Suicidal Narrative in Modern Japan: The Case of Dazai Osamu (Studies of the East Asian Institute, Columbia University)

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. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905. Cover 1 Contents 8 Preface -1 Introduction Saint of Negativity 20 Subtext: Between the Facts -1 Critical Connections -1 Part 1: Nation and Suicidal Narrative 36 1. From Seppuku to Jisatsu: Suicide as National Allegory -1 Nation and Antihero -1 A Tale of Two Suicides -1 2. Two Tales of Suicide: Socio-Literary Complicities in Japanese Modernization -1 Suicide East and West -1 Suicidal Genealogies -1 Cross-Cultural Complicities -1 Part 2: Suicidal Autobiography 94 3. Novel, Ghostly, and Negative Selves -1 The Ghostly "I" -1 Negative Selves: The Buraiha Phenomenon -1 Pharmakon and Deathscript -1 Intellectual Outlaws -1 Perversity Personified: Sincere Decadence -1 De-Estheticizing the Political -1 4. The Last of the I-Novelists -1 Specifically Autobiographical -1 An I for An I -1 Silent and Tasteless -1 Dazai's Double-Edged Dagger: The Critical Quandary -1 The Insufficient "I" -1 The Permeable Self -1 The "Last" I-Novelist -1 5. Dying Twice: Allegories of Impossibility -1 The Drowning Fish -1 Suicide and Second Death -1 Suicidal Signifiers -1 Seamy Suicide: Threading the "I" -1 Solitary Sumo: Dazai's "Reminiscences'' -1 Part 3: Japanese Littératuricide and Postwar Rebirth 162 6. Deathscript: Suicide as Political Survival -1 Writing Love and Revolution -1 Tenkō and Literature -1 An Endless String of Commas -1 Tenkō as Littératuricide -1 7. Allegorical Undoings -1 The Myth of Rebirth: Japan in 1945 -1 The Barren Years: Modernization Derailed -1 Modernization Resurrected: Reversing the Course -1 Strands of Suffering -1 8. Japanese Ressentiment -1 Friendly Dissuasion -1 Sunset... Sunrise: Re[Pre]Senting Japan -1 Peasantly Intellectual: The Dilemma of Ressentiment -1 A Japanese Littératuricide -1 Impossible Loves -1 Epilogue Postmodern Postmortem -1 Modern Death and the Nuclear Sublime -1 National Suicide and Posthistorical Japan -1 Postmodern Suicidal Narrative -1 Japanese Postmodernism and the Persistence of Suicidal Narrative -1 Notes -1 Selected Bibliography -1 Index -1 Alan Wolfe. Includes Bibliographical References (p. [247]-255).