In this blog post, we will carefully examine how Osamu Dazai’s repeated suicide attempts and Christian influences are reflected in his works, particularly ‘No Longer Human’ and ‘The Sound of the Wind’.
Introduction
Osamu Dazai (born Shuji Tsushima, 1909–1948) attempted suicide five times during his short life of 39 years and ultimately took his own life on his fifth attempt. The question of what drove him to such a desperate act of self-destruction can serve as a key to understanding Dazai.
Naturalist literature, regarded as a major trend in modern Japanese literature, was a form of serious self-exploration grounded not in the question of “What and how should one write?” but in the urgent question of “How should one live one’s life?” In this respect, the weaknesses of the autobiographical novels in this category—such as their narrow-mindedness, flatness, and vulgarity—are to some extent offset. If so, the question “How should one die?”—alongside “How should one live?”—can also be a fundamental question posed by every human being granted life in this world.
There is a saying that demonstrates how the foundation of Japanese bushido lay in the question of how to die. “I have realized that bushido is the act of dying. If one dies again and again every morning and every evening, becoming a body that is always dead, one will attain freedom from martial arts and fulfill one’s duties without error throughout one’s life.” This is one example of how an attitude toward death is directly linked to the norms of life.
In various traditions that predated the dominance of Christian logic, attitudes of tolerance or respect toward noble suicide existed across all times and places, East and West. Just as the ancient Roman philosopher Seneca praised Cato’s voluntary death, suicide was sometimes understood as an act of asserting freedom or dignity through one’s own life. Although suicide was later defined as an act worthy of condemnation from a Christian perspective, historically, there were also viewpoints that regarded suicide as a choice made by a mature human being.
Behind the shift that led to suicide and aiding suicide being condemned both legally and morally lies a change in perception. It has been pointed out that Japan is a place where the gap and contradictions between this perception and reality remain particularly pronounced.
A look at the history of modern Japanese literature reveals that, while personal motives vary, there are quite a few writers who took their own lives. Examples include Kitamura Tokoku, Kawakami Bijan, Arishima Takeo, Akutagawa Ryunosuke, Dazai Osamu, Tanaka Hidemitsu (who followed Dazai and committed suicide at his grave), Mishima Yukio, Kawabata Yasunari, and Eto Jun. Criticism of these individuals is rarely seen; rather, the view that their deaths were the logical conclusion of the lives they led is widely held.
What is interesting is that Takeo Arishima, Ryunosuke Akutagawa, and Osamu Dazai were among the modern Japanese writers who were closest to Christianity. Since Christianity and suicide are elements that, on the surface, seem difficult to reconcile, it is necessary to ask these writers, “What was Christianity to them?”
Dazai read the Bible, particularly the Gospel of Matthew, so many times that he memorized it, and he frequently quoted biblical verses throughout his works. He once expressed the intensity of his Bible reading, stating, “The history of Japanese literature has been divided into two parts with a clarity never seen before by a single book: the Gospel of Matthew, Chapter 28…” Through these points, we can examine the relationship between Christianity and death in Dazai’s life.
Among Dazai’s works, his final novel ‘No Longer Human’ (1948) and the short story ‘Jigsaw’ (1940), which deals with Judas’ betrayal, are particularly helpful in elucidating the causes of his death-oriented mindset. ‘No Longer Human’ is a fictionalized account of the traumatic events Dazai experienced throughout his life and is often referred to as a kind of autobiographical manifesto. “Jigsaw” is a short story that explores the meaning of Christianity and Jesus for Dazai through his own unique interpretation of Jesus and Judas.
The Circumstances of Five Suicide Attempts
Dazai first attempted suicide in 1929, while he was a senior at Hirosaki High School. Critic Takeo Okuno argues that Dazai harbored an instinctive sense of guilt stemming from his upbringing as the son of a wealthy family, and that he attempted suicide because he despaired over his social background after being exposed to communist ideology—a prevailing trend of the time—upon entering high school.
Indeed, there are numerous passages in Dazai’s works that reveal the bewilderment he felt after encountering communism. For example, passages such as “Only the penniless commoners are right. But I was not a commoner. I was the one hanging from the guillotine. I was a nineteen-year-old high school student. I was the only one in my class dressed conspicuously in luxurious clothes. I thought I had no choice but to die” reveal his inner conflict and self-reproach.
