Voices in the Age of Collapse: Osamu Dazai and the Spiritual Landscape of the Midwar and Postwar Eras Late 1930s to 1940s

Voices in the Age of Collapse: Osamu Dazai and the Spiritual Landscape of the Midwar and Postwar Eras Late 1930s to 1940s
Osamu Dazai's literature is a language with a keen sense of the collapse of value experienced by Japanese society during and immediately after the war and the shame and pain of the individuals who survived in the midst of this collapse.

In the late 1930s, Japanese society became increasingly militarized and loyalty to the state was enforced as morality. Literature, too, demanded soundness and cooperation, and individual weakness was excluded. Dazai continued to write about his inability to be a model subject in this era.

During the war years, Dazai did not speak directly against war, but he depicted individuals who could not conform to the respectable life demanded by the state, and as a confession of his ethical failure, he formed a tension with the regime.

In "Shayo" and "Ningen Shikkaku," written in the midst of an overnight reversal of values after the war's defeat, Dazai depicts people who cannot be saved even in a supposedly changed society. Shame and self-loathing do not end when the war is over.

Dazai did not depict the defeat of the war as liberation, but took on the defenselessness of individuals who had lost their stronghold until the very end. His literature is a testimony of the postwar period, recording the sensations of those who lived through it.