Pathway to Japanese Literature

Having suffered war damage twice—if it were just me alone, that would be one thing—but being saddled with a five-year-old and a two-year-old child, I was in dire straits and ultimately ended up sneaking into my family home in Tsugaru, where the four of us became dependents.

Most people—I imagine they already know this—but I had maintained an uncomfortable relationship with my family home’s inhabitants for a long time.
To put it crudely, I had been disowned for the dissolute behavior of my twenties.

And so, having suffered disaster twice and with nowhere left to go, I sent a telegram saying “Please take us in” and marched right into my family home.

And before long, the war ended, and I found myself able to wander through my hometown’s fields in informal kimono attire, leading my five-year-old daughter by the hand.

Truly, it was a peculiar feeling.
I had been away from my hometown for fifteen years now, yet the place itself hadn't changed one bit.
And there I was—wandering through those familiar fields—still nothing more than a man of Tsugaru.
Even after fifteen years living in Tokyo, I remained utterly unlike a city person.
Thick-necked and lumbering, I was through and through a peasant.
What in blazes had I been doing all those years in Tokyo?
Hadn't I managed to become even slightly refined?
I felt something deeply strange.

And so, on one sleepless night, as I reflected on my fifteen years of urban life, I resolved that now was the time to try writing my memoirs once again.
The reason I say "once again" is that about five years prior, I had written and published an unvarnished account of my Tokyo life up to that point under the title *Tokyo Eight Views*.
However, after five years had passed and I came to endure the Great War's hardships, I began to feel that *Tokyo Eight Views* alone was somehow insufficient. This time, I resolved to shift my approach: anchoring the narrative in the works I had published in Tokyo, I would compose an account of what sort of urban life a man of my lineage—a Tsugaru peasant through and through—had lived. I would also supplement it with descriptions of my wartime existence after *Tokyo Eight Views*, thereby striving to lay bare my unrefined rural essence.

The first work I published in Tokyo was an eighteen-page short story titled *Fish Robe Chronicle*, and beginning the following month, I serialized a hundred-page novel called *Reminiscences* in three installments.
All of them were published in a coterie magazine called *Kaibō* (Seal).
It was Showa 8 (1933).
I graduated from Hirosaki High School and entered the French Literature Department at Tokyo Imperial University in the spring of Showa 5 (1930), which means I published my first novel in my third year in Tokyo.
However, the fact was that I had begun writing those novels in earnest from the year before that.

The circumstances of that time are recorded in *Tokyo Eight Views* as follows.

"But I was gradually awakening from my foolishness, it seemed."
I composed a suicide note.
*Reminiscences*
A hundred pages.
Now, this *Reminiscences* has come to be regarded as my debut work.
I wanted to write down the misdeeds from my childhood without embellishment.
It was the autumn of my twenty-fourth year.
Gazing out at the vast, lushly overgrown abandoned garden, I sat alone in a detached room, having completely lost all ability to laugh.
I intended to die again.
If you want to call it pretentious, then pretentious it was.
How smug I was.
I was, after all, regarding life as a drama.
No—I had been regarding drama as life.
(Omitted) But life was not a drama.
No one knows the second act.
There are also men who make their entrance in the role of 'destruction' yet never exit until the very end.
Intending it as a small suicide note, I wrote a confession of my childhood and boyhood—"There was even such a filthy child as this"—but that suicide note instead became an overwhelming preoccupation, and a faint candle was lit within my nihilism.
I couldn’t die.
I had grown utterly dissatisfied with just that one piece, *Reminiscences*.
Well, I’ve written this far.

I want to write it all down—everything.
I want to dump out every last bit of my life up to today.
This and that.
Things I wanted to set down came flooding in.
First, I wrote about the Kamakura incident. No good.
There was an oversight somewhere.
Furthermore, I wrote another work and remained dissatisfied.
Sighing, I began work on my next piece.
Unable to place periods—only a succession of small commas.
By that ever-present demon, I was gradually being devoured.
It was a mantis’s futile axe.

I had turned twenty-five.
It was Showa 8 (1933).
I was supposed to graduate from university that March.
But I hadn't even taken the exams, let alone graduated.
My brothers back home didn't know this.
Though I'd done nothing but foolish things, they must have thought I'd at least graduate by way of apology.
They seemed to have quietly expected I possessed that much basic decency.
I betrayed them spectacularly.
I had no intention of graduating.
To deceive those who trust you is a hell verging on madness.
For two years after that, I dwelled in that hell.
"Next year I'll graduate without fail," I'd vow.
Then I'd weep to my eldest brother—"Please grant me one more year"—only to betray him again.
That year repeated the pattern.
The next year did too.
Amidst self-laceration, mockery, and mortal terror—yet still breathing—I became fixated on crafting self-indulgent works I dubbed suicide notes.
If only I could finish this.
It might have been mere callow affectation in the end. Yet I'd staked my very life on that sentimentality.
I stored completed works in three or four large paper bags.
Gradually the number grew.

I wrote “Bannen” with a brush on those paper bags.
It was intended as the title for that entire series of suicide notes.
It was meant to convey that this was truly the end.

