No Longer Human

One aspect of The Setting Sun puzzled many readers, however, and may puzzle others in Dazai’s second novel No Longer Human: the role of Western culture in Japanese life today. Like Yozo, the chief figure of No Longer Human, Dazai grew up in a small town in the remote north of Japan, and we might have expected his novels to be marked by the simplicity, love of nature and purity of sentiments of the inhab. itants of such a place.

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However, Dazai’s family was rich and educated, and from his childhood days he was familiar with European literature, American movies, reproductions of modern paintings and sculpture and much else of our civilization. These became such important parts of his own experience that he could not help being influenced by them, and he mentioned them quite as freely as might any author in Europe or America.

In reading his works, however, we are sometimes made aware that Dazai’s understanding or use of these elements of the West is not always the same as ours. It is easy to conclude from thin that Dazai had only half digested them, or even that the Japanese as a whole have somehow misap. propriated our culture.

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I confess that I find this parochialism curious in the United States. Here where our suburbs are jammed with a variety of architecture which bears no relation to the antecedents of either the builders or the dwellers; where white people sing Negro spirituals and a Negro soprano sings Lucia di Lam.

mermoor at the Metropolitan Opera; where our cele brated national dishes, the frankfurter, the hamburger and chow mein betray by their very names non American origins: can we with honesty rebuke the Japanese for a lack of purity in their modern culture? And can we criticize them for borrowing from us when we are almost as conspicuously in their debt? We find it i nal that we drink tea, their beverage, but curious that they should drink whiskey, ours.

no longer human osamu dazai Read

Our professional decorators, without thinking to impart to us an adequate background in Japanese aesthetics, decree that we should brighten our rooms with Buddhist statuary or with lamps in the shapes of paper. lanterns. Yet we are apt to find it incongruous if a Japanese ornaments his room with examples of Chris tian religious art or a lamp of Venetian glass. Why does it seem so strange that another country should have a culture as conglomerate as our own?

There are, it is true, works of recent Japanese literature which are relatively untouched by Western influence. Some of them are splendidly written, and convince us that we are getting from them what is most typically Japanese in modern fiction. If, how.