Pathway to Japanese Literature

Seagull

When I said, “You know, a seagull—that bird’s mute,” most people would calmly nod and reply, “Oh, really? I suppose that could be true,” which flustered me so much that I ended up having to confess my own fabrication: “No—well, doesn’t it sort of feel that way?”
Muteness is a sad thing.
I sometimes feel a mute seagull inside me.

Despite my age, driven by loneliness, I wandered out around noon—aimless—kicking a single stone on the road to send it rolling, then walked on, nudged it again to roll further, until I realized I’d chased this one stone for blocks: kicking-chasing-catching up-kicking again, hands tucked into my waistband, walking like an idiot.
Am I truly a sick person?
Am I mistaken?
I may have misunderstood what a novel truly is.
“Heave-ho,” I muttered softly and leaped over the puddle in the road’s center.
In the puddle, the autumn sky’s blue was reflected, white clouds drifting slowly.
The puddle—how beautiful it is, I think.
With relief, the burden lifted and I wanted to laugh; as long as this small puddle exists, my art too has its foothold.
Let me not forget to preserve this puddle.

I am a man of disgrace.
I appeared to have no guide whatsoever.
Could it be that I was nothing more than one among that crowd—powerlessly adrift, swaying right and left at the mercy of the waves' movement?
And now I somehow seemed to have been placed aboard a terrifyingly fast train.
Where this train was headed, I did not know.
I had not yet been told.
The train ran.
It ran roaring.
Now in mountains, now on shores, now over iron bridges; a tunnel I thought we'd cross—no, not even time to think it—through darkness into open fields, relentlessly passing—ah, passing by.
I blankly watched the scenery outside the window fly past.
With my finger, I scribbled a person's profile on the windowpane, then soon wiped it away.
The day darkened, and the dim bulb in the train car flickered on.
I opened my rationed meager boxed meal and listlessly nibbled at it.
The desolate simmered preserves—even so—I devoured every last grain and smoked a nine-sen Bat cigarette.
Night deepened; I had to sleep.
I slept.
Under the pillow lay the terrifying scream of rushing wheels.
But I had to sleep.
I closed my eyes.
Now in mountains, now on shores—the young girl's plaintive voice singing those words came welling up from beneath the roaring wheels.

The passion to love one’s country—is there anyone who lacks it?
But I cannot say it.
The act of proclaiming it loudly and shamelessly is beyond me.
There were times when I would peek at the soldiers heading off to the front from the shadows of the crowd and end up sniveling quietly.

I was third-class.
I had been born with an inferior physique.
Even when hanging from a horizontal bar, I would just dangle limply—unable to perform any stunts or movements.
I couldn’t even do radio calisthenics properly.
My inferiority wasn’t limited to physique alone.
My spirit was feeble.
I was hopeless.
I lacked the ability to guide others.
Though I seemed to love my country as fiercely as anyone—secretly—I couldn’t voice it.
Somehow I felt I had a true declaration of love right at my throat—yet couldn’t speak it.
It wasn’t that I knew and chose silence.
It felt lodged there—but no matter how I strained, it wouldn’t emerge.
The phrase seemed genuinely noble; even as I tried grasping it clearly now, the more urgently I reached, the more it slithered away.
I stood there blushing vacantly like some incompetent.
I couldn’t compose even one patriotic poem.
Couldn’t write anything at all.
One day, the words I poured my soul into uttering—how utterly pathetic—were “Let’s die! Banzai.” Knowing no way to prove loyalty except through death, I remained what I was: a country fool through and through.

I was a petty and powerless citizen.
I made shabby comfort bags and had my wife take them to the post office.
From the front line came a polite receipt notice.
I read it, and my face burned as if on fire.
Shame.
It was mortification in the literal sense.
There was nothing I could do.
I possessed not a single resolute word.
Somehow, I couldn't make that shameless declaration of patriotism.
All I did was secretly write servile letters to friends on the front lines.
(I'd resolved to lay everything bare now.) My letters of comfort were truly inept.
I wrote nothing but lies.
I even penned such nauseatingly sycophantic flattery that I appalled myself.
Why was this?
Why did I grovel so before people from the front lines?
Hadn't I been meant to strive with all my soul to leave behind worthy art?
Yet even that solitary shred of pride—I was trying to discard it.
Novel manuscripts too arrived from the front line.
They asked me to introduce them to magazine publishers.
The manuscripts were scrawled on Western paper in rice-grain-sized characters—some lengthy works spanning many sheets, others brief stories confined to two pages.

