea and ruling over them brutally for 35 years) — the Japanese state under an autocratic leadership showed itself to be undaunted in the face of Western military might, even up to the military challenge launched against the United States in World War II. Any evaluation of Japan's "successful" emulation of the West, moreover, must include the "economic miracle" of Japan's postwar rebirth, again audacious in its move from skyscraping growth rates and envy-inducing productivity and quality control to the recent waves of capital investment reaching into the American "heartland" itself.

There is also the matter of defeat in war. Not only the horrendous bombing, both nuclear and conventional, and the dislocation and ruin suffered by the Japanese people during the Pacific War, but also the failure of opposition groups within Japan to liberate the people from an authoritarian structure perpetuating the oppression of Japanese women, men, children, and minorities (Korean, Chinese, Ainu, Burakumin). Moreover, in spite of the indications of success, there is a dramatic consciousness of a certain cultural and intellectual inadequacy, and it is felt by Japan's most articulate representatives: writers and intellectuals. Their dilemma, shared by many third world and minority intellectuals, has been that of having to create a distinctive cultural consciousness in terms that have already been defined by an external hegemonic power structure. Japanese writers and intellectuals have been painfully aware that the nation's economic prowess has not been accompanied by comparable cultural recognition. As the nation most likely to dominate the world economy in the twenty-first century, and currently in the process of buying up most of the Western as well as the third world, it seems strange that Japan could even be considered a third world country, and yet it does share with those nations a similar relation to Western hegemony. The Japanese case is on the surface different since Japan can boast a marked autonomy, and above all a history free of colonization, and yet the issue has anguished writers from the 1860s until today.

Japan came into the international arena in the middle of the nineteenth century as a nation lacking the advantages of the West and threatened by it. And although Japan's economic and political history is relatively familiar, what is less well known is that the Japanese literary tradition underwent a transformation as momentous and anxiety-producing as its industrial and social one. Japanese literature has had to grapple with the notions of identity and modernity in multiple ways. Culturally, it may be argued, the Japanese continue to see themselves as at best "honorary whites" not only in South Africa but on the Europe-dominated world culture scene.

It is this story of Japan in the last hundred years that is of concern here, specifically the way in which one version of that story underlies the way in which we read Japanese culture in general and Japanese literature in particular. In the present chapter, I argue that what has been familiar to specialists as modernization theory is at the same time a metanarrative encompassing and subsuming the perspectives of most residents of the advanced capitalist world. After briefly introducing some of the ways in which this metanarrative operates in the case of Japanese literature, I draw on the debate over "national allegory" in order to suggest how modern nationalism is constituted in large part by a notion of anonymous death, and how in the Japanese case, and most dramatically in literature, the metanarrative of modern nationalism is both constructed and undone by two opposed styles of self-destruction, traditional ritual suicide or seppuku and the more common "ordinary" suicide referred to literally as "killing of the self" or jisatsu.

The Modernization Syndrome

Modernization is a part of a larger framework of conceptualization, involving economic, social, and cultural components, which for convenience may be designated historical development. It is in the evolution of two opposed concepts of human historical evolution in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Marxist historical materialism and modernization theory, that we must look in order to place the problematic of change in its proper perspective. Although these two competing sets of explanations are both outgrowths of Western intellectual history that continue to influence Japanese intellectual history, it should be noted that Marxism has a history of more than a hundred years, whereas modernization theory — a more recent phenomenon — has had not only to define itself in the terms set by Marxism (without, however, seeking to confront those terms) but to counter the very venerability of the Marxist tradition by placing its own roots in a somehow equivalent time-honored tradition.

The modernization syndrome involves the common propensity to see nations as horses in a horse race, all aiming for a finish line that remains mysteriously at one remove, but which may be thought of as the attainment of a perfectly modern and democratic society. On this race course are positioned the nations of the world, with the European and North American industrial nations stretching toward the finish line and the rest of the world set behind them at appropriate intervals. Implied in this metaphorical sketch is of course a notion of linear development and a teleological view of history in which the goal of a capitalist democracy is presumably shared by all. Modernizationists deny, however, that the goal is so well defined and claim their theory to be nothing more than a measuring instrument for determining the relative position of each nation. Although modernization theory has been much discredited in certain economic and sociological quarters, as much for its politically motivated construction (i.e., antisocialist) as for its tendentious scientific claims, one may argue that the implicit tendency to view the world as a horse race has not changed, especially where people must continue to define themselves in relation to or against a cultural imperialist reality.

