Dazai Osamu, pseudonym of Tsushima Shuji, (1909-1948) is considered one of the foremost fiction writers of 20th century Japan, particularly post-war period. He is doubtless a dark writer whose works mainly explores the darker side of humanity and reflects human weakness. Dazai’s life with ups and downs (mainly downs) is already a fiction. He committed suicide five times, while three of them are double suicide with different women. He has a transient love relationship including marriage and affairs. From his nanny to the first wife, Hatsuyo, and the last girlfriend Yamazaki, his life is surrounded by women. His strong opinion and antipathy towards female are conveyed in his essay and short stories without prevarication, his misogynistic character is well-delivered by describing every woman in his essay to be foolish, irrational and dull.
Many novels of Dazai, like the short story “Ubatsute” (“姥捨”), are straightforward autobiography in the third-person perspective which loosely based on his fourth suicide with Hatsuyo in a spring Ryokan. While for The Schoolgirl written in 1939, the war years of Japan and also the most steady phase of Dazai’s life which is in his second marriage with Ishihara Michiko. Dazai chooses to write from a first-person female narrator who has a tough and determined character. Cox paper suggests that giving a strong and empowered character to a female narrator can create a vivid contrast between the protagonist and Dazai himself, and his self-criticize can be done remarkably, which can be clearly shown in “December 8th”. However, in Schoolgirl, the first-person narrative serves another purpose, the protagonist appears to be Dazai’s incarnation, by expressing the innermost thoughts of self-hatred and weariness of a schoolgirl, Dazai criticizes himself for “being impure”, which is one of the most impressive elements throughout the novel.
Schoolgirl takes place entirely in a day, from the very moment the protagonist wakes to the end of the day, that she falls asleep at night. This writing style suggests dullness and sameness of the repetitive painful daily activities of a girl who is preserved along the road to adolescence. The protagonist is discouraged and hopeless as she is in long-term sufferings that do not appear to have an end. The current youth life to her is distasteful, full of conflicts which without any guidance to escape from the pain:
No one knows our agony. Perhaps we could frankly recall the loneliness and anguish and comment: “how ridiculous” after we have grown up. But how should we get along with this obnoxious prolonged period before turning into an adult? No one tells me.
In particular, the pain comes from the conflicts between herself of being a “good girl” or a “bad girl”. The most noticeable parameter is purity which appears multiple times in the novel: whenever she confronts with people, such as her mother, the art teacher or the society, she describes herself as impure and filthy. Purity in here does not completely relate to the “ideal women” constructed in traditional Japanese society which sexualizes women and emphasizes on their sexual purity. Or the assumption in purity culture that the more the sex activities a female performs, the less worthy she is. Dazai tends to interpret purity as the “mental purity” that follows social expectations and rules for a teenage girl. The protagonist first condemns impurity of herself when she was being an art model for her teacher Ito:
Thus, I act as a model obediently while I was praying: “I want to be more natural and honest”… A person with attitude but not meaning who pretend to be know-it-all only results in contempt.
In this context, the protagonist considers purity as a requirement to be an art model. She does not engage in being a dedicated model who can pose confidently and naturally. Indeed, she was just pretending to be professional by doing excessive poses. She hates herself of deceiving Ito that she has a beautiful soul though in fact she does not. Purity here means the honesty when exposing weaknesses to others, to be pure in her standard, she has to admit that her inner beauty does not exist and rejects Ito’s request by admitting her insignificancy like what a child would do, instead of pretending to be a professional adult. This difficult circumstance of acting like an adult or a child always puzzles the protagonist in her puberty. On one side, she does not want to be considered as a child as she can develop her independent thoughts and feelings as an individual, which is not a child who only follows parents’ instructions. On the other side, she is not well-experienced and confident enough to handle adult things so that she has to pretend to be self-assured. The impurity arises from the dishonesty. This insoluble conflict may relate to Dazai’s adolescence, being the sixth child in a big family, he did not receive enough attention from the prestige land-owning family as he was not the heir who was brought up with extra care and cultivation. As an act of rebellion or out of sympathy as a son of the land-owner, he joined the underground communist movement that protests against his own family. His own thoughts about life and his distasteful youth are reflected on the schoolgirl, a “bad girl” in family aspects.
The protagonist also shows dissatisfaction about herself fitting in social constrains for an adult woman. The protagonist does not directly criticize the patriarchal Japanese society that restricts women from being liberated, but finds herself disgusting as she follows social norms and considers public gaze:
That lady has a huge tummy, she grins from time to time. What a hen. I, who secretly do the hairstyle in Hollywood, have no difference from the woman. I remember the lady with heavy makeup sitting next to me. Ew, stained, filthy. Women are hateful. Because I am a female, I understand how impure a woman is. … I want to get sick. If I suffer from a serious illness, sweat like a pig and becomes skinny, I may become clean and pure again.