I read them earnestly.
They were not good.
The battlefield scenes written on those papers did not move a single step beyond the landscapes I idly conjured while propping my cheek on the desk in my shabby house.
Nowhere in those manuscripts could new emotional discoveries be found.
"They write 'I was deeply moved,' but these emotions had been indoctrinated by trite, inferior literature—shallow sentiments born from haphazardly learning that inserting such reactions here, in this manner, would make their writing seem properly novelistic and 'cohesive.'"
Merely imagining the soldiers’ toil of mud, sweat, and blood made me physically sense it in full; such was my reverence that I became utterly speechless.
Even the word "reverence" rang hollow.
I grew unable to speak.
All words vanished.
I merely crouched down, using my finger to write characters in the sand—writing and erasing, erasing and writing.
I could not say anything.
I could not write anything.
Yet in art, it differed.
Can you laugh at that pitiful old street musician—his teeth crumbling away, back bent, wheezing with asthma—as he desperately scrapes his violin in the dim alleyway?
I consider myself akin to that.
Socially, I had been defeated from the very beginning.
But art.
To even mention it felt mortifying and unbearable, yet with a fool’s single-mindedness, I resolved to investigate that thing.
I deemed it sufficient as a man’s lifelong work.
Street musicians have their own kingdom.

I read several novels written by the soldiers and found them unacceptable.
Perhaps my expectations for those manuscripts were too high, but I couldn't help thinking that on the front lines—for those of us in third-class—there must exist entirely new emotions and contemplations we could never conceive of even if we stood on our heads.
A vast, boundless something.
An eternal shudder and emotion akin to seeing God before one’s eyes.
I wanted to be shown that.
You didn’t need grand gestures.
Gestures were better the smaller they were.
Entrust it to a single flower; you should express your own unfeigned emotion and prayer.
It certainly existed.
Something entirely new existed there.
I say this with pride—it was through my modest instinct as an artist that I understood this.
But I couldn’t specify it concretely.
I didn’t know the front line, after all.
I wasn’t so presumptuous as to haphazardly write about emotions of a life I’d never experienced with feigned authenticity.
No, no—perhaps I simply lacked talent.
Unless it was something I’d groped for and obtained myself, I absolutely couldn’t write it.
I had no choice but to keep treading down the small world where conviction existed.
I knew my station.
There was nothing to do but leave all matters of the front lines entirely to those on the front lines.

I read the soldiers’ novels.
To my chagrin, they were not good.
They did not speak of what they themselves had seen, but instead narrated the war using words taught to them by the inferior literature they had once read.
People who knew nothing of war spoke of war, and since that received foolish acclaim on the home front, even soldiers who properly knew war ended up imitating that style.
People who did not know war should not write about war.
Stop your unnecessary meddling.
Would they not only end up getting in the way?
I read the soldiers’ novels and felt unbearable hatred toward those on the home front—people who wrote about war having only viewed it through a telescope.
Your self-satisfied literature had destroyed the innocent soldiers’ “capacity to see things.”
This was a statement that could only be made to writers on the home front; to the soldiers at the front, I could say nothing.
When utterly exhausted yet managing to find a moment of respite, they must have written earnestly by candlelight.
When I thought of that, there was no room for me to expound on art or elaborate my own aesthetics.
In the letter accompanying the manuscript, it was written: “Since our lives may end tomorrow, we humbly ask for your kind consideration.”
I made some adjustments to the novel—if I may say so, though I had no right to do so.
And then I instructed my wife to transcribe the characters on the crumpled Western-style paper onto four hundred–character manuscript paper.
The longest was around thirty pages.
I entrusted them to various occupational magazines.
“Since I believe it’s written with relative sincerity and think it’s a good work, I humbly ask for your kind consideration.”
I began to write things like, “You may find it abrupt that a man of no virtue like myself would submit the soldiers’ manuscripts, but human sincerity is another matter entirely, and even I—” only to stumble and falter.
“What’s this ‘even I’ nonsense?”