The field of Japanese literature, as the study of other aspects of culture, has generally not been included under the rubric of the "social sciences" or of history and, as a result, has perhaps been overlooked in critiques of the dominant tendencies in those areas. Yet, the role of culture and values has been central indeed. The fact that literature has seemed so insignificant in this evolution, except as a "reflector," is not only a result of the traditional tendency to view the humanities from a respectful (and often condescending) distance, but may also be due to the failure of the modernizationist nemesis, Marxism, to come to terms with its real significance. In other words, if modernization theory was the "counter-ideology" to Marxism that it gave every indication of being, its choice of "targets" was determined by those areas in which Marxist scholarship in Japan had been most effective, and hence perceived as the most threatening: economic, political, social, and institutional development. Culture (with the important exception of education, perhaps) and literature have been relatively neglected, and yet the field of literary studies seems to be as infused with modernizationist assumptions as its social science counterparts.

Modernizing Japanese Literature

Purely Japanese literature died out completely around the year 1897. The literature written after that is not Japanese literature. It is Western literature written in the Japanese language for the sake of form only.

— Nagai Kafu, quoted in Seidensticker's Kafu the Scribbler

The transformation of Japan within the space of about forty years from an obscure Oriental monarchy to one of the great powers is accounted a miracle of the modern age. ... In 1868 ... Japanese literature had dropped to one of its lowest levels. ... And yet within the same forty years ... Japanese literature moved from idle quips ... to Symbolist poetry, from ... harlots to the complexities of the psychological novel.

— Donald Keene, Modern Japanese Literature

Discussions of modern Japanese literature invariably imply a historical process of development, whether it be one characterized by a movement of literary forms themselves or a perception of those forms as reflecting a more widespread process in the society at large. In general, there is an implicit bias running throughout both Western and Japanese writings, to the effect that Japanese culture, in line with socio-political trends in Japanese society, is wending its (sometimes tortuous) way toward a model that the author presumably shares with the reader. Some of the attributes of the model are suggested by the terms "Symbolist poetry" and "complexities of the psychological novel" quoted above. They are offered not merely as indications of what Japanese writers were seeking (and, it is implied, failing) to emulate, but as the normal and proper course for a literature seeking to be "modern." This is epitomized by the wistful assertion that, unlike the development of the modern political and industrial state, "in literature the change came more slowly."

One of the arguments of this book is that such developmental perspectives underlie the entire thrust of Western (and dominant Japanese) perceptions and images of Japan, be they economic, political, social, or cultural. Moreover, this phenomenon is not merely an oversight or a fortuitous Eurocentric bias that can be eliminated by increased sensitivity to the specificity of Japanese culture; it is rather a structural component of an ideological apparatus that informs our perceived relation to society and to the world.

The literary history of the Meiji period reveals an increasing factionalization (proliferation of schools and tendencies) coupled with a trend toward a heightened self-awareness among intellectuals and writers of their own role and status (evident in the development of a modern literary criticism, in the growth of the introspective tendency, and in the increasing social orientation of writers). The period of early Meiji is characterized as that of the "Japanese enlightenment," the key components of which are the adoption by the Meiji state and its ideologues (the most notable of whom was Fukuzawa Yukichi) of a utilitarian approach to society. The notion that technical change was to be tempered by the maintenance of a Confucian value system was soon shown to be untenable, as industrialization disrupted institutional fixtures at all levels of society.

There is a consensus that the writing of Edo literature, the gesaku tradition, had been at a "low ebb" on the eve of modernization, capable at best of producing satirical tirades directed at adherents of the new ways. The early years from 1868 to 1877 are placed in their proper perspective by the advent, in bold relief, of the novel form in the succeeding decade. The "novel" is introduced in the form of translations of Western works and Japanese versions of political and romantic novels. The enthusiastic search for models to which to relate Japanese reality, as exemplified in the political novel (seiji shosetsu), are, like the Peoples Rights movement, generally accorded short shrift by critics, much as is the proletarian literature of the 1920s and 1930s. The criteria developed to judge them are derived from a different set of concerns than those underlying their creation.