Another recollection describes how the discourse on democracy he heard around him during his elementary school days perplexed Dazai, and how he even helped with farm work in the summer in an attempt to teach those workers about democratic ideals. These experiences illustrate the conflict between his sense of guilt as a privileged individual and external ideologies.
Dazai was born as the tenth of eleven children to Tsushima Gen’emon, the owner of the Kanegi Bank and a member of the House of Peers, in a rural family in the northernmost part of Honshu, Japan. The Tohoku region was a poor area plagued by frequent severe winters and droughts, leading to frequent famines. Growing up there as the son of a large landowner and receiving special treatment, Dazai constantly contrasted his own circumstances with the poverty around him, harboring a sense of guilt as a privileged individual. His sensitive nature only intensified this sense of guilt.
However, it is difficult to attribute his first suicide attempt solely to the shock of encountering communist ideology. Despite Okuno’s deep understanding—he described Dazai as “an inseparable part of our youth” and said he had staked everything on Dazai—other factors must also be considered.
Dazai was originally renowned as a prodigy. During his time at Kanegi Elementary School, he received perfect scores in all subjects and served as class president; he consistently achieved excellent grades in middle and high school as well. However, the point at which his grades dropped dramatically coincided with his immersion in literature, his study of Kidayu starting in his first year of high school, and the beginning of his relationship with his classmate Beniko (later his first wife, Oyama Hatsuyo).
While some view Dazai’s transformation as linked to Ryunosuke Akutagawa’s suicide (1927), the background behind his decision to study Kidayu likely involved his family’s deep appreciation for traditional performing arts as well as the prevailing social trends of the time. The problem lay in his exposure to the lifestyle of geisha while studying Kidayu.
Tazawa, whose creative consciousness had become distinct since his days at Aomori Middle School, published short stories and essays in the literary magazine ‘Shinkiro’; from his second year of high school onward, he founded the literary magazine ‘Seppo Bungei’ and continued his literary activities by publishing various works, including ‘Infinite Abyss’. Because the works from this period tended to portray the Tsushima family as bourgeoisie who deserved to be destroyed, some critics have suggested that his first suicide attempt was triggered by a sense of self-loathing stemming from the proletarian literary movement.
However, what is important is that Dazai harbored a special affection and pride for his family home. In one of his writings, he recalled that his family had never behaved disgracefully and was regarded as a respectable family in the community, noting, “I was the only one in this family who committed the foolish act of inviting public scorn.” Such a statement makes it difficult to explain his suicide attempt solely as a result of guilt stemming from his privileged background.
In short, while the sense of guilt he had harbored since childhood may have merged with leftist ideology and spread like a fever during his high school years, we must bear in mind that there were complex circumstances that prevent us from concluding that this directly led to his suicide attempt.
The fact that his first suicide attempt—an overdose of Calmotin taken after praying on the night of December 10, 1929—occurred the night before the start of the second-semester final exams leaves a very different impression from his autobiographical confession. Contrary to his confession that while he praised himself as a prodigy or genius, he grew up neglected as the unremarkable sixth son in his family, it is difficult to equate the characters in his works with his actual life. There is also an aspect that suggests he was a playful young man who excelled in his studies and was well-liked, and that his actions appeared to be a commotion caused by his fear of losing his family’s trust after taking an exam without having studied for it. Considering that the work blends fiction, the author’s true nature, and biographical facts, some elements should be viewed as factual, but one must be cautious about accepting them at face value. It is widely acknowledged that Dazai, who claimed to be naturally timid and unable to say no to others, was, surprisingly, well-mannered and concerned with maintaining his family’s reputation in a respectable household. Therefore, it seems reasonable to view his first suicide attempt as a theatrical act intended to avoid a situation that would have disappointed his family and those around him.
His second suicide attempt occurred in 1930, the year he entered the Department of French Literature at the University of Tokyo. Following a visit and persuasion by his high school senior, Eizo Kudo, Dazai felt an emotional affinity for the Marxist movement and agreed to contribute ten yen a month to fund it. The death of his third older brother, who was closest to him, from tuberculosis at the age of twenty-seven that same year was a major shock to Dazai. Furthermore, the arrival in Tokyo of Oyama Hatsuyo, a geisha with whom he had been close during high school, and the resulting responsibility placed on Dazai likely also played a role. Bunchi, his eldest brother, who had traveled to Tokyo after receiving a call from “Tamaya,” the brothel that employed Hatsuyo, conditionally approved their marriage but imposed demands such as ceasing illegal political activities, establishing a separate household, and being disinherited. As Bunchi—who had run for mayor at twenty-eight and been elected to the prefectural assembly at thirty, with plans to enter national politics—must have worried that the revelation of his younger brother’s involvement with communism could jeopardize his political career.