Cut the lies already.
You’re what they call human dregs now.
Are you that clueless?

I knew that.
I’d been made so aware of it that I was sick to death.
That’s precisely why I kept stumbling.
Five years ago, I went through a spell of half-madness.
When I recovered from my illness and left the hospital, I stood utterly alone in a scorched wasteland.
There was nothing.
Literally nothing but the clothes on my back.
All that remained were unpaid debts.
My house had been struck by lightning—now gourds flowered where it stood.
The bitter pathos of that ancient verse seared itself into my chest.
I’d even been stripped of my humanity.

I must not exaggerate the facts at this moment.
Since I write with utmost care, I believe readers may trust me.
What I detest most is being brushed off with a snort as *that typical self-aggrandizing hyperbole*.
Back then, no one would acknowledge me.
No matter what I said, people would eye me strangely, steal furtive looks at my face, then turn away.
Legends about me—ponchi cartoons—appeared to circulate from mouth to mouth with smugly scornful laughter, though I knew nothing of this at the time and merely drifted through the streets.

As one year, then two passed, even my dull-witted self gradually came to understand the truth of the matter.
According to people’s talk, I had been a complete madman.
What’s more, a madman since birth.
Upon learning this, I became mute thereafter.
I no longer wished to meet anyone.
I no longer wished to speak anything.
No matter what people said to me, I resolved only to keep smiling outwardly.

I have become gentle.

Five years had already passed since then.
And even now I still seemed to be thought of as half-mad.
I knew full well that people who had never met me—who knew only my name and the legends clinging to it—would observe my face at gatherings with an indescribably rude gaze, both uneasy and as if beholding something uncanny, stealing furtive glances.
When I stood at the toilet, there were times someone behind me would loudly remark, “What’s this? Dazai’s not such a weird fellow after all,” their words faintly reaching my ears.
Each time, I felt something peculiar.
I had been dead for so long, yet you all failed to notice.
Only my soul somehow kept living.

I am not human now.
An artist—a peculiar breed of creature.
I mean to prop up this dead corpse until sixty and show you all what makes a great writer.
To dissect the secrets in that cadaver’s writings? Futile.
To mimic the ghost’s scribblings? Impossible.
Quit trying.
Friends apparently whisper “Dazai’s gone senile” when I smile vacantly.
True enough—I’ve gone senile. But—I begin before swallowing the rest.
Just trust this one thing:
“I won’t betray you.”

It’s that the Ego has been lost.
And then—I start to say, but lose the desire to even voice this.
There’s one more thing I can say.
Those who don’t believe me are fools.

Now, regarding the matter of the soldiers’ manuscripts—I steeled myself against embarrassment and made a request to the editor. Occasionally, they were kind enough to publish them. When I saw that magazine advertisement appear in the newspaper—the soldier’s name now listed alongside those of esteemed novelists—I felt twice as happy as I had six years earlier, when my first short piece was published in a literary magazine. I felt grateful. I promptly expressed my profuse gratitude to the editor. I cut out the newspaper advertisement and sent it to the front line. I was of use. This was the utmost service I could perform. From the front line as well, innocent letters declaring “Banzai!” arrived. After some time, a letter filled with undeservedly kind words arrived from the soldier’s wife at his home front as well. Home front service. How about that? Am I still decadent even now? Am I still an immoral person even now? How about that?

