“Dazai Osamu: Shadows of Censorship Traced Through Monographs” Edited by Hiroshi Ando and Masao Saito

2021/01/29

When I was in my first year of my master's program, I wrote my first paper on Osamu Dazai. That coincidence led to an invitation to join a young group advancing Dazai research. It was unexpected since my master's thesis theme was Ryunosuke Akutagawa, but I was very happy. Eventually, the group began publishing a literary journal, continuing to serve as an important forum for dialogue and shared research practice. In 2019, we published the co-edited volume “Dazai Osamu and War” (Hitsuji Shobo). Through collaborative research, we were able to explore the correlation between social trends leading up to the defeat in the war and Dazai's texts.

Later, Masao Saito, a fellow member of the group, approached me. He was planning a research book on Dazai and censorship with Professor Hiroshi Ando of the University of Tokyo and asked if I would like to write about “Tsugaru.” It had been a favorite book of mine since my first year of high school, so I accepted immediately. Mr. Saito visited the Gordon W. Prange Collection at the University of Maryland, where many censorship materials from the occupation period reside, and conducted a thorough investigation. While benefiting from his work, I wanted to illuminate the wartime and postwar periods of “Tsugaru” by bridging it with a different perspective.

Valuable materials such as manuscripts were donated by the bereaved family to the Museum of Modern Japanese Literature in Komaba, and in 2017, the “Catalog of the Dazai Osamu Library: Enlarged Edition” was released. The section for formerly owned works lists three copies of “Tsugaru,” including reprints and variant editions, and apparently contains handwritten notes. I decided to first confirm who wrote them. I shut myself in the museum and turned the pages one by one of the books formerly owned and handled by Dazai and his wife, Michiko. Considering the "culprit" and their motives from these traces, like a detective novel, was purely thrilling.

During the investigation, a sense of unease I had felt while reading “Tsugaru” in paperbacks and complete collections resurfaced. This time, I was able to respond to that long-standing question by linking it to the calamities of war. If you are interested, please read it. "Why was it that when seeing Dazai's own sketch of Take-san at the climax, there were times when the inspiration reached its peak and times when it did not?"

By the way, Dazai has an essay titled "King of the Heart," which is a play on the phrase "King of the Land" (Riku no Ouja). It was published in the “Mita Shimbun” in January 1940, the year the Tokyo Olympics became a phantom event. I often use it in contemporary Japanese classes at Keio Shiki Senior High School, but this academic year I featured it in a lecture for the Faculty of Letters. It is a quintessential Dazai-esque song of encouragement, including a stern push, likening students who are not yet anyone to poets. I hope it resonates with all Keio students studying amidst the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Dazai Osamu: Shadows of Censorship Traced Through Monographs” Edited by Hiroshi Ando and Masao Saito

Jun Ozawa (Co-author)

Shumei University Press

168 pages, 2,500 yen (excluding tax)

*Affiliations and titles are as of the time of publication.