However, Bunchi did not simply curb Dazai’s activities for the sake of his own advancement. As someone within the system, it is highly likely that he genuinely worried about his younger brother out of a sense of responsibility to keep the family in order after their father’s death, as well as his aversion to communism. In any case, as the phrase suggests—“the one who had driven his mother, brother, and aunt to despair, who had sent the entire family into a state of shock, and who had inflicted hellish suffering upon his mother”—Dazai must have been engulfed in extreme fear and confusion, feeling as though he had become the sole black sheep of the Tsushima family. The shock he felt when disowned by his family must have been far greater than what is revealed in his writings. While autobiographical elements—such as Dazai’s fear of his strict father or the fact that he was raised by his aunt and nanny due to his frail mother—are often pointed out, these points are not significant issues when compared to the affection and pride he harbored for his family.
For Dazai, who lived feeling that he was inherently incapable of understanding people and life, his family home was his only source of solace. As someone who saw himself as incapable of managing his own life, he must have felt extreme anxiety due to the self-loathing of having gone from being the family’s darling to a source of shame overnight, as well as the reality that he had to stand alone as the head of a household. Considering his personality—one that often led him into corners because he refrained from saying what needed to be said out of a fear of hurting others’ feelings—it remains questionable whether he loved Hatsuyo enough to trade his family home for her. In any case, after moving out and receiving a copy of his family register showing his removal on November 19 of that year, he attempted suicide by taking camotine with Atsumi Tanabe (then 19), a waitress at a Ginza café, on the beach in Kamakura on the 29th. This occurred just five days after the engagement ceremony (yuino) with Hatsuyo, which he had sent to his family home.
To Hatsuyo, who was elated with wedding preparations, this must have come as a bolt from the blue. While he was tormented by guilt toward his family, Hatsuyo seemed oblivious and smug, and the fact that Dazai found her attitude distasteful may serve as a clue to explain his “betrayal” or his relationship with another woman. In the suicide note Dazai sent to Hatsuyo, which was made public by his family in 1999, there is a passage that reads, “Your will has likely been carried out to a considerable extent. Now that you are a free woman, discuss everything with Kasai and Hiraoka.” This passage casts doubt on whether he truly desired to marry Hatsuyo. In his essay “Eight Views of Tokyo,” written in his later years, he wrote: “H thinks only of her own happiness. You’re not the only woman. You’re suffering this retribution because you don’t understand my pain. Serves you right. “What pained me most was being separated from my family. The realization that, because of my affair with H, I had become a disgrace to my mother, my brother, and my aunt was the most direct reason for my attempted suicide.” This reflection shows that the primary factor behind his suicide attempt was his estrangement from his family.
In this incident, only Atsumi died, and Dazai was detained on charges of aiding suicide, but with his family’s help, he received a suspended prosecution. Ironically, the suicide attempt he had brought upon himself by disappointing his family ended up causing him to lose their trust completely. The fact that he had caused a woman’s death while surviving himself left him with a sense of guilt that was psychologically difficult to heal. The anguish associated with this incident is deeply embedded in many of his works. Traces of this can be found in ‘The Flower of the Clown’ (1935), ‘The God of Kyogen’ (1936), ‘Fictitious Spring’ (1936), and ‘No Longer Human’.
The fact that Dazai frequently changed his residence—so often that even his friends were unaware of his whereabouts—during the period from 1931, when he lived with Hatsuyo and provided his home as a hideout for underground activists, suggests that he had become far more deeply entangled in the movement than before. However, in 1932, Dazai turned himself in to the Aomori Police Station and broke ties with the underground movement. It is highly likely that this was because his older brother discovered that he had broken his promise and urged him to turn himself in. The argument that the account in ‘Eight Views of Tokyo’, in which Dazai wrote that he “turned himself in because everything became a bother following the shock of learning of Hatsuyo’s infidelity,” does not hold up given the circumstances, is gaining traction.