Such aspects were, well, what you might call the “backstage” of my works from that time.
I ended up publishing all the works in these paper bags between Showa 8, 9, 10, and 11—four years in total—but they were mainly written during Showa 7 and 8.
They were works created almost entirely between the ages of twenty-four and twenty-five.
For the next two or three years, whenever someone asked, I would simply take out one piece from those paper bags and give it to them—that was sufficient.

In Showa 8 (1933), when I was twenty-five years old, the eighteen-page short story titled *Fish Robe Chronicle* that I published in the inaugural issue of the coterie magazine *Kaihyou* marked the beginning of my career as a writer; however, when it elicited an unexpectedly strong response, Mr. Ibuse—who until then had been meticulously correcting my Tsugaru-dialect-laden, unrefined prose—was taken aback and remarked, “There’s no way something like that should gain such acclaim. Don’t get carried away—it might all be some mistake.”

he said with a truly uneasy expression.

And so Mr. Ibuse continued thereafter—indeed, forever after—to fret anxiously, muttering that it might all be some mistake.
The ones who would forever harbor anxiety about my writing might be none other than Mr. Ibuse and my eldest brother from our family home in Tsugaru.
These two gentlemen were both forty-eight years old that year.
Eleven years my senior, my eldest brother’s head had already become a gleaming bald dome, while in recent years Mr. Ibuse too had developed noticeably more white hair.
Both had endured rather harsh discipline.
Their personalities shared certain similarities here and there.
Yet it was these people who had raised me.
Were these two to die, I believe I would weep terribly.

I published *Fish Robe Chronicle*, and even though Mr. Ibuse worriedly said it might all be some mistake, with my country bumpkin audacity I went on to publish *Reminiscences* that same year, thereby establishing myself as a literary newcomer.
In the following year, I began receiving manuscript requests from other fairly prominent literary magazines, but the royalties were inconsistent—sometimes they came, sometimes they didn’t—and even when paid, they amounted to a paltry thirty or fifty sen per page, sums so meager that I couldn’t even afford to go drinking at bars with my closest school friends from those days.
Collections like *Bannen* were published, and my pen name Dazai alone gained renown in society, but I didn’t become even slightly happier.
Looking back on my life thus far, the only period when I felt even a faint sense of restorative respite was when I was thirty years old—when through Mr. Ibuse’s matchmaking I married my current wife, rented the smallest house in Kofu City’s outskirts for 6 yen 50 sen a month, saved around 200 yen in royalties, saw no one, and spent afternoons leisurely drinking sake with yudofu starting around four o’clock.
I didn’t have to mind anyone.
However, that too came to nothing in just three or four months.
Something like 200 yen in savings—there’s no way that would last forever.
I had to return to Tokyo and throw myself back into a rough, dissipated life.
My half-life is a history of dissipated drinking.

Though I always yearned for an orderly life and to lay my body—cleansed of alcohol and nicotine—upon pure white sheets, I wandered the back alleys as a filthy drunkard.
Why did it always end up that way?
To explain that away here and now in two or three words struck me as rather presumptuous.
That may be the problem of all Japanese intellectuals of our generation.
Even if I were to list every single one of my works to date as an answer, it might still prove insufficient to address this major problem.

I rejected salon art.
I detested salon ideology.
In short, I could not endure salons themselves.

That was a brothel of knowledge.
Ah, but even in brothels there might occasionally be found jewels of truth.
That was a thieves' market of knowledge.
Ah, but even in a thieves' market genuine gold rings might occasionally be found.
Salons defied all comparison.
Perhaps I should just put it this way.
That was the "Imperial General Headquarters Announcement" of knowledge.
That was the "wartime Japanese newspapers" of knowledge.

Not a single article across all pages of wartime Japanese newspapers was believable—(but we forced ourselves to believe them, prepared to die.
When parents on the verge of bankruptcy, desperately cornered, tell transparently painful lies—would the child expose them?
Resigned to fate’s extremity, we’d silently choose shared annihilation.) True, every article was a strained fabrication—yet even so, non-false reports appeared daily in small print at the margins of those pages.
It read: death notices.
The small article stating that Hazaemon had died at his evacuation site was not a lie.

Salons are even worse than those wartime Japanese newspapers.
There, even human life and death are treated with utter disregard.
It’s impossible to know how many times Dazai was declared dead in salons, or announced to have undergone some transformation or downfall.

I have fought against the hypocrisy of salons—at least let me say that much.
And so I remain forever a grubby drunkard.
There exists no salon that displays my works on its bookshelves.

But even as I write with such frantic intensity about salons and their ilk, I suspect most people remain utterly clueless about what I'm actually saying.
The salons I mean are precisely those dilettantes who confront me with nonsense like "But weren't salons the birthplace of literature abroad?"
Nothing in this world terrifies me more than dilettantes.
They've done nothing but memorize definitions learned a decade ago.
Then they try cramming new realities into those moth-eaten frameworks.
It won't work, Granny.
In the end, it just doesn't fit.

