No One Knows by Osamu Dazai
"I won’t reveal the name of this little station. I don’t need to; one day you’ll see me here.”
No One Knows (translated by Ralph McCarthy) is the latest in a long backlist from New Directions by the Japanese writer Osamu Dazai. Dazai, who is most famous for his autofictional 1948 novel No Longer Human, is steadily being revealed to English readers as a writer defined by far more than his suicide and gripping depictions of depression. In particular, his tumultuous relationships with women as depicted in No Longer Human and Self-Portraits obscure what No One Knows now reveals: a writer with a deep and persistent interest in the interior struggles of women to make sense of themselves within and without the roles placed upon them, and of his own implications in these struggles. The collection is made up of 14 stories, all told from the perspectives of women in the first person, written between 1929 and 1948.
“Schoolgirl”, already something of a cult classic in Allison Markin Powell’s previous translation, is rendered just as beautifully here by McCarthy. In the context of this collection, “Schoolgirl” establishes Dazai’s preoccupations with the nature of femininity by mapping its emergence in adolescence. The novella—one of his finest works—is a stream of consciousness narration that follows a day in the life of a teenager. The story’s tension is muted, visible under the surface of Dazai’s placid prose as the narrator encounters her “first inkling of philosophy” in a future scene of deja vu envisioned when the narrator glances at her own hands. The story explores how the advent of conscious sense making in adolescence is complicated by a developing sense of self as being at odds with societal expectations.
“We have no individuality, they say… We all want to live good lives. In that sense we do have proper aspirations and ambitions. And we’re anxious to find reliable, unshakable convictions. But imagine the effort it would require to realize all these things in a given role—the role of daughter, for example… If you look at all these things, think about all these forces in our lives, the question of developing one’s individuality hardly seems of vital importance.”
The death of the narrator’s father looms over the story, shadowing her sensory observations and foretelling the fiction of Dazai’s own daughter, Yuko Tsushima, whose work is haunted by Dazai’s death through a preoccupation with absent male figures and water. The protagonist of Tsushima’s novel Territory of Light, a sister text to “Schoolgirl” in its explorations of grief and sense making, would likely find resonance in the novella’s veneration of sky and daylight:
“How beautiful this sky is. I feel I should bow down to it, prostrate myself before something for once in my life. Right now I believe in God. I wonder what you call this color, the color the sky is now. Roses. Fire. Rainbows. Angel wings. Cathedrals. No, none of them come close. It’s more holy, more divine.”
The divinity found in these everyday moments and sensations grates against the societal expectation to conform. In “Skin and Soul” we find an older woman who has a further developed sense of gender along the lines established in “Schoolgirl”. This narrator did not seek marriage and was content to provide for her mother and sister, but her lack of a father determines her economic inability to deny a marriage proposal when it comes her way. In this we see Dazai furthering his oeuvre’s overarching theme of conformity, but through the lens of womanhood individuality appears as something at odds with heteronormativity. The appearance of a rash on her skin sparks an existential crisis, as if it is the physical manifestation of a deeper discomfort.
“There’s a languid sort of docility about her, like water passively flowing to lower levels. That’s what a woman is. She has secrets she can never reveal, a trait innate to all women, though each has her own dark quagmire to deal with. This I can state unequivocally. In the end, for a woman, today is everything. It’s not like that for men. Women don’t contemplate death or the afterlife. We don’t speculate about such things. Moment by moment we seek only the perfection of beauty. We adore life, the feel of life… Each movement, from moment to moment, is itself her life’s purpose… There’s no telling how drastically a skin disease could overturn a woman’s fate and disrupt her romantic life.”
If “Schoolgirl” depicts the first conscious encounter with what escapes articulation between the self and society in a woman’s life, “Skin and Soul” depicts the way in which what is unspoken amasses weight over time, a weight of silences and secrets that comes to define womanhood itself. It is not so much the weight of knowledge as it is the weight of what no one knows, of what certain patriarchal and economic systems do not allow us to know. This not knowing is established in a key adolescent moment described in “Schoolgirl”:
“I don’t know which is better: to distinguish clearly between your social self and your real self and go about coping with everything in a methodical, cheerful way; or to never conceal or lose sight of your real self, even if people ridicule you for it.”