However, I could not tell it to anyone.
When I thought about it, this was service women and children ought to perform—nothing particularly worth boasting of.
I still wrote what might be called “game literature,” like a fool oblivious to the zeitgeist.
I knew “bun.”
I was a petty citizen.
I could not issue any commands to the zeitgeist.
Even so—when I sometimes left home forlornly on impulse, walking the road while kicking stones—was I truly ill after all?
I agonized—could I be fundamentally mistaken about what novels should be? No—even as I denied this, no grand thought emblazoned in bold characters arose to bolster my confidence.
There were no definitive words.
Though feeling them on the tip of my tongue, somehow I could not grasp them.
I was a wandering people.
Drifting along with the waves, ever remaining lonely.
With a grunt, I leaped over the puddle and felt relief.
In the puddle was reflected autumn sky, clouds drifting.
Somehow saddened yet relieved.
I turned back toward home.

When I returned home, someone from the magazine company had come and was waiting.
Lately, from time to time, people from magazine companies and newspaper companies came to check up on me.
My house was located deep in Mitaka, far into the countryside amidst fields; they spent nearly an entire day searching for my shabby house and arrived wiping their sweat, saying, “My, it’s quite remote, isn’t it?”
Since I was an unpopular, unknown writer, I felt deeply apologetic each time.

“Has your illness improved?”
Without fail, this was always the first question asked.
Since I was accustomed to it,

“Yes, I’m sturdier than most people.”
“What was it like?”
“It was five years ago,” I answered, keeping a straight face.
I didn’t want to say I’d been a madman.

“According to rumors,” they offered from across.
“I’ve heard it was rather terrible, though.”

“I recovered while drinking alcohol.”

“That’s rather odd.”

“I wonder what could have caused it.”
The master too joined the guest in acting puzzled.
“It may not have healed, but well, I’m treating it as if it has.”
“There’s no end to it, you know.”

“Do you drink a lot of alcohol?”

“I drink about as much as an ordinary person.”

Up to that point in the exchange，it fell into the category of a decent performance—but afterward，things gradually fell apart.
It became a jumbled mess.

“What do you think—what do you think of other people’s novels these days?” When asked this, I became terribly flustered.
Resolute words—I had none.

“Well...”
“I haven’t been reading much, but are there any good ones?”
“When I read them, I’m usually impressed—but really, I can’t help finding it strange how everyone manages to write so swiftly.”
“It’s not sarcasm.”
“Is it because they’re physically robust?”
“Truly, everyone writes so fluently.”

“Have you read Mr. A’s work?”

“Yes, I read it after receiving the magazine.”

“That’s awful, isn’t it?”

“Do you think so...?”
“I found it interesting, though.”
“Aren’t there plenty of even worse works out there?”
“I don’t think there’s any need to single that out for criticism.”
“What kind... of thing could it be?”
“Well, I don’t really know much about it, you see.”

My replies did not become this half-hearted out of cunning intent; rather, it was from servility that they grew so unclear. Everyone seemed superior to me, and in any case, I could see that each person was living with all their might, so I ended up unable to say anything.

“Do you know Mr. B?”

“Yes, I know him.”

“We’ve arranged to have that person write a novel this time.”

“Ah, that’s good.”
“Mr. B is a very good person.”
“By all means, have him write it.”
“I think he can definitely write something wonderful now.”
“There was a time when I too received kindness from Mr. B.”
“I’m borrowing money from him.”

“What about you?”
“Can you write?”

“I’m no good.”
“I’m completely no good.”
“I’m just terrible at it.”
“While telling a love story, I end up slipping into a lecturing tone and find myself laughing in dismay all alone.”

“That can’t be true. Haven’t you been leading the charge for the younger generation until now?”

“You must be joking. Lately, I’ve become exactly like Faust. I’ve come to understand those mutterings in the old doctor’s study all too well. I’ve aged terribly, you see. I hear Napoleon said something like ‘my remaining years’ once he was past thirty—now that I understand that, I find it so absurd I can’t help myself.”

“Do you yourself feel what they call ‘remaining years’?”

“I’m not Napoleon—no, that’s not it at all—but yes, I do sometimes get this sudden sense of remaining years.”
“And I’m certainly no Dr. Faust either—it’s not like I’ve read ten thousand books—but still, I’ll occasionally feel that same kind of void come over me.”
The exchange grew hopelessly tangled.

“That’s no way to be, is it? You’ll forgive my rudeness, but how old are you?”

