Trivia Week 10 [Last!]
The Saga of Dazai Osamu by Phyllis I. Lyons
chapters: The Journey Outward, Fatal Success, Conclusion
And yet still 人間失格 is somehow much more darker version of his life. As Lyons puts it “the events are all transformed negatively”. 
During this week’s portion, morphine addiction finally makes an entrance, but different circumstances lead to it and it was at the end of the story vs in the middle of Dazai’s life.
Basically Yōzō’s life ends much quicker than Dazai’s, just after the traumatic mental hospital experience.
Thank you all for sharing the book club space with me and giving me the motivation to finally read Lyons’ book. (Well, at least the non-fiction part of it, because there are also short stories included, some of which I didn’t read yet.)
Of course I didn’t quote everything, and there were many things I had to skip because it would get to long and because it wouldn’t be fair use anymore 
(although the book itself is out of print, unfortunately, I had to buy a pricey second-hand copy)
Final Women
Ōta Shizuko
- A young woman whom he [Dazai] had known for several years, and who had been corresponding with him while he was in Tsugaru
- Shizuko had first become interested in Dazai while she was suffering intense guilt feelings over the death of her infant daughter; the child had died, Shizuko was certain, because she no longer loved her husband
- Shizuko is the general model for Kazuko, the heroine of The Setting Sun
- The Setting Sun is based on her diary: but the events of this diary cover mainly the events of the first half of Dazai’s novel
- There is evidence that The Setting Sun was to end in eight chapters with Naoji arc ending as the conclusion, but Shizuko was now pregnant with Dazai’s child, and this may have inspired him to substitute a more defiant ending
- Dazai never entered the child [daughter] into his family, but he did name her at Shizuko’s request, and wrote a statement recognizing her as his own
- But he was avoiding Ōta Shizuko when she wanted to discuss pregnancy
Yamazaki Tomie
- The next and fatally the last woman in his life
- Tomie’s husband had been sent to the Philiphines by his company; after less than two weeks of marriage, he had been drafted from there; since 1943 he has been missing in action; in July 1947 death had been confirmed (Tomie was already seeing Dazai before confirmation)
- Within a week she had written her first suicide note (which she kept; the one she ultimately left behind was her third) and had chosen the photograph she wanted to be her memorial picture
- Her relationship with Dazai seems, from the evidence of her diary, to have been aimed toward death right from the start
- The bodies of Dazai Osamu and Yamazaki Tomie were recovered on the morning of June 19, 1948, on what would have been Dazai’s fortieth birthday by Japanese count
- Some critics claimed, on various physical evidence that Dazai was already dead, or the least unconscious, when he entered the water; they hint darkly that she may have made sure he would not escape this time; perhaps, had Tomie not been so set on it, he might have survived yet another attempt; perhaps Dazai had finally met a woman who would make up his mind for him
[Dazai] ashses were laid to rest at Zenrinji Temple near his home in Mitaka, in a tomb facing that of another writer he had admired, Mori Ōgai.
人間失格 quotes (spoilers for the Week 10)
Yōzō’s world is empty and echoing. He is, by his own description, a bizarre little fellow. By some accident of fate, he has been placed in a world whose first principled he cannot even discern. What it means to be human is a puzzle to him. They are many and he is one, so he must adapt to survive; but like a little creature from outer space plunked down on an alien planet, he can only change his surface coloration and pray that his truly different metabolism will not be discovered. […] If Yōzō stands appalled at human hypocrisy, stupidity, and mindless cruelty, he also is sadly unable to respond to the warmth, love and trust that also exist in the human world.
When the bar madam at the end says, “It’s his father’s fault,”, that is Dazai’s judgment on his life. If his father had not abandoned him, in life or in death, when he was in high school, his life would have been different. We can remonstrate that the outcome would have been the same, but the child in Dazai only repeats, “It was his fault.”
What was In Recollections a touching, amusing scene of Osamu’s younger brother helping him paint acne medicine on his face, is transformed in No Longer Human into a horror scene of Yōzō swabbing out Takeichi’s pus-filled ears […]
[…]Dazai’s world was filled with love – failed though it mostly was – while Yōzō’s is devoid of it; and that is the difference.
In real life, the causes of Dazai’s plunge from potential solid citizen to a life of chaos were to him complicated, the threads torn and knotted – gidayuu lessons, Akutagawa’s death, the class struggle, Hatsuyo, family, guilt, resentment, fear – no wonder Dazai could not get the story right. In No Longer Human, the control afforded by pure fiction makes it neater.
About Yoshiko’s rape
Why does he feel a “bottomless horror” surpassing anything he has known so far? The answer lies in the nature of Yōzō’s character, not Yoshiko’s. Yōzō’s emotional metabolism is totally different from that of the people surrounding him. To him, they are like another race of beings; he finds their emotions wholly mysterious and impenetrable. Just once, with the trustful Yoshiko, an instant came when it seemed that he had a meeting points with these beings. Her absolute trust in him elicited an extreme response in him. He took what was for him a terrible risk, and placed his soul in her keeping. The violation of Yoshiko is the violation of her “immaculate trustfulness” – the one virtue, Yōzō confesses to himself, that he had depended on.
Oh look Lyons also compares Dazai to Camus!
Yōzō’s fatal flaw is, like that of Camus’s “outsider,”, his pathological incapacity of the self-assertion that means life.
Random quotes
Osamu is in some of the stories (as Dazai was in life) a father, but we are left with a final view of him as a fatally damaged child, not a functioning adult.
Had Dazai been a true rebel, he might have ignored outside values and proceeded on his own isolated path; and in fact, Osamu’s saying good-bye to woman at the last in the unfinished novel Good-bye shows that Dazai might have had some other idead about the possible progress of his tale.
I also randomly stumbled upon this link, which I though was interesting. It’s about the fact that Dazai left a note saying that his mentor was an “evil man” and nobody really knows why.
Ibuse was devastated. In his book on Ibuse, John Whittier Treat says that Ibuse came to write over thirty tormented works about Dazai after the latter’s death. One begins “I have no idea why Dazai died.”
Osamu Dazai and Masuji Ibuse - waggish