A person who can consider themselves a failure is, by that alone, already someone worthy of respect.
Dilettantes remain eternally self-assured.
It is these people who misrepresent the sincerity of genius.
And thus, on the contrary, it is these people who lend support to the hypocrisy of philistines.
In Japan, dilettantes are swarming about everywhere—it would be no exaggeration to say they fill the entire nation.

Grow more timid!
The great one isn't you!
Throw away all that scholarship!

Love thy neighbor as thyself.
There's simply no way it'll ever come together unless you start with that.

Were I to say this, those salon dilettantes would no doubt launch into their idiotic debates about that ideology being such-and-such.
Water on a frog's face.
Unbearable.

What exactly do I mean by this "salon" I keep mentioning? What fundamental differences exist between the salons said to be literature’s birthplace abroad and Japan’s salons? How do salons directly tied to the Imperial Household or royalty differ from those connected to industrialists or bureaucrats? What makes your salons such a farce? I could explain it all here in bite-sized pieces for your easy digestion—but if I poured effort into such explanations, you’d likely counter with that nauseating coquetry of yours, and before long even Dazai would get welcomed into the salon and mummified into some pathetic relic. No thanks—I’ll pass on further service. Ah well, the decent ones grasp it without needing spoon-feeding anyway.

I sat now, flipping through the pages of a soot-stained notebook—what I might call my creative chronology—that had survived the fires, indulging in myriad recollections.
From 1933, when I first published my work in Tokyo, until 1945—those twelve years—I had walked at a completely different pace than those salon people.
Given this, it was no wonder I could never truly blend in with them.

That must have been around Showa 2 or 3 (1927 or 1928). When I was still a literary student at Hirosaki Higher School, I often visited my brother in Tokyo—this brother being a frail sculptor who died of illness at twenty-seven—and when he took me into what they called cafés, there would usually be some ostentatiously pretentious fair-skinned, delicate-looking man inside. My brother would whisper to me, “That’s so-and-so, an up-and-coming writer,” and I’d be appalled at what a shallow, frivolous-looking man he was, growing thoroughly disgusted with the human species called artists.

I harbored doubts about refined artists and rejected the notion of “beautiful” artists.
For a country bumpkin like me, those things were simply too affected and unbearable.

I believe everyone is familiar with the painter Böcklin, who favored depicting sea monsters and such.
That man’s paintings were indeed somewhat crude and by no means masterful, but I distinctly recall there being one titled *The Artist*.
It depicted a solitary island in the vast sea where a single thick tree with lush green leaves grew, its shade concealing a truly filthy, bizarre creature playing a small flute.
He hid his filthy body and played the flute.
At the water’s edge of this isolated island, beautiful mermaids gathered, listening enraptured to the flute’s melody.
Were she to glimpse even once the source of that flute’s sound, she would undoubtedly shriek and faint dead away.
Therefore, the artist hid his form completely, sending forth nothing but the flute’s notes.

Here lay both the artist’s wretchedly lonely fate and art’s true beauty—searing, noble—or rather, what should I call it? That very thing called art itself existed there.

I declare:
True artists are ugly.
That pretentious pretty poser in the café is a fake.
Do you know Andersen’s story “The Ugly Duckling”?
Among a brood of small, adorable ducklings, there had been one hideously awkward and ugly chick that became the target of everyone’s abuse and ridicule.
Surprisingly, that turned out to be a swan’s chick.
The youth of masters was without exception ugly.
It had never been anything salon-appropriate with even a semblance of charm.

Refined salons are humanity's most dreadful corruption.
Then who should be denounced first and foremost?
Myself.
It is I.
This strangely pretentious man who goes by the name Osamu Dazai.
An orderly life sleeping on pristine white sheets—this is all very well and good (an undeniably appealing prospect!). But the moment I alone strive to attain such a state, might I not suddenly transform into a man putting on airs, start frequenting those very salons I so detested—no, worse than frequenting, might I not establish my own shabby salon and become the guru of dilettantes?
After all, he's timid and slovenly by nature yet harbors considerable vanity—a man who gets all worked up when flattered, so there's no telling what he might do.

I was intensely afraid of such an outcome.
If I were to attain a salon-like refined family life, I believed it would clearly amount to betraying someone.
I was like a repulsively timid debtor.

I destroyed my own family life one after another.
Even without any strong will to destroy them, they crumbled away on their own.
How many times had I relocated since graduating from Hirosaki Higher School in Showa 5 (1930), entering university, and coming to live in Tokyo up to now?
Those relocations were by no means ordinary.
I would lose everything each time—escape with nothing but myself—then gradually procure life’s necessities anew elsewhere.
Totsuka.
Honjo.
Kamakura hospital room.
Gotanda.
Dōbōchō.
Izumichō.
Kashiwagi.
Shintomichō.
Hatchōbori.
Shirokane Sankōchō.
In a detached room of that large vacant house in Shirokane Sankōchō, I wrote works like *Reminiscences*.
Amanuma 3-chōme.
Amanuma 1-chōme.
Asagaya hospital room.
Kyōdō hospital room.

Chiba Prefecture, Funabashi.
Itabashi hospital room.
Amanuma apartment.
Amanuma boarding house.
Kōshū Misaka Pass.
Kōfu City boarding house.
A house in the suburbs of Kōfu City.
Tokyo Prefecture, Mitaka Town.
Kōfu Suimonchō.
Kōfu Shin'yamachi.
Tsugaru.