“I’m thirty-one.”

“So you’re one year younger than Mr. C. Mr. C is always in high spirits whenever I meet him. When it comes to literary theory or anything else, he really speaks briskly. His eyes are truly remarkable.”

“That’s true. Mr. C is my high school senior, but he always has eyes glistening with passion. He’ll probably start churning out works one after another from now on. I like him.”

To that Mr. C as well, I caused great trouble five years ago.

The visitor, growing visibly irritated at my indecisiveness, changed his tone. “Just what kind of principles,” he demanded, “do you hold when writing novels? For example—things like humanity, love, social justice, beauty. Is there even one such thing that you’ve maintained from your literary debut until now, and will continue to uphold hereafter?”

“There is.”
“Remorse.”
This time, I could respond immediately with the crisp resonance of a struck bell.
“Literature without remorse is a kappa’s fart.”
“Remorse, confession, reflection—from such things modern literature, no—rather, modern spirit must have been born.”
“So—”
Again, I had stammered.

“I see,” the other said, leaning forward. “So that current has vanished from the literary world now.”
“Then you must like writers like Kajii Motojirō, I suppose.”

“Lately—I don’t know why—this nostalgia keeps growing stronger within me.”
“Perhaps I’ve become old-fashioned.”
“I take no pride whatsoever in my own heart.”
“Rather than pride, I feel ashamed of it as something truly repulsive.”
Though I don’t fully grasp the meaning of “karmic destiny,” I sense something akin to it within myself.
To say “child of sin” would make me sound like some sanctimonious preacher—unbearable—but how else to put it? This conviction that I once committed some terrible deed, that I’m fundamentally foul.
Because I can’t rid myself of this conviction, I remain perpetually servile.
“Though truthfully, even I find this state—”
My words faltered mid-sentence.
I had meant to speak of the Bible.
I wanted to say it had once saved me, but shame sealed my lips.
Is not life more than meat, and the body than raiment?
Behold the fowls of the air: they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns.
Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin: yet Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.
If God so clothe the grass of the field—which today is, and tomorrow is cast into the oven—shall he not much more clothe you?
“Are ye not much better than they?” Christ’s consolation had once granted me strength to live “without pretense.”
Yet now I couldn’t voice it for shame.
Is faith not meant to be held silent within?
Somehow even uttering the word “faith” felt impossible.

Then we discussed various other matters too, but the visitor—appearing greatly disappointed by the disjointedness of my ideas—began making preparations to leave. I felt truly sorry for him. I wracked my brain for some clear, decent words to say—but there were none. After all, I am a vacant-faced fool. That I understood full well the visitor’s kindness—that he must have come intending to help advance my standing even slightly—only rendered my own gracelessness all the more intolerable.

After the guest left, I sat vacantly at my desk and gazed at the Musashino fields fading into dusk.
I harbored no particular solemn reflections.
Only an inconsolable desolation.

While thou art yet on the way with thine accuser, make haste to be reconciled.
For verily shall the accuser deliver thee unto the judge, and the judge shall deliver thee unto the officer, and thou shalt be cast into prison.
Truly I say unto thee: Thou shalt not come out thence till thou hast paid the uttermost farthing.
(Matthew 5:25–26.) Wait—is hell coming for me again?
The thought flickered through my mind.
An anxiety like a subterranean rumble trembling up from unfathomable depths.

Am I alone in this?

“Hey, give me money.”
“How much is there?”

“Well, there should be four or five yen.”

“Can I use it?”

“Yes, please leave at least a little.”

“I know.”
“I’ll be back by around nine.”

I took the wallet from my wife and went out.

It was already dusk.

A thin mist hung in the air.

I entered a sushi restaurant near Mitaka Station.
Give me sake.
What disgraceful words.
Give me sake.
What a trite, repetitive cliché.
I wondered how many hundreds—no, thousands—of times I had repeated this phrase.
Ignorant, filthy words.
If there were a young man in these times going around complaining of hardship, drinking sake, putting on airs of profundity and getting full of himself—I would beat him senseless.
Without hesitation.
But how did I differ from that youth?
Wasn’t I exactly the same?
The fact that I was older only made it all the more vile.
How self-satisfied.

