First Memoir

by Osamu Dazai

I have lived carrying a great deal of shame.

I have absolutely no idea what human life is like. Having been born and raised in the countryside of Tohoku, it was quite late in my life when I first saw a train. I didn't realize that going up and down the station bridge was meant for crossing the tracks; I simply thought it was there to make the station complex, fun, and stylish, like a foreign amusement park. And I thought that for quite some time. For me, going up and down the bridge was rather a sophisticated game, and I considered it a particularly thoughtful service provided by the railway. However, when I later learned that it was merely a practical staircase for passengers to cross the tracks, my enthusiasm suddenly waned.

Also, when I saw an underground railway in a picture book as a child, I thought it wasn't devised out of practical necessity, but rather that riding a train underground was a more pleasant and interesting game than riding one above ground, due to the comfortable breeze.

I was sickly from childhood and often confined to bed. While lying there, I would look at the bedsheets, pillowcases, and duvet covers, thinking they were trivial decorations. It was not until I was nearly twenty that I realized they were, surprisingly, practical items, and I felt disheartened and sad by the triviality of human beings.

Furthermore, I never knew what "hunger" was. No, I don't mean that I grew up in a home where I lacked nothing in terms of food, clothing, and shelter; rather, I simply had no idea what the sensation of "hunger" felt like. It's a strange way to put it, but even when I was hungry, I wouldn't realize it myself. When I came home from elementary or middle school, the people around me would make a fuss, saying, "You must be hungry, we remember that feeling. The hunger you feel coming home from school is really terrible, so how about some amanatto? We also have castella and bread." So, I would use my naturally sociable personality to murmur, "I'm hungry," and pop about ten pieces of amanatto into my mouth, but I still had no idea what the feeling of hunger was like.

Of course, I eat a lot too, but I rarely remember eating out of a feeling of hunger. I eat things that are considered rare, and things that are considered luxurious. Also, when I go to someone else's house and am served food, I usually eat it, even if I have to force myself. Amidst all that, the most painful time for me as a child was actually mealtime at my own house.

At my rural home, about ten family members would arrange their individual meal trays in two rows facing each other, and as the youngest, I was naturally at the lowest seat. The dining room was dim, and during lunch, for instance, the sight of over ten family members silently eating always sent a chill down my spine. Since it was an old-fashioned rural house, the side dishes were mostly fixed, and there was no hope for anything rare or luxurious. Meal times became increasingly terrifying. In that dim room, at the lowest seat, I shivered with cold as I slowly brought rice to my mouth, thinking, "Why do people eat three meals a day?" Everyone ate with solemn faces, as if it were a kind of ritual, and I even once thought that perhaps the family gathered in the dim room three times a day at fixed times, neatly arranged their meal trays, and silently chewed their food even if they didn't want to, all to pray to the spirits stirring throughout the house.

The phrase "If you don't eat, you'll die" sounded to me like nothing more than an unpleasant threat. That superstition, which even now still seems like a superstition to me, constantly filled me with anxiety and fear. There was no phrase more obscure, ambiguous, and threatening to me than "Humans will die if they don't eat, so they must work and eat for that reason."

In other words, it means I still understand nothing about human endeavors. I have rolled around in bed night after night, groaned, and even nearly gone mad from the anxiety that my concept of happiness and the concept of happiness of everyone else in the world are completely at odds. Am I truly happy? Since I was little, people have told me I am indeed fortunate, but I always feel as if I am in hell, and rather, those who called me fortunate seem incomparably more at ease.

I even thought that if my neighbor were to bear even one of the ten bundles of misfortune I carry, that single one would be enough to take their life.

In other words, I don't understand. I have no idea what kind of suffering my neighbor endures, or how deep it runs. Practical suffering, suffering that could be solved simply by having food. But perhaps that is the most intense pain, a horrific hell that would make my ten worries vanish. I don't know. Yet, they don't commit suicide, they don't go mad, they talk about politics, they don't despair, and they continue the battle of life without yielding. Are they not suffering? Have they become complete egoists, convinced that it's natural, and never once doubted themselves? If so, that would be easy. However, perhaps all humans are like that, and that's a perfect score. I don't know... Do they sleep soundly at night and feel refreshed in the morning? What kind of dreams do they have? What do they think about while walking down the street? Money? Surely, it's not just that. I seem to have heard the theory that humans live to eat, but I've never heard the phrase that they live for money. No, but, in some cases... No, I don't understand that either... The more I think about it, the less I understand myself, and I'm only assailed by anxiety and fear, as if I alone am completely different. I can barely converse with my neighbors. I don't know what to say or how to say it.

What I came up with then was clowning.

It was my last courtship of humanity. Despite my extreme fear of humans, I simply couldn't bring myself to give up on them. And so, through this line of clowning, I was able to maintain a tenuous connection to humanity. While outwardly I constantly wore a smile, inwardly I was desperate, providing service with a sweat of oil, truly a hair's breadth from disaster, one in a thousand times.

From childhood, even towards my family, I had no idea how much they suffered or what they thought about living. I was simply terrified and couldn't bear the awkwardness, so I had already become skilled at clowning. In other words, before I knew it, I had become a child who never spoke a single truthful word.

When I look at photographs taken with my family from that time, everyone else has a serious expression, but I alone always have a strangely distorted smile on my face. This, too, was a form of my young and sad clowning.

Furthermore, I never once talked back when my relatives said something to me. Even the slightest scolding felt as powerful as thunder to me, driving me to near madness. Far from talking back, I would convince myself that the scolding itself was the "truth" of humanity, passed down through the ages, and since I lacked the power to act on that truth, I could no longer live with humans. Therefore, I was incapable of arguing or defending myself. When someone spoke ill of me, I always felt as if it were perfectly reasonable, as if I had made a terrible mistake, and I would silently accept the attack, feeling an inner terror that drove me to madness.

It may be that no one feels good about being criticized or scolded by others, but in the face of an angry person, I see the true nature of an animal more terrifying than a lion, a crocodile, or a dragon. It seems to hide its true nature ordinarily, but on some occasion, for example, like a cow lying placidly in a meadow suddenly striking down a fly on its belly with its tail, when I see a person's terrifying true identity unexpectedly exposed by anger, I always feel a shiver that makes my hair stand on end, and when I think that this nature might also be one of the qualifications for human existence, I almost feel despair about myself.

Always trembling with fear and dread towards humans, and lacking even an iota of confidence in my own words and actions as a human, I kept my personal anguish hidden in a small box in my heart, completely concealing my melancholy and lethargy, and earnestly feigning an innocent optimism, gradually perfecting myself as an eccentric, like a clown.

Anything is fine, as long as I make them laugh. If I do that, perhaps humans won't care so much if I am outside of what they call "life." In any case, I must not be an eyesore to them. Thoughts like "I am nothing, I am wind, I am sky" accumulated, and I made my family laugh through my clowning, and even desperately offered my clown services to the servants, male and female, who were even more incomprehensible and terrifying than my family.

In the summer, I walked down the corridor wearing a red wool sweater under my yukata, making everyone in the house laugh. Even my eldest brother, who rarely laughed, burst out laughing when he saw it and said, "That, Haa-chan, doesn't suit you," in a tone that sounded incredibly fond. What? I wasn't such an eccentric person