There may be some I’d forgotten, but even this alone already amounted to twenty-five relocations.
No—twenty-five bankruptcies.
I had been living by going bankrupt twice a year and starting over each time.
And so from now on, what would become of my family life—I had absolutely no idea.

Of the twenty-five places I listed above, the house in Chiba Funabashi was where I felt the deepest attachment.
It was there that I wrote works such as *Das Gemeine* and *The False Spring*.
On the day I absolutely had to leave that house, I pleaded!
I haven't forgotten how I pleaded with someone—"Please let me stay in this house just one more night! I planted the oleander by the entrance myself! I planted the phoenix tree in the garden myself!"—and ended up weeping uncontrollably.
The place where I had lived the longest was probably the house in Mitaka Town, Shimorenjaku.
I had been living there since before the war, but when it was destroyed by a bomb this spring, I relocated to my wife’s family home in Suimonchō, Kōfu City.
However, when that house was completely burned down by incendiary bombs in the third month after our relocation, I took temporary shelter in a house on the outskirts of Shin'yamachi; then, driven by the thought that if we were to die anyway, it should be in my homeland, I came to my family home in Tsugaru with my two children—but in the second week after arriving, that imperial broadcast occurred. Such is the rough outline of my vagrant life up to now.

I was already thirty-seven years old.
And so I had to start over yet again with nothing—still clinging to my abhorrence of salon ideology.

Flipping through what might be called my creative chronicle—a notebook—I could clearly see how every single one of those past ten-odd years had been filled with utterly miserable experiences.
Our generation had encountered nothing but terrible ordeals over those twenty years.
It was truly a tempest of leaves.
Absolute chaos.
Around the time we were coming of age, almost all of us had already joined the so-called class struggle—some imprisoned, some expelled from school, some driven to suicide.
When I came to Tokyo, it was a forest of neon:
Fune no Fune here,
Kuro Neko there,
Bijinza glowing further on.
What with one thing and another—the bustle of Ginza and Shinjuku back then!—it became a frenzy of despair.
They’d change their expressions as if thinking “Play or lose,” then drink themselves senseless.

Then came the Manchurian Incident.
The May 15 Incident, the February 26 Incident—nothing but these grim milestones until finally the Second Sino-Japanese War broke out, forcing everyone in our generation to march off to battle.
The conflict dragged on interminably—them vacillating over whether to confront Chiang Kai-shek or not—until everything dissolved into shapeless chaos, and this time they declared America and Britain our enemies. Every Japanese citizen—old and young, men and women—steeled themselves for death.

It was truly a terrible era.
During that period, upholding one's own banner while preoccupied with matters like love, faith, and art was an immensely difficult task.
It wouldn't be easy afterward.
This wouldn't do.
Returning to the frivolous Fune no Fune days of ten-odd years ago would be meaningless.
If we started saying the wartime era was still better, that would be truly miserable.
If we weren't careful, that's what would happen.
From then on, I would stop trying to make a quick profit amid the chaos.
It wouldn't amount to anything.

1942, 1943, 1944, 1945—no, for us it had already become an unbearable time.
Three times they made me attend roll calls—each occasion bringing brutal bamboo-spear drills and pre-dawn mobilizations—yet in stolen moments I wrote and published novels. Rumors spread that the Information Bureau had me under surveillance, and when in 1943 I published a three-hundred-page work titled *Right Minister Sanetomo*, certain contemptible "loyalists" seized on its literal reading—"Dazai treats Sanetomo as a Jew!"—maliciously trying to brand me a traitor through whatever twisted logic they could muster.
One forty-page story of mine received orders for full deletion immediately after publication.
Another new novel over two hundred pages long was denied printing altogether.
Still I kept writing novels.
By then I felt it would be dishonest not to persist in writing until the bitter end.
This was beyond reason.
It was peasant obstinacy—sheer mulishness.
But let me be clear: unlike some, I won't stand here declaring, "We never wanted this war."
"I opposed Japan's militarists."
"I am a liberal"—I refuse to engage in this new opportunism of suddenly vilifying Tojo after the fighting stopped, then clamoring about war responsibility.
Even socialism has now rotted into salon ideology.
I cannot swim with this current either.

During the war, I was appalled by Tojo, despised Hitler, and went around telling everyone about it.
Yet at the same time, in this war, I resolved to wholeheartedly support Japan.
Even if someone like me became an ally, I don’t think I was of any use whatsoever—but I had intended to support Japan.
I want to make this point clear.
Of course, I had no hope for this war from the very beginning, but Japan went and did it.

In my unfinished novel *Firebird*, which I wrote in 1939 (Showa 14), there is the following passage. If you read this, I believe what I had earlier described—"When a parent teeters on bankruptcy’s edge and tells an excruciatingly obvious lie, does their child expose it?"—and its continuation—"Or perceiving fate’s finality, silently join them in death?"—will clarify my meaning further still.

