“The parent is more important than the child.” 

So ends Osamu Dazai’s Self-Portraits. With a cult following and an anime character to his name, Dazai is the celebrated author of The Final Years, No Longer Human, and The Setting Sun amongst others. Dazai was born in Kanagi, Imperial Japan as Shūji Tsushima, and briefly studied French at Tokyo Imperial University before being suspended. Translated by Ralph McCarthy and published with New Directions, Self-Portraits is an expansive collection of autobiographical short stories written with Dazai’s unsparing awareness, a signature of this contemporary cultural icon, putting the life of this literary “rebel” under a magnifying glass. 

It is no coincidence that Dazai chooses to bookend his collection with familial genealogy. His journey of self-knowledge begins and concludes with family. Family’s unique function as home, intimacy, and expectations that to Dazai, blurs performance and authenticity. 

Starting with his first short, “My Elder Brothers,” we are immediately confronted with a 14-year-old narrator witnessing his father’s death. Situated in Dazai’s politically affluent family with its patriarch at the brink of death, his oldest brother assumes the role of family leader, moving quickly to ascend within the political world. Despite his quick success, Dazai observed that his brother “always seemed rather gloomy.” His brother’s shelves were crammed with plays by Ibsen and Oscar Wilde, himself also a playwright. His oldest brother reads to him a poem he has written, expressing a lack of desire in life except for when he is chewing on rice. Not the symbolism of rice or eating, just the rote act of it. This, an image of a person burdened by duties that destine unhappiness, I think is the seed that prompts young Dazai to a lifetime of rigorous questioning — and intense fear — of a life not preoccupied with untethered expression of the “I.” 

In “Thinking of Zenzo,” Dazai is at once elated and anxious when he receives an invitation calling for artists for his hometown, Aomori Prefecture, to return for an autumn gathering. Dazai turns his critical eye inwards, assessing the nature of his own disheveled reactions. He wonders at his own authenticity for accepting this invitation. 

“Why would a man like me who has long regarded human interactions with horror accept such an invitation?” 

Dazai casts his critical eye onto the world around him, leading to a constant revising of his own authenticity that is always operating in a norm-full society he is weary of. Why had he, yes a successful writer — but he understood that others considered him to be the kind of writer of low-brow crass — gotten invited? Was this an elaborate prank? The initial warmth from going back to his hometown with pride, a scene that mirrors his eldest brother’s trajectory, quickly dissipates into a devil-may-care, frustrating nonchalance. As he engages with other writers and anxiously prepares for his own speech, he finds the panorama of bodies interacting to a ritualized social performance. Dazai regards himself as one of the bodies participating in performance, and as he leads us through his doubts, he comes to a moment of halt.   

• “It’s just that I suddenly don’t feel like saying anything to them. I just don’t want to.  Hell with it. I don’t care if my hometown never understands me. I’m resigned to that. I give up on the robes of gold.” 

Yet Dazai is concerned about the potential problems he would inflict upon his family. This long monologue of self-conversation becomes, I think, a reaction to his desire to return to his hometown of Tsugaru, struck by a nostalgia for childhood and beautiful landscape, and a reminder of the performance those very emotions can generate. The purity of the land’s visual beauty strikes Dazai in its subtle, moving bareness. 

In “Early Light,” it is 1945 and Japan has become a war zone. Allied planes are overhead. Confronted with the possibility of imminent death, Dazai feared for his wife and children and hoped that there was a “still older man in the house.”  He realizes that he is now in a position to assume the performance of that older, reliable man, and decides to stay with his sister-in-law to protect the house while his wife and children evacuate. With no hints of heroic rhetoric, Dazai is only driven by the fear of losing his family. True to a bildungsroman, Dazai is once again confronting himself at the edge of loss. This time, he is no longer a passive observer, but taking on a parental role, he performs his duty with tenderness. The texture of grief is an abrasive touch that never strays too far from the folds of family. Dazai’s preoccupation with the performance of his death is rooted in the quest for self-knowledge that returns, always, to a grief that he keeps alive. 

From the very first line of Self-Portraits, Dazai’s unadorned, transcription-like prose resists the performance he, and we, witness. Let’s revisit that last line. To really ground it within the expanse of this collection, we have to acknowledge a line that came before it. “I like to think that the parent is more important than the child. After all, the parents are weaker.”  By the collection’s final short story, Dazai has traveled from a young boy who witnesses his father’s death to becoming a father himself. Being made constantly aware of his presence on the page, readers are made to see two levels of performance: the people Dazai observes and Dazai’s own performance as a narrator. 

His acerbic self-consciousness spares no one, not the least himself. Dazai’s crack at authenticity has him witnessing himself as a father while contemplating how to go about its performance. In his final short story, “Cherries,” he confesses to us, as he always had, the vulnerability of performance. Dazai, now occupied in the role of a father, has a plate of cherries in front of him. He considers how his children would enjoy a platter of cherries their father brought home for them. If he went a step further and “tied the stems together… it would look just like a coral necklace.” Dazai eventually resigns from entertaining this potential further. Instead, he picks and eats away at the huge plate of cherries. Dazai understands that he could be performing the role of a father, entertaining his children and making them happier, but that is exhausting. 

After his father and brother’s death, the young Dazai hesitated to write about events that, because of its universal nature, feel too self-indulgent. Performative. By the end of the chapter however, Dazai revisits that idea with a different lens. 

“However much money they may have, brothers who lose their father at an early age are to be pitied, it seems to me” (26).  

If Dazai’s young age defined his spectator position to his father’s death, then as he returns to a similar position, as a father himself who has danced along the social rituals of adulthood, he has arrived at his own conclusion. Dazai, granted with a wisdom of self-knowledge, sits there in the final act, deciding that does not want to do. He refuses. 

Dazai is no doubt a steely observer of people. Across the collection of eighteen stories, his preoccupation with authenticity tapes itself onto every page. Authenticity isn’t an antonym to performance. Dazai’s posthumous stardom has, I believe, less to do with his eccentricity than with his relevance. As a reader, Dazai excites me because he is able to use his lucid first-person narrative — his honesty — to generate a critical distance of his bildung in wartime Japan and the period that ensues. Critical distance is Dazai’s gift as a writer and keeps him timeless as he holds up a mirror for us.