Entering history through ‘weak’ prose: Dazai Osamu's ‘Sange’

Abstract

This article explores Dazai Osamu's (1909–1948) work ‘Sange’ (Fallen flowers, 1944), which juxtaposes tales of the narrator's two friends’ deaths: one died a quiet, ‘personal’ death at home and the other a heroic death in the battle of Attu near the end of the Pacific War. The narrator's effusive admiration of both deaths makes it difficult to determine where exactly the narrator stands politically. This article argues that the story surreptitiously privileges the quiet death impervious to wartime exploitation of the fear of the unknown over the heroic death in battle. In doing so, the article shows the ways in which the ironic configuration of writing makes it such that only after the reader ‘experiences’ the narrator's aestheticization of death in battle can she hear his critical voice submerged in the text. This duplicity of the text opens a way for critiquing, rather than simply denouncing, the allure of aestheticized, ‘meaningful’ death at a specific historical juncture. It deters the reader from the critical pitfalls of losing a necessary distance from the text while cautioning against taking too much distance and appropriating it from an unaffected position.