That is to say:

Separated by the long brazier, my elderly mother sat neatly—as beautifully as a Seto ceramic figurine—with downcast eyes. Eventually she began to recount: “That is my only son—a man who seems like some sort of monster. But I believe in him.”
“His father died seven years ago this year.”
“Well, it’s pitiful to boast of bygone days, but when my father was in his prime, we were in Maebashi—yes, in Joshu Province.”
“In Maebashi, ours was a first-rate establishment among first-rate restaurants.”
“Ministers, division commanders, governors—whenever they came to Maebashi for leisure, they would invariably stay at our house.”
“Those were good times.”
“I too worked myself to the bone every single day, striving with purpose.”
“But his father picked up a bad habit at fifty—speculation.”
“Once things began to crumble, they went swiftly.”
“One morning I suddenly realized—everything was gone.”
“Clean. Wiped out.”
“It seems absurd.”
“The father must be so ashamed before everyone.”
“Even then, he kept up appearances—‘What do you know? I’ve got a secret mountain hidden away.’”
“He came up with this preposterous lie—‘I own a mountain that yields gold’—like a child. Men are pitiful creatures, aren’t they? Having to desperately save face even before the old wife they’ve lived with for decades. To us, he’d explain every minute detail about that gold mountain with perfect seriousness.”
“Precisely because we knew it was false, listening filled me with such wretched pity and poignant sorrow that tears came unbidden—it was unbearable.”
“Father, sensing our lack of interest, grew ever more earnest—pulling out maps and documents to explain in hushed intensity until he finally declared, ‘Why don’t we all go to that mountain now?’ At this, I was utterly confounded.”
“He’d drag over any townsfolk he could find to boast of his gold mountain until I wished to die of shame.”
“The whole town made us their laughingstock. Though Asataro had just entered university in Tokyo then, in my distress I wrote him a letter laying bare the whole situation.”
“At that time, Asataro was admirable.”

“He rushed over from Tokyo right away, pretending to be overjoyed—‘Father, why did you hide such a wonderful mountain from me all this time? If there’s something this good, school’s ridiculous—please let me quit! Let’s sell off this house and go inspect that gold mine right now!’—urging him on while practically dragging Father by the hand. Then he called me aside secretly and scolded me harshly: ‘Mother, listen—Father doesn’t have much longer left. We can’t humiliate someone who’s fallen on hard times.’”
“When he told me that, I realized for the first time—oh, he was right—and felt so ashamed that, though he was my own child, I wanted to clasp my hands in prayer.”
“Even though we knew full well it was a lie, we rode trains, took carriages, trudged through snowy roads—the three of us, parent and child—all the way to the depths of Shinano.”
“Even now, remembering it fills me with heartache.”
“We took lodging at a hot spring deep in the Shinano mountains, and for a full year after that, that child accompanied his father through the hills rain or shine. At day’s end when they returned to the inn, he would listen to Father’s words with such earnestness it could hardly be called an act—the two of them studying this and that, discussing plans, encouraging each other with ‘Tomorrow will be fine, tomorrow will be fine’ before bedding down. Then at dawn they’d set out again into the mountains, where Father dragged him about every which way and subjected him to endless nonsensical explanations. Still, he nodded deeply at each one, returning each night utterly spent.”
“Everything is thanks to Asataro.”
“Father was able to spend a year at the mountain lodge leading purposeful days, and managed to maintain his dignity before his wife and child, passing away peacefully without showing shame.”
“Yes, he died at that mountain lodge in Shinano.”
“He went to his death boasting, ‘My mountain has potential—what do you think? It’ll multiply our fortune twentyfold!’”
“His heart had been terribly weak for a long time.”
“It was a morning of terribly strong wintry winds.”
“It’s a pitiful story, isn’t it.”
“But that child has promise.”
“After that, the mother and child headed to Tokyo and went through hardships.”
“What was hardest for me was carrying a bowl to buy a block of tofu.”
“Now, somehow—thanks to everyone—Asataro has come to earn money through his writing, and I believe in him no matter what foolish things he may do.”
“When I think of how he protected his father so devotedly long ago, that child fills me with such gratitude and unworthiness—no matter what happens with him, even if he were to commit murder, I believe in him.”
“He is a deeply compassionate child.”
(The rest is omitted.)

With those who snorted derisively at such ideas—dismissing them as mere “old-fashioned humanism”—these self-styled “possessors of scientific spirit,” I could never work alongside.
During the war, I thought that if Japan were to win in such a wretched state, it would not be a divine nation but a demonic one.
But I proclaimed Japan’s inevitable victory and resolved to stand by Japan.
The faces of those who skulked in the shadows whispering “We’ll lose, we’ll lose” with an air of exclusive knowledge about Japan’s inevitable defeat were not particularly noble either.

I had resolved to be an "ally of Japan" in that manner, but it seemed the government of the time still did not trust me at all.
A rumor spread that I was a person of interest to the Information Bureau, and publishers stopped commissioning manuscripts from me.
I know this sounds miserly, but with living expenses kept rising, children kept multiplying, and no income at all, the anxiety was boundless.
At that time, not only I but all so-called pure literature people seemed to wear expressions of those trapped in a burning house.
However, most other people apparently had assets like art or antiques that they could sell off to scrape by, but I had nothing resembling such wealth.
I thought my family would be in dire straits if I were conscripted, but for some reason, the draft notice never came to me in the end.
I didn’t want to say this lightly, but I couldn’t help thinking it was divine consideration.
I persevered and managed to finish writing the novel.