The watershed is conveniently marked by Tsubouchi Shoyo's advocacy in his Essence of the Novel (Shosetsu shinzui, 1885) of a more realistic novel in the British Victorian mode, whereas the evolution of Meiji, and indeed of Japanese literature subsequent to that, is defined in terms of whether the goal of a "modern novel" was achieved or not. Thus, the advent of the Naturalist movement, with its precursor Futabatei Shimei and his Drifting Clouds (Ukigumo, 1886) incorporates the prototype and gauge against which subsequent efforts are judged or directed. On the one hand, there is the Romantic/Realist reaction of the 1890s, spearheaded by Ozaki Koyo and Koda Rohan, and their creation, the Kenyusha group, marking the beginning of the Japanese literary establishment (bundan); on the other, the line of ideological, social, and naturalistic Ichroman fiction culminating in the "breakthroughs" of Shimazaki Toson with The Broken Commandment (Hakai, 1906) and Tayama Katai with The Quilt (Futon, 1907). "Progress" is thus registered in successive waves of innovation inspired by or in reaction to Western trends and crystallized by the labels of realism, neoclassicism, romanticism, naturalism, and antinaturalism. The Meiji period is brought symbolically to a close politically with the death of the Meiji Emperor in 1912, accompanied by the startling junshi (following one's lord in death) by seppuku of General Nogi and his wife (and no less so at another level by the controversial conviction of Kotoku Shusui and others for "conspiring to assassinate the Emperor" — this in 1910, the year of Japan's annexation of Korea); and, in literature, again in 1912, with Mori Ogai's "abandonment of [his] uncomfortable soul-searching" and Natsume Soseki's productive output of psychological novels until his death in 1915.

A key assumption underlying studies of Japanese literature in the Meiji period was that Japan was successfully assimilating not only Western knowledge and technology, but Western culture and values as well. Nowhere was the measure of success better revealed, it would seem, than in Japanese writers' ability to produce the "psychological novel." The accolades for this achievement bestowed by critics on Meiji (1868–1912) and Taisho (1912–1925) authors, though primarily on Soseki, have led to their being assimilated into the modernization syndrome in a resounding manner: "He felt that his personal difficulties were those of all modern Japanese and, indeed, those of all men in the modern world. Consequently, although the psychological patterns that Soseki depicted were unmistakably Japanese, they were at the same time universal."

Soseki's "psychological novel" is significantly related not only to the West, but to a distinctively "Japanese" perspective. Howard Hibbett argues that Japan's modern psychological tradition has deeper roots than one might suspect: "The Japanese tradition boasts the first great psychological novel [The Tale of Genji] of the world." He argues, moreover, that a Japanese psychological analysis is, in Kawabata's terms, more contemplative than analytical, dealing in the long run with a conflict that is usually between the "individual and the family" rather than "within the self." The "crucial theme" of the modern Japanese psychological novel, then, is "its uneasy, self-critical individualism," introduced and developed by Soseki himself in his famous 1914 speech to students on "My Individualism." Soseki's development is also depicted as an Eriksonian "identity crisis," leading us to an explanation of his creativity while lending an aura of psychohistory to Japan's modernization success story.

(Continues...)

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Table of Contents

• FrontMatter, pg. i
• CONTENTS, pg. vii
• PREFACE, pg. xiii
• Introduction. SAINT OF NEGATIVITY Introduction SAINT OF NEGATIVITY, pg. 3
• Chapter One. FROM SEPPUKUTOJISATSU: SUICIDE AS NATIONAL ALLEGORY, pg. 21
• Chapter Two. TWO TALES OF SUICIDE: SOCIO-LITERARY COMPLICITIES IN JAPANESE MODERNIZATION, pg. 48
• Chapter Three. NOVEL, GHOSTLY, AND NEGATIVE SELVES, pg. 79
• Chapter Four. THE LAST OF THE I-NOVELISTS, pg. 97
• Chapter Five. DYING TWICE: ALLEGORIES OF IMPOSSIBILITY, pg. 120
• Chapter Six. DEATHSCRIPT: SUICIDE AS POLITICAL SURVIVAL, pg. 147
• Chapter Seven. ALLEGORICAL UNDOINGS, pg. 165
• Chapter Eight. JAPANESE RESSENTIMENT, pg. 185
• Epilogue. POSTMODERN POSTMORTEM, pg. 212
• NOTES, pg. 225
• SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY, pg. 247
• INDEX, pg. 257