In any case, Dazai viewed himself as someone who “could never become a revolutionary even if he stood on his head… and was at best a sympathetic supporter and a mediocre financial backer.” Nevertheless, the fact that he abandoned communism—which he had purely believed to be the “only correct ideology”—and betrayed his comrades left a deep wound in his psyche.
His third suicide attempt took place in March 1935. Although he was enrolled in university, Dazai—who rarely attended classes due to his involvement in illegal activities, romantic entanglements, and his immersion in creative work—realized he had no chance of graduating. He then attempted to hang himself on a mountain in Kamakura but failed. It is difficult to assume that the mere loss of tuition and living expenses due to failing to graduate was the immediate cause of his suicide. He had already known since March 1933 that he would not graduate, yet his recollection that “I had no intention of graduating. Deceiving the people who trusted me was a maddening hell” is difficult to understand.
The work Dazai devoted himself to writing during this period, intending it as a “suicide note,” was ‘Man’nen’ (1936). Consumed by “self-reproach, self-pity, and fear that felt like death,” he attempted to restore his honor through ‘Man’nen’ and treated it as his sole means of proving why he had been unable to devote himself to his studies. His obsession with the Akutagawa Prize (from 1935, when ‘Reversal’ placed second, through his third submission in 1936) can be understood in the same context. The fact that he quoted Verlaine’s line “The ecstasy and anxiety of the chosen one” at the beginning of his first collection of works, ‘Man’nen’, published when he was twenty-seven, shows that while he was a failure in life, consumed by feelings of inferiority, he simultaneously harbored a sense of pride in being a “chosen one” superior to others. This contradictory emotion, unable to find harmony, manifested in schizophrenic symptoms and became one of the factors that led him to his death.
As the author himself stated, “I wasted ten years of my life to publish this single collection of short stories. For a full ten years, I never ate breakfast with a clear conscience like other people. For the sake of this one book, I constantly wounded my pride, burned my tongue, scorched my heart, and damaged myself beyond repair,” ‘Man-nyeon’ was, in a sense, a kind of suicide note. Although Dazai lived for another twelve years after publishing this book, in some ways he lived a life flowing backward from ‘Man’nen’, and there is also an aspect to it as if he had gained a surplus of life where it didn’t matter when he died.
Previous Suicide Attempts and Background
Comrades, family members, Atsumi… Driving himself, a traitor, toward self-destruction was also the path left to him. “Death is the best option. No, not just for me. At least everyone who is a hindrance to social progress must die.” With this mindset, Dazai believed that when his work stalled and the day came when everything would be exposed, suicide was the only path left to him.
Amid these events, he once took the entrance exam for the Miyako Newspaper Company. Although he failed spectacularly, it is presumed he intended to join the newspaper company to save face for his family. This incident demonstrates that, contrary to previous assumptions, the existence of his family home was extremely important to Dazai.
Up to this point, suicide for Dazai had a largely calculating, pragmatic aspect—almost a form of self-preservation. It can be viewed as a calculated choice to seek exoneration through death when faced with an insurmountable obstacle. Furthermore, the perception prevalent in Japanese society that death forgives and glorifies everything—as evidenced by the practice of referring to the deceased as “Hotoke-sama” (Buddha)—likely played a role to some extent. However, his fourth suicide attempt was qualitatively different from the previous three. Therefore, it is necessary to discuss this fourth attempt separately.
The Fourth and Final Suicide Attempt
In April 1935, Dazai fell into a critical condition due to peritonitis following an appendectomy and became addicted to the painkillers he had been taking during his recovery. At this time, he also discovered that he had contracted pulmonary tuberculosis, as evidenced by coughing up blood. Eventually, in 1936, he was admitted to a psychiatric hospital for treatment of his addiction, an experience that caused him severe psychological trauma. Believing he had been admitted simply for medical treatment, he found himself confined to a barred psychiatric ward, where the sight of the other patients filled him with extreme terror. Furthermore, the realization that his trusted wife and mentor had deceived him and had him committed plunged him into a state of profound distrust of humanity. Although his hospitalization lasted only a short period, from October 13 to November 12, this experience became a decisive turning point that made Dazai realize how the world viewed him. This experience, in which he came to perceive himself as a “non-human” being, formed the basis for ‘No Longer Human’, giving the work a dark and self-mocking atmosphere.