Except for war profiteers, everyone was struggling at the time, so I resolved not to speak of my own hardships and made efforts to put on a cheerful front—but even so, I felt so utterly desolate that I once wrote a letter of this nature to a certain senior.

Dear Sir,
This letter is neither a request to you, nor a complaint, nor an attempt to accuse anyone.
I write because I wish for you alone to know a truth I have not disclosed even to my family.
Yet should you learn this truth, there is no need for you to do anything.
I harbor no such expectation.
Simply knowing this truth suffices.
When you have read this letter, please tear it up and discard it without a word.
I beg this of you.
Do not speak of it to others.

I am now thinking of suicide.
However, I am restraining myself.
More than pitying my wife and children—as a Japanese citizen, I cannot bear the thought of my suicide becoming fodder for foreign propaganda; moreover, I restrain myself by considering how my young friends at the front would feel upon hearing of my suicide.
Why is there no path other than suicide?
That is something you should already know.
However, since I had no assets, the suffering struck me more intensely than others.
My income this year is ×× yen.
And now, the money remaining at hand is ×× yen.
However, I intend to borrow money from no one.
There were nights when I seriously considered sending a letter requesting a loan to my elder brother in my hometown, but I refrained.
At this point, I’m being damn stubborn.
I intend to put on a lively face and carry on cheerfully right up until the eve of my death.
And so, I will persistently continue writing only novels.
However, I certainly have no intention of writing novels that glorify the war.

It is only this much, but I would like you to know. For it is unclear when or what might befall me as well. This letter requires no reply or anything of the sort. After reading, please discard it immediately. That is all.

I once secretly sent a letter of roughly this meaning to that senior. Even if one were to voice complaints, they would be branded a traitor to the nation—when I think back on it, it was a dreadful era.

About a month after sending such a letter, I happened to meet that senior in Shinjuku.
We walked together in silence without saying a word.
After a while, the senior spoke.
“I read that letter of yours.”

“I see.”
“Did you tear it up right away?”

“Yes, I tore it up.”

That was all.

That senior too, it seems, had been placed in an even more trying position than I during that time.

In any case, I couldn’t go on living that way forever. I had to somehow carve a path through my strained livelihood.

I received travel expenses from a certain publisher and planned a trip to Tsugaru. At that time in Japan, everyone’s attention was being concentrated ever southward, but I set out toward the polar opposite—the northern tip of Honshu. I had no way of knowing when or what might become of me. I resolved to take a good look at my own Tsugaru—the land where I was born and raised—while I still could.

I was born what you might call a pure Tsugaru peasant and spent twenty years growing up there through elementary school, middle school, and high school—yet I knew no more than five or six of Tsugaru’s small cities and towns. During summer and winter vacations in my middle school days, I lazed around my family home, devouring my brothers’ books haphazardly without ever attempting to travel anywhere. Then in high school vacations, I would visit my brother—the sculptor living in Tokyo—and hardly ever returned home. Once I entered university in Tokyo, I never went back for over a dozen years, so it’s fair to say I knew nothing about the land called Tsugaru.

I put on gaiters and, for the first time in my life, walked all around every corner of the land of Tsugaru.

From Kameda to Aomori, lying on my back atop the small steamship’s roof in shabby clothes, remaining still even as the drizzle soaked me, crunching on souvenir crab legs from Kameda while gazing up at the gloomy low sky—the loneliness of that moment is hard to forget.

Ultimately, what I discovered on this journey was what I would call “the clumsiness of Tsugaru.”

It was clumsiness.

It was ineptitude.

It was the bewilderment of having no means to express culture.

I also felt it within myself.

But at the same time, I sensed a health in it.

From there, might something entirely new—a culture (I shudder at the word “culture”;

they used to write it as 文花 in the old days)—might such a thing be born?

Might a new expression of affection be born?

I returned to the capital feeling something akin to confidence in the pure Tsugaru temperament within my blood.

In other words, I had discovered—and felt relieved by the discovery—that Tsugaru had no such thing as culture, and consequently, I myself, as a Tsugaru native, was not in the least a cultural elite.

Since then, I feel my works have changed somewhat.

I published a full-length novel titled *Tsugaru* that reads like a travelogue.

After that, I published a short story collection titled *New Tales from the Provinces*.

And then, next, I completed a novel titled *Farewell*, which took as its subject Lu Xun’s time studying in Japan, and a short story collection titled *Fairy Tale Book*.

Even if I had died then, I thought it would be acceptable to say that I had left behind a considerable body of work as a Japanese writer.

The others were slovenly.

In the meantime, I had suffered war damage twice.
Having completed *Fairy Tale Book* and secured an advance on its royalties, we finally ended up coming to my family home in Tsugaru.

Having suffered a second disaster in Kofu and having nowhere left to go, our family of four set out for Tsugaru—but even then it took a full four days and nights before we finally reached the family home in Tsugaru.