These two stories—the collection’s most advanced in their emotional and intellectual thought—articulate ideas that germinate throughout No One Knows. Several stories capture this idea about what no one knows of the inner lives of women through brief, photographic snapshots that recall Yasunari Kawabata’s Palm-of-the-Hand Stories. In the title story, a woman recounts an untold childhood memory to an unidentified listener: Upon learning that her close friend absconded with a maligned love interest, an inexplicable, inspired urge to chase down her friend’s brother and profess her love to him emerges. The listener is told not to share this with her daughter, who is just starting third grade and who must not know. “Cherry Leaves and the Whistler” depicts a woman who finds a letter addressed to her dying sister in which a man calls off their relationship. Disgusted by the man’s letter, she writes her own version, composed of a more sympathetic heartbreak. The narrator’s sister, reading this version, reveals that she had been writing letters to herself as this man, that there was no man. Here, the ingrained desires for conformity are so ingrained as to be enacted by the self for the self. When a whistle is heard outside their window, as the narrator-as-man had promised to do in the last letter, one senses Dazai’s radical suggestion of what can be made real out of what is not known.
Visions of liberation from the confines of what no one knows emerge as the collection progresses. “Katydid” assumes the form of a woman explaining to her husband why she is leaving him. After a pleasant first few years of marriage predicated upon her personal encounter with one of his paintings, an encounter that leads her to romanticize his unacknowledged artistry, his rise to fame reveals a duplicitous social self that she knows to be at odds with the true self revealed in his work. A similar story, “Chiyojo”, explores a young girl whose early successes as a writer alienate her from her friends and family and contradict her own feelings of inadequacy. It is only when she rejects fame, when she adopts more vulgar writing that her family discourages her from pursuing, that her sense of self and artistry achieve self-fulfillment.
Japan’s entry into World War II is captured in these stories (presented mostly chronologically) as these ideas become increasingly filtered through a wartime society. In “December 8”, a housewife decides to write down a record of her present life for posterity. However, unlike previous narrators who sought to work through what lies hidden between their social selves and real selves, she explicitly defines her documentation as a record of what life was like when Japan entered the war. Her dealings with an alcoholic husband do not take center stage themselves, but instead serve to illustrate her society at the outbreak of war. As depicted in Dazai’s Self-Portraits, the era of war disrupted and subsumed all individual and societal sense making within itself.
While the men depicted in this collection by and large resemble Dazai himself, “La Femme de Villon” is where he most directly puts his depression into conversation with the collection’s insights into the ontological struggles of women. In it, a woman finds peace after one of her husband’s mistresses begins to cover his debts. He is a writer, a suicidal hedonist in anguish over the question of whether or not God exists. For her, this is a question facing the wrong direction. After a harsh critique of his character in a newspaper, she tells him that they can label him whatever they want as long as he goes on living. Through his actions, through the unsociable unburdening of her husband by his mistress, she has come to the understanding that whatever one must do to keep on living is what is important—she is past caring for the social self. She understands that the social self cannot provide the fulfillment of the real self.
Despite the various visions of liberation that combat the inexpressible dilemmas and crises these women face, Dazai presents them all with the understanding that an inner self and its sense-making will never fully be in harmony with society—even less so for women. The idea of what no one knows and how to reckon with it is most elegantly and succinctly depicted in “Waiting”, the collection’s shortest story, in which a woman waits at a train station every day. Anxious about sitting at home doing nothing during the war, but otherwise unsure what to do with herself, she finds herself waiting for something at the station.
“No, it’s something more gentle, peaceful, brilliant, and wonderful, but I don’t know what. Something like spring, for example. No, wait. New green leaves. The month of May. A crystalline stream in a field of barley. None of those are quite right either. Ah, but I’m still waiting. Waiting with a spark of hope in my heart… I wait and watch with every fiber of my being. Please don’t forget me. Please don’t laugh at me, but remember this poor twenty-year-old girl who visits the station each day to meet someone, only to return home alone, with nothing. I won’t reveal the name of this little station. I don’t need to; one day you’ll see me here.”
She understands that what she is waiting for is ephemeral. She is waiting for meaning to reveal itself, and yet simultaneously, meaning is found in the act of waiting, in acknowledgement of the ephemeral, in learning how to know what no one knows.
amazing! u have opened my eyes to dazai