The protagonist mentions once again the lady sitting next to her on the train after
seeing a pregnant woman who is belittled as a “hen”. Although she plays down on the woman, she thinks they are the same. This clearly suggests a hatred towards women that follow traditional social values and the gender stereotypes, and her self-hatred of turning into an adult woman. An ideal woman in Japanese culture is represented by Yamato Nadeshiko, in which Yamato is another name for Japan and Nadeshiko is the floral metaphor for feminine characters such as modest, kind, gentle, virtuous, pure and beautiful. It is also common in a patriarchal society to think that woman has the ultimate responsibility to become a nice mother and wife. Therefore, when the protagonist sees the pregnant woman who does not protest against this unfairness but satisfied with the social and family role that forced to Japanese women in general, she considers her as a hen, which only lays eggs for people without personal thinking. However, she also tries to fit in the social standards of beauty by going to the salon, Hollywood. She wants to be pretty and attractive. Since it is an instinct for the youth to dress up themselves and concern about their appearance. But she has full-awareness of social constrains and standards for women which she does not want to follow, therefore when she follows her instincts to be lovely, she finds herself disgusting as she unintentionally follows the beauty standard under the traditional values. The impurity here stands for her rebellious mentality of rejecting social consensus: the obeying gender role of a female in Japanese society, which is considered as “impure”. Dazai here uses metaphor to describe her innermost feelings: she wishes that through physical torture, particularly serious illness and sweat out all the “impurities” inside her body, she can become “pure” again and gladly accept the social role without being “overly self-conscious” which brings her agony. This thought continues to appear when the protagonist mentions impurity in the third time:
I have been too childish, even impure in these days. Only filth and shame. … Women in the past were criticized as slaves and insects that deny themselves, or puppet etc. But they are women with positive femininity when compare to me. They are broad-minded and wise enough to tolerate and obey, they also know the beauty of sacrificing themselves and the joy of giving without asking for returns.
The meaning of impurity is well-delivered in this excerpt. Although the protagonist looks down on the pregnant woman on the bus and accuses her as a non-thinking reproductive hen, in this part, she praised the feminine characters of them. This content seems to be conflicting between itself, but indeed it is considered as the Dazai’s featured sarcastic tone that used to criticized himself as Cox suggests. In fact, the despised attitude towards those ideal traditional women does not change when praising them. By admiring their selfless spirit of devoting, the protagonist discloses her impurity of being unable to act the same that the society wants her to. She is disappointed by her overwhelming thoughts and full awareness about gender expectation in the traditional Japanese society that stops her from blindly following. Under such condition, the protagonist ends up with self-loathing and considers herself as impure that implicates the abnormal thoughts that deviate her from being an ideal woman with purity, as it is one of the most important parameters to determine one’s value.
The overall tone of Schoolgirl is dark and direct, as many of the works in the wartimes. The novel also bears some resemblance to Dazai’s life, such as the painful adolescent development of both the mind and the body. To alleviate the agony in this period, Dazai developed an interest in communism and joined the underground activities to actualize himself in opposing his own family and identity. For the protagonist in Schoolgirl, the only feeble protest she makes is wearing the undergarment with white rose sewing. White is the color of purity, chastity and innocence. White flowers are usually used to convey the sympathy of humility. The protagonist hides her innocence and innermost thoughts under her school uniform and kimono, keeping it as a secret in herself and comforts herself that her values are not determined by society. The protagonist isn’t acting out an expected rebellion like Dazai, instead, she silently copes with the feelings and thoughts with the white rose as consolation, though it does not work so well. The last sentence “We will never meet again” indicates the hopelessness and desperation of the protagonist and also Dazai.
References
Cohn, Joel. “Dazai Osamu.” In Modern Japanese Writers, edited by Jay Rubin, 71–88. New
York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2001.
Cox, Jamie Walden. "Dazai's Women: Dazai Osamu and His Female Narrators." Master’s thesis, Portland State University, 2012.
Dazai, Osamu 太宰治. ”Nyonin sōzō” 女人創造 [Creating Women]. Aozora Bunko, 2012.
Dazai, Osamu 太宰治. 女生徒 [The Schoolgirl]. Translated by 劉子倩. Taipei: Bookrep 大牌出版, 2018.
Dazai, Osamu. “December 8th.” Translated by Phyllis Lyons. In The Columbia Anthology of Modern Japanese Literature, edited by J. Thomas Rimer and Van C. Gessel, 373-380. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005.
Molony, Barbara, and Kathleen S. Uno, eds. Gendering Modern Japanese History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2005.
O'Brien, James Aloysius. “A Biographical and Literary Study of Dazai Osamu." PhD diss., Indiana University, 1969.
Ren, Jiang-hui. “The Analysis About the Thought of Japanese Mulaiha Literature Writer Osamu Dazai.” Journal of Southern University of Science and Technology 29, no.3 (2012): 61-65.
陳婷婷, and 徐旻. “The Deconstruction and Reconstruction of Self-Identity: The Growth Theme of Osamu Dazai’s Sunset.” 日語學習與研究, nko.2 (2013): 112-19.
Ostling, Richard. “What is ‘Purity Culture’? Why is This Term in the News Right Now?” Get Religion, August 4, 2019.
Ko, Kyota. “Modern Japanese Women – Their Traits and How to Get Along.” The Metro-classic Japanese, December 17, 2018.
Disclaimer
This paper has been submitted as a term paper in my undergraduate studies. I personally like it so much that i‘d love to share with people who love Joseito as well! Lemme me know your thoughts by commenting or dm! : )
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