The difficulties along the way were considerable.
We departed Kofu on the morning of July 28, encountered an air raid warning near Ōtsuki, arrived at Ueno Station around 2:30 PM, immediately joined a long queue, waited eight hours, and attempted to board the 10:10 PM Ōu Line train bound for Aomori—but ill-timed, an alarm sounded just before the ticket gate, plunging the station into darkness in an instant. With order and queues dissolved, the crowd surged toward the gate in a bizarre uproar; each of us holding an infant, we were instantly overwhelmed. By the time we somehow reached the train, it was already packed full—no space to enter through windows or anywhere else.
As we stood dazedly on the platform, the train let out a sigh-like whistle and lumbered into motion with a heavy groan.
That night, we bedded down in front of Ueno Station’s ticket gate.
The loudspeakers kept reporting details of the incendiary bomb attacks in the Aomori area until near dawn.
However, in any case, we had to head toward the Aomori area.

Having decided to board any train that would take us even slightly northward, we got on the 5:10 AM train bound for Shirakawa the next morning.
At 10:30 AM, we arrived at Shirakawa.
We got off there, waited on the platform for two hours, then boarded a train heading slightly further north to Kogota at 1:30 PM.
We climbed through a window.
En route, Koriyama Station was bombed.
At 9:30 PM, we reached Kogota Station.
Again we spent the night before the ticket gate.
Though we had brought three days' provisions, in the midsummer heat all the rice balls had spoiled—their grains trailing natto-like threads that turned to slimy mush in our mouths, impossible to swallow.
After passing the night at Kogota Station, since we still had about one sho of rice, my wife went around knocking on houses near the station from predawn gloom to exchange our rice for rice balls.
At last one household obliged.
There were four fairly large rice balls.
I bit into one.
A crunch sounded in my mouth.
When I spat it out and looked—a pickled plum.
I had crushed its seed.
I—with my bad teeth—had crushed that hard pickled plum seed.
I shuddered.

However, even now we had still only covered about one-third of our entire journey home.
The readers must have been growing weary too.
I went through various other hardships after that, but I won't write about them anymore.

In any case, after all that hardship, when I finally reached my hometown, it was in utter chaos from carrier-based aircraft bombings.

But I thought that even if I were to die now, since it would be in my hometown, it might count as a form of happiness.

And soon after came Japan’s unconditional surrender.

Nearly five months had already passed since then.
I wrote one full-length novel serialized in a newspaper and several short stories.
It seemed to me that short stories possessed their own distinctive technique.
Being short did not make something a short story.
In foreign countries too—while one might trace their origins as far back as the *Decameron* and cite various figures in more recent times like Mérimée, Maupassant, Daudet, and Chekhov—Japan had particularly been a nation where this technique developed since antiquity, with nearly all *monogatari* tales being just that. In the early modern period giants like Saikaku emerged; in Meiji, Ōgai excelled; in Taishō there were not few who knew the technique of the short story—Naoya, Zenzo, Ryūnosuke, Kikuchi Kan. But by the start of Shōwa only Mr. Ibuse had seemed peerless, and now in recent times it had become utterly useless.
They were all merely short in page count.
Since the war had ended and it was now permissible to write whatever one pleased, I resolved to revive the short story’s obsolete techniques—writing three or four pieces and sending them off to magazine publishers—but as I did so, I found myself growing terribly depressed.

Once again, I felt the urge to lash out and drown my sorrows in drink.
I saw signs that Japanese culture was about to decay yet another degree.
The various "-isms" shouted by these so-called "cultural elites" lately all reeked to me of that same old salon ideology.
"If I were to feign ignorance and ride this wave," I thought, "I too might become one of the 'successful ones'—but for a country bumpkin like me, it’s too mortifying; I simply can’t manage it."
I could not deceive my own senses.
Those ideologies had lost the truth they held when first conceived, and now seemed only to spin aimlessly, utterly detached from this world’s new reality.

New reality.

A completely new reality.
Ah, I want to proclaim this louder and more forcefully!
I must not run away from that.
I must not deceive myself.
It is no easy anguish.

The other day, a young man visited me and spoke of the gloom of food shortages.
I said.

“You’re lying.”
“Your melancholy stems less from food shortages than from moral anguish.”

The young man nodded.

The things that concerned us most now, that weighed most heavily on our conscience—I couldn’t shake the feeling Japan’s current “new culture” was rushing past them without a glance.

I might still be nothing but a dim-witted Tsugaru peasant who knew nothing of “culture.”
Wearing snow boots as I trudged along the frozen path, my appearance was exactly that of a country bumpkin.
Yet from now on, I resolved to push through with this bumpkin’s inefficiency, clumsiness, slowness to grasp things, and simple questions.
If there remained anywhere I could rely on myself now, it was solely in this one point—being a “Tsugaru peasant.”

For fifteen years I had been away from my hometown, but it remained unchanged, and I too had not become any more urbane or polished—no, rather, I was only growing increasingly rustic and uncouth.
“Salon ideology” grew ever more distant from me.

Lately, I have been writing a novel titled *Pandora’s Box* for a Sendai newspaper, but I shall conclude this memoir of nightmare-like fifteen years by presenting an excerpt of it below.