I drink sake with a serious face.
How many thousands of *sho*, tens of thousands of *sho* of sake have I drunk up to now?
I drink on, thinking: I don’t want to, I don’t want to.
I hate alcohol.
Not once have I ever thought it tasted good as I drank.
It’s bitter stuff.
I don’t want to drink.
I want to stop it.
I consider the act of drinking alcohol to be a sin.
It’s definitely vice.
But alcohol helped me.
I have not forgotten that.
Because I am a mass of vice, it may take the form of using poison to control poison.
Alcohol restrained my madness.
It made me avoid my suicide.
I am such an abject weakling that unless I drink alcohol and numb my thoughts a little, I cannot even hold a proper conversation with friends.

I was starting to get a bit drunk.

The sushi restaurant waitress was twenty-seven this year.
She had once married and divorced, and was said to be working there.

“Master,” she called me and approached the table.
She wore a serious expression.
“This may sound strange,” she began, then glanced furtively toward the cashier’s counter before lowering her voice. “Among your acquaintances… might there be anyone who would take someone like me?”

I studied the waitress’s face anew.
She remained unsmiling, her expression still grave.
She had always been a proper and earnest waitress—she couldn’t possibly be mocking me.

“Well,”
I could no longer avoid considering it seriously.
“It’s not that there aren’t any, but asking someone like me for such a thing is pointless.”

“Yes, but I thought I’d ask all my regular customers too.”

“How strange.”
I let out a small laugh.

The waitress twisted one cheek into a smile,

“I’m just getting older by the day, you know.”
“Since it wouldn’t be my first marriage, I wouldn’t mind even an older man.”
“I’m not expecting any good points or anything like that.”

“But I don’t have any leads.”

“Yes, there’s no need to rush, but please keep it in mind.”
“Um, I have a business card here,”
From her sleeve, she hurriedly produced a small business card.
“I’ve written this place’s address on the back too, so if you find someone suitable, no matter how troublesome it is, please let me know with a postcard or something.”
“I’m truly sorry for the trouble.”
“Even if there are several children, I wouldn’t mind.”
“Truly.”

I silently accepted the business card and slipped it into my sleeve.

“I’ll look into it, but I can’t make any promises,” I said. “Please bring the check.”

Leaving that sushi restaurant on my way home left me with an intensely strange mood.
I felt I had glimpsed a fragment of contemporary trends.
It was a century so earnest it felt insincere.
It could neither be pushed nor pulled.
Returning home made me mute again.
Silently handing my wife the somewhat lighter wallet made me want to speak words that wouldn’t come.
I ate ochazuke and read the evening paper.
The train ran.
Now in mountains now on shores now crossing iron bridges—without even meaning to think it—the young girl’s song sounded pitiful.

“Hey, is the charcoal alright?
“They say it’ll run out though.”

“It should be fine. The newspapers are just making noise.”
“When the time comes, we’ll manage then.”

“Is that so?”
“Lay out the futon.”
“No work tonight.”

I was already sober.
When I sober up, it’s always in my nature to find sleep elusive.
I lay down with a thud, making an exaggerated noise, and read the evening paper again.
Suddenly, the evening paper was filled with countless servile smiles, and in an instant, they vanished without a trace.
I wonder—are they all so servile?
I wonder if no one has any confidence.
I threw down the evening paper and pressed my hands against my eyes with such force that it felt like I was crushing my eyeballs.
There was a superstition I held that if I kept at this for a while, sleepiness would come over me.
I recalled this morning’s puddle.
As long as that puddle exists—I thought.
I forcibly made myself believe it.
After all, I was a street musician.
Clumsy as it may be, I might have no choice but to continue playing my violin.
The train’s destination—leave it to the patriots.
“Wait” suddenly flashed across my forehead, emblazoned in bold letters.
What was I waiting for?
I knew not.
Yet, this was a noble word.
The mute seagull wandered offshore, thinking so—yet persisted in its silent drifting.