His fourth suicide attempt, made in late March 1937, carries far more complex undertones. While he was hospitalized, his wife, Hatsuyo, had an affair with a painter who was a close relative of Dazai’s. Dazai attempted to end their lives together with Hatsuyo by taking an overdose of medication, but he survived while she died. However, Dazai subsequently suffered from the thought that he had abandoned Hatsuyo. The realization that he had become a “disqualified human being” while confined to a psychiatric ward, coupled with self-loathing and a sense of betrayal toward those who had trusted him, dealt a fatal blow that shattered the “purity,” “innocence,” and “trust”—the things he cherished above all else—due to Hatsuyo’s affair.
What sustained him was his passion for literature and the belief that by portraying his life in stark detail, he could serve the weak, like himself. Although it is estimated that he first encountered the Bible and Christianity around 1933, it was his hospitalization that led him to embrace them more deeply. Dazai’s middle period, during which he married Michiko and enjoyed a lull, producing relatively optimistic works, coincided with the difficult times of the Pacific War; yet it was also the period when he first resolved to make a living as a professional writer. During this postwar period of upheaval, after deciding to stand on his own and achieving a degree of success, he produced many bright and wholesome works, likely influenced by his stable family life and Christian beliefs.
However, postwar Japan brought him nothing but disillusionment and disappointment. The profound insights into life gained through self-denial led to anger and disappointment toward the social conditions of the postwar era, and that anger evolved into frustration and self-abandonment. This self-abandonment did not remain confined to personal circumstances; it also spoke for many idealistic individuals disillusioned by the turbulent postwar situation, which is why it strikes a chord with us. Dazai, who emerged as a popular postwar author, expanded his personal despondency into a platform for social criticism, and in a sense, sought a public form of self-destruction; the inclination toward suicide always surrounded him.
His fifth and final suicide attempt took place in 1948. While his tuberculosis, which had worsened to the point of causing him to cough up blood, likely played a role, his drive toward self-destruction was consummated on June 13 when he took an overdose of medication alongside Tomie Yamazaki, who had remained by his side until the very end, and threw himself into the Tama River reservoir. Thus, his death was finally realized.
Dazai’s Contemporary Significance
There are various explanations for why Dazai was obsessed with self-destruction throughout his life. As mentioned earlier, a sense of guilt over being born with more than others is cited as one reason. His involvement in the Marxist movement can also be understood in this context. There was clearly a sentimental aspect stemming from his sense of guilt in his sympathy for and participation in communism. While some downplay the lasting impact his act of betrayal had on his life, given that Dazai viewed himself as a member of the “people who must perish”—unable to belong to that group due to his background—the scars this betrayal left on his soul at the level of conscience cannot be taken lightly.
Strictly speaking, it is difficult to classify Dazai solely as a writer of private novels (shishosetsu), given that he fictionalized his own life experiences in his works. However, the raw, personal voice imprinted throughout his works offers a glimpse into his true nature.
Some describe him as “a writer one passes through like a rite of passage during a phase of youth and then forgets,” while others hail his work as “the book of youth.” Yet, his status is also criticized by some critics for his exaggerated gestures and emotional outbursts. What, then, is Dazai’s true standing?
During the political upheaval of the 1960s, sparked by protests against the automatic extension of the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty, Dazai’s literature was revered by students as a sacred text. Many young people endured the postwar period of confusion by relying solely on Dazai, and they shared the belief that he should be critically reevaluated and rightfully revived. Amid this atmosphere, Dazai’s literature, labeled as “delinquent literature” or “decadent literature,” dominated a postwar era. Some critics characterized Dazai as a martyr of despair, the first in modern Japan to visualize the negative trajectory of the “soul.”
Writers like Eto Jun empathized with Dazai within the context of the origins of personal ruin and the inversion of contemporary values, while Kojin Karatani honored him as a writer who, alongside figures like Sakaguchi Ango, staked his very existence on confronting existential reality. This empathy and reevaluation ensure that Dazai is not merely seen as a writer who committed suicide, but as a figure who bore witness to the darkness and loss of his era.
Norihiro Kato, citing excerpts from Dazai’s plays, pointed out that the reason those who resisted in their own way without yielding to wartime pressures were excluded from the mainstream literary canon after the war was precisely because they alone had properly recognized the distorted reality of postwar Japanese society. What, then, is the background behind this recent reevaluation of Dazai?