(Omitted) Whether it was due to the storm or perhaps our meager candlelight, that night we four roommates gathered around the flame of Echigo Lion’s candle and shared frank conversation for the first time in ages.

“What exactly is a liberal?” Kappore asked in an oddly hushed voice.

“In France,” said Katapan—perhaps having tired of English—as he launched into an exposition of French matters.
“There existed these Libertins, you see—creatures who reveled in free thought and made spectacular nuisances of themselves.”
“The seventeenth century,” he added, eyebrows arched with performative solemnity, “meaning roughly three hundred years past.”
“They apparently raised hell primarily while clamoring for religious freedom.”

“So they were just rowdies?” Kappore said with a look of genuine surprise.

“Well, yes, that’s about right. Most of them were living like ruffians. Take Cyrano—you know, the big-nosed one famous from plays—he could be considered one of the Libertins of that time. They resisted the authorities of their time and helped the weak. The French poets of that time were probably mostly like that as well. They seemed to bear some resemblance to what they called gallants in Japan’s Edo period.”

“What in the world!” Kappore burst out laughing. “Then does that mean even someone like Banzuiin Chōbei was a liberal?”

However, Katapan did not even smile,

“Well, I suppose you could say that.”
“Of course, today’s liberals seem to be a slightly different type—but those seventeenth-century French *Libertins* fellows were generally that sort of thing.”
“Hanakawado no Sukeroku and Nezumi Kozō no Jirōkichi might have been that way as well.”

“Huh, so that’s how it comes about?” Kappore exclaimed in delight.

Echigo Lion also smirked slyly while mending the torn slippers.

“When you get down to it, this thing called free thought,” Katapan grew increasingly earnest, “in its original form, is a spirit of rebellion.”
“It might even be called destructive ideology.”
“It is not an ideology that first sprouts once oppression and constraints have been removed, but rather one that arises as a reaction to oppression and constraints—a nature of thought that must emerge and struggle simultaneously with them.”
“A commonly cited example—a dove once entreated God: ‘When I fly, this thing called air gets in my way and prevents me from moving forward quickly.”
“‘Please eliminate this thing called air.’ God heeded that wish and granted it.”
“However, no matter how much the dove flapped its wings, it could not take flight.”
“In other words, this dove is free thought.”
“It is only through the resistance of air that the dove can take flight.”
“Free thought without an object of struggle is like a dove flapping its wings inside a vacuum tube—it cannot fly at all.”

“There’s a man with a similar name, isn’t there?” Echigo Lion said, pausing his mending of the slippers.

“Ah,” said Katapan, scratching the back of his head. “I didn’t mean it in that sense.”
“This is Kant’s example.”
“I know nothing about modern Japan’s political world.”

“But you need to know at least a little.”
“From what I hear, they’re about to grant all young people both voting rights and eligibility for election,” said Echigo with the composed demeanor befitting the group’s elder. “I suppose you could say the substance of free thought differs entirely with each era.”
“Geniuses who pursued and fought for truth can all be said to be free thinkers.”
“As for someone like me, I even consider Christ to be the true originator of free thought.”
“Do not worry—look at the birds of the air. They neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns. Is that not a splendid form of free thought?”
“I believe all Western schools of thought are grounded in Christ’s spirit—expanding it, simplifying it, doubting it—but no matter how many theories people devise, they ultimately tie back to the Bible.”
“Even science is not unrelated to it.”
“The foundation of science—whether in the realm of physics or chemistry—is entirely composed of hypotheses.”
“It starts from hypotheses that cannot be confirmed with the naked eye.”
“From this faith in hypotheses arises all science.”
“The Japanese should have studied the Bible first before delving into Western philosophy and science.”
“I am not a Christian myself, but I believe Japan’s great defeat stemmed from studying only the superficial aspects of Western civilization without ever researching the Bible.”
“Whether it’s free thought or anything else—without understanding Christ’s spirit, you can’t grasp even half of it.”
(Omitted)

“An unchanging political ideology—like ten years passing as a single day—is nothing but a delusion.”
“Christ also said, ‘Do not swear at all.’”
“He said, ‘Do not worry about tomorrow.’”
“He’s practically the founding ancestor of free thinkers!”
“Foxes have holes, birds have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head—this too might be called the lament of free thinkers.”
“They’re not permitted a single day’s respite.”
“Their assertions must be renewed daily—made fresh with each dawn.”
“In Japan today, denouncing yesterday’s military bureaucrats no longer counts as free thought.”
“That’s precisely the dove in the vacuum tube.”
“If you’re a truly courageous free thinker, there’s something you must now proclaim above all else.”
“Long live His Majesty the Emperor!”
“This cry—”
“Until yesterday, it was antiquated.”
“Not just antiquated—it was fraudulent.”
“Yet today, it’s the newest free thought.”
“This shows how freedom’s substance differs between ten years ago and now.”
“It’s no longer mysticism.”
“It’s humanity’s innate love.”
“I’ve heard America is a free country.”
“Surely they’ll recognize Japan’s true cry for freedom without fail.”

(Omitted)