Dazai Osamu — The Man Who Pretended to Talk in His Sleep

Fountain Pen

"Fountain pen, fountain pen."

In his bed, the boy called out in a low voice, with his eyes shut. He was pretending to talk in his sleep.

In the next room, his father was talking with a guest. The boy wanted his father's fountain pen. But he could not bring himself to ask. After worrying about it alone for a long time, this sleep-talking was the idea he came up with.

The voice, it seems, never reached his father's ears or his heart. He wrote about it himself, years later.

The boy's name was Tsushima Shuji. Later he would call himself Dazai Osamu. He was born in 1909 in the village of Kanagi, in Aomori prefecture in northern Japan, into one of the largest landowning families in the prefecture.

His father was always busy and rarely at home. Even when he was home, he did not spend time with the children. The boy was afraid of him.

Once, he was playing with his younger brother in the rice storehouse. His father stood in the doorway and scolded them: "Boys, get out, get out!" The light was behind him, and his big figure looked pitch black. Even now, he wrote as a grown man, remembering that fear made him feel sick.

His mother was in poor health. The boy was raised on a wet nurse's milk and grew up in his aunt's arms. He could not feel close to his mother either.

One memory of his aunt has survived.

It was the evening in summer when Emperor Meiji died, when he was three. He was standing at the gate beside his aunt. She scolded him gently: at a time like this, you should say the emperor had "hidden himself," the polite way to say an emperor has died. The boy asked back:

"Where did he hide himself?"

He actually knew what it meant. He asked on purpose, and made his aunt laugh. It is one of the oldest scenes in his own memories.

It was the maid, Take, who taught him to read. The two of them read all kinds of books together, and when they ran out, Take borrowed children's books from the village Sunday school. The sickly boy read a great deal, lying in bed.

Then one day Take left without a word. She had gone to marry a man in a fishing village. She came to visit the next summer, at the Obon festival for the dead, or maybe the one after. When she heard about his grades at school, she only said, "Never let your guard down," and did not praise him at all. He wrote about this much later.

He lied all the time, too.

One Doll Festival day, when he was in the second or third grade, he told his teacher that his family wanted him home early, and left without sitting through even one hour of class. At home he said that school was closed for the Peach Festival, as the day is also called, and helped take the dolls out of their boxes, though no one needed his help.

His school compositions were nonsense too. If he wrote as a solemn, good boy, everyone always applauded.

"Shadow Play of My Younger Brother," which his teachers praised as a masterpiece, was copied word for word from a first-prize story in a boys' magazine. His teacher had him write it out neatly with a brush and sent it to an exhibition.

Later, a boy who loved books found out.

The boy prayed for that child to die. He wrote this down himself.

He sometimes wrote the truth, too.

Once he complained in writing that his father and mother did not love him. His teacher called him in and scolded him.

For a composition titled "If a War Broke Out," he wrote this. If war came, he would run into the mountains first. On the way, he would invite his teacher too. The teacher is a human and so am I, so we must be equally afraid of war.

According to his own memory, the principal and another teacher then questioned him together. Are all humans the same? they asked. Yes, he said, a little shyly. Then a teacher asked:

"Are your father and we the same kind of human?"

The boy was stuck. He said nothing.

Lie, and he was praised. Tell the truth, and he was scolded.

In March 1923, his father died in a hospital in Tokyo. A nearby newspaper put out an extra edition, and among the names of the family left behind was the name of the thirteen-year-old boy.

"I felt more excitement at this sensation than grief at my father's death."

The grown man wrote this. The next day, when the lid of the coffin was taken off, everyone in the family cried out loud. The boy was drawn in by their crying, and tears ran down his face too.

The head of the family became his oldest brother, Bunji.

This is the brother he would lie to, again and again.

Next Year, I'll Graduate for Sure

In new hakama (the wide, pleated trousers worn over a kimono), black socks and laced boots, with a wool cape thrown over his shoulders, unbuttoned like a fashionable young man, Shuji set off for a middle school in a town by the sea.

Even when he went to the public bath, he wore his school cap and hakama. When his reflection showed in a shop window along the street, he would smile and nod to it lightly, he confessed himself.

He was good at looking cool.

When he went on to a higher school in Hirosaki, the one student in his class who wore flashy clothes that stood out was him. And yet he was drawn to a movement that was spreading among the students, one that wanted to overthrow the rich and remake the world. Later he wrote:

"I was not one of the lowly. I was the one who would go under the guillotine."

In the spring of 1930, he came to Tokyo to enter the university. Even buying one map of Tokyo embarrassed him. He hesitated again and again, afraid they would laugh at him as a country boy. At last he bought it in a deliberately rough voice, mocking himself, and went back to his boarding house with it inside his kimono.

At night he shut the room tight and secretly opened the map. Beautiful patterns of red, green and yellow. He held his breath and gazed at them, he recalled ten years later.

In November that year, he tried to die together with a woman who worked in a shop in Ginza. She died. Only he lived.

"The black spot of my life."

In Tokyo too he kept giving money to the movement, and he was taken to the police lockup many times. He was so meek that the detective questioning him said this to him, he wrote later.

"A rich man's pampered son like you could never make a revolution. The real revolution, we'll do it."

In 1932, he went to the police himself and left the movement.

Around then, meaning it as a will, he set down everything bad about himself since childhood, without dressing it up. It became a hundred-page story, Memories.

But when he finished, it bothered him instead. It was not enough. He found there was so much more he wanted to write.

"But life was not a drama. No one knows what the second act holds."

In 1933, he published a work for the first time under the name "Dazai Osamu." He was supposed to graduate from the university that spring.

He had not only failed to graduate. He had not even taken the exams. His brothers back home did not know.

"Next year, I will surely graduate. Please forgive me for one more year."

He cried this to his oldest brother, and betrayed him. The next year was the same, he wrote. Once a week he put on his uniform and left the house, read books at random in the university library, dozed, wrote drafts of stories, and came home in the evening. Hatsuyo, who lived with him, never suspected a thing. (They had held a simple wedding ceremony but never registered the marriage.)

"I am not a bad man! Deceiving people is hell."

He put the stories he had saved in a large paper bag. On it he wrote with a brush, "Late Years." It meant: this is the end.

In the late autumn of 1934, he picked fourteen of the twenty-some stories, and burned the rest in the garden together with spoiled manuscripts. He wrote about that night like this.

"Hey, why did you burn them?"

"Because I didn't need them anymore."

"Why did you burn them?"

Hatsuyo was crying.

The next March, graduation season came again. He took the entrance exam for a newspaper company, saying that he would become a reporter and live an ordinary life, and he made the people in the house laugh cheerfully. There was no chance he would pass.

That same month, he tried to die again, and was saved.

He wrote about what came after with a strange feeling. When he got home, Hatsuyo gently stroked his back at the front door. Everyone comforted him: thank goodness, thank goodness. His oldest brother rushed in from the country and scolded him harshly.

But even as he was being cursed, he felt such longing and affection for that brother.

Soon after, a violent stomachache struck him. His appendicitis had gotten worse, and even the doctors nearly gave up, but little by little he recovered.

That summer, one of the stories that would later go into Late Years was picked as a candidate for a literary prize. It was a prize for new writers, started just that year, with prize money of five hundred yen.

The Akutagawa Prize.