Defeat and Dazai’s Despair
When society is in upheaval and everything seems uncertain, there are those who, having aspired to a “revolution” aimed at shattering all forms of falsehood and hypocrisy, come to keenly feel their own powerlessness in the face of the existing thick walls and choose to risk their lives and plunge into self-destruction. After the defeat, when the ruling elite—who until the day before had defended the war of aggression as a holy war and proclaimed that sacrificing one’s life for the emperor was the path to eternal life—suddenly flipped their stance overnight to advocate for democracy, and even Communist Party figures became intoxicated by the “freedom granted” under the occupation forces, Dazai felt an endless shame so profound that he could no longer live with a clear conscience.
“It is not because we lost the war that we fall. It is because we are human that we fall, and because we are alive that we fall…… Human beings must fall as far as they can fall. And Japan, too, must fall alongside humanity. We must fall as far as we can fall to rediscover ourselves and save ourselves. “Salvation through politics is nothing more than a superficial, laughable notion.” It was only natural that the “Muroha” writers, who had fallen to the very depths under Sakaguchi Ango’s influence, were enthusiastically embraced by the Japanese people after the war, who were consumed by a sense of betrayal.
So why has there been a recent movement to reevaluate Dazai? The modern era is a time of upheaval that demands agonizing self-reflection and despair. The situation we face today—marked by confusion over values, the intensification of intergenerational conflict, and the deepening of confrontations between those with differing opinions—makes us feel an urgent need to seek solutions.
At times like these, Dazai’s literary stance—in which he staked his life on delving into the frailty, distrust, and despair that we, as human beings, cannot help but embrace—offers many insights. While Dazai’s despair cannot itself serve as a solution, without the prerequisite of agonizing self-reflection and a sense of responsibility, we are bound to remain stuck in the same place. In that sense, the recent reevaluation of Dazai can be seen not merely as a Japanese phenomenon, but as a reflection of a shared contemporary consciousness.
“No Longer Human” and “Jikso”
Dazai’s works are generally divided into three periods.
The early period spans approximately four years, from ‘Memories’ (1933) to ‘No Longer Human’ (1937). Following a hiatus of about a year and a half, the middle period begins with ‘Ten Thousand Yen’ (1938) and continues through ‘Eight Views of Tokyo’ and ‘New Hamlet’, ending with ‘Farewell’ and ‘A Book of Old Tales’ in 1945—a span of seven years. The late period spans three years, beginning with ‘Pandora’s Box’ in 1945, continuing through ‘Bion’s Wife’ and ‘Decline’, and ending with ‘No Longer Human’ and ‘Goodbye’ in 1948. Since Dazai took his own life while ‘Goodbye’ was being serialized, ‘No Longer Human’ stands as his final completed novel.
‘No Longer Human’ is the work in which Dazai first broke away from the attitude of writing “for others” to attempt his own artistic autobiography; as described in the text, a “gloomy, goblin-like” self-portrait is laid bare. Consequently, research linking the work to the author’s life has continued; however, considering that Dazai was a writer who felt too shy to reveal himself directly and that his novels were always variations on autobiographical facts, one must be wary of interpretations that rely excessively on autobiography.
Rather, when approaching this work, it may be more effective to interpret it by playing a game of identifying antonyms within the text—for instance, treating Dostoevsky’s ‘Crime and Punishment’ as an antonym rather than a synonym, or considering “flower” as the antonym of “woman” and “viscera” as its synonym within the work. Scholars such as Yoshiki Watanabe and Katsumi Togo have divided the world into a male world belonging to the legitimate sphere and a female world belonging to the illegitimate sphere, convincingly demonstrating the process by which the protagonist Yōjō—alienated from the male-dominated world that constitutes the real power of society—ultimately fails to belong to either world and becomes a “disqualified human.”
Meanwhile, Takeo Okuno, premising that he wrote his theory of Dazai based on ‘No Longer Human’ alone, wrote: “After reading the ‘Preface,’ I sensed that this author was a man who had experienced a life filled with profound anguish beyond our imagination, leading a serious spiritual life completely different from that of an ordinary person.” Few works reveal as clearly as ‘No Longer Human’ the incomprehensible human world governed by self-interest and social standing, as well as the falseness and cruelty of a social order that appears to be solid.
This work, in which the protagonist—who strives to assimilate into society and entrusts his dreams to purity and innocence—is ultimately betrayed by everything and becomes a “disqualified human,” can be regarded as a sharp indictment of modern society in this respect. The ugliness of the conventional human archetypes embodied by Nopchi and Horiki in the novel urges us—who live insensitively, steeped in that very framework—to engage in self-reflection.
Few works present as clearly as this one the fact that modern society, having lost its humanity, is heading down the path to ruin. A society devoid of self-reflection and incapable of shame can ultimately be nothing but Sodom. Whether one acknowledges Yōjo’s anguish will serve as the criterion for accepting or rejecting Dazai.
While ‘No Longer Human’ is a work from Dazai’s later years, ‘Jikuso’ was written during his middle period, when he was living a stable life for the first time after graduating from Tokyo Women’s Normal University and marrying Michiko Ishihara, a high school teacher. Published in 1940 during the only period when Dazai “lived leisurely in a small three-room apartment, saving his royalties and worrying about no one,” and when he began “writing not as a suicide note but to live” and “finally began to seriously support himself through writing at the age of thirty,” this work raises several issues.
First is the interpretation of Judas. As is well known, there is no passage in the Bible that definitively identifies Judas as a traitor. There is even a passage where Jesus tells Judas, “Go and do what you must.” Judas may have been a figure created for the sake of Jesus’s glory. As François Mauriac said, without Jesus, Judas’s anguish would not have existed.
During his time in a mental hospital, Dazai became deeply captivated by Christianity, particularly the “torments of Jesus” as a persecuted figure, and this interest is evident in this work as well. It is said that Dazai completed the work in one sitting while drinking with his wife Michiko, as if dictating it to her. While it is unclear whether he later cross-referenced it with the Bible, the fact that eighteen passages are cited from the Gospel of Matthew alone clearly indicates that he had read the Bible deeply.
Dazai was particularly interested not in Jesus, but in Judas. Unlike Ryunosuke Akutagawa, who viewed Jesus as the greatest figure among humanity, Dazai turns his gaze toward Judas, who, due to his weakness of character, had no choice but to succumb to betrayal. While Dazai projected himself onto both Jesus and Judas, the portrayal of Judas—a figure torn between jealousy and wavering between love and hatred—demonstrates Dazai’s profound interest in Judas.
Judas’s self-reproach—such as his resolve to “kill him with my own hands rather than hand him over to others,” or his statements like “Money. The world is all about money,” and “I’m just a merchant, after all. I chased after him hoping to make a little money, but when I realized it was hopeless, I betrayed him”—demonstrates exceptional psychological insight. In ‘No Longer Human’, Dazai embodies his longing for a pure and innocent being in the figure of Jesus, while portraying Judas—bound by a mix of love and hatred—as a weak human being.
From this perspective, the work could be read as a defense of Judas. At the same time, it reveals that Dazai’s engagement with Christianity remained strictly on a personal level—that is, confined to the issues of betrayal and atonement, with forgiveness excluded. Dazai’s remark—“I don’t go to church, but I read the Bible. I suspect there are few races in the world that can understand the Bible as correctly as the Japanese”—also suggests that he sought to deeply understand the spirit of Christianity on a personal level.
When reading this work, it is important not to forget that it is a novel, not a religious text. Getting caught up in religious debates risks missing the message the work intends to convey. One must focus on what Dazai saw in Judas and why he felt the need to create a new image of Judas.
Another point to note is how effectively Dazai’s characteristic verbose style—a style of ceaseless chatter—highlights Judas’s confused state of mind. While the translation did not reproduce the excessive punctuation for Korean readers, there remains a sense of regret that Dazai’s style could not be fully recreated.
Like many other modern Japanese writers, Dazai’s interest in Christianity did not lead to evangelical faith, a fact that must be considered in the context of Japan’s historical and cultural landscape. Jesus, who embodies the innocence, purity, and beauty that Dazai yearned for throughout his life, and Judas, who, as a weak and ordinary human being, was plagued by inferiority complexes and inevitably driven to betrayal, can be seen as Dazai’s alter egos.
The bar owner’s recollection in the final scene of ‘No Longer Human’—“The Yōjō we knew was truly pure and kind; if only she hadn’t drunk, or even if she had… she was a person as good as God”—clearly illustrates the fusion of purity and ruin that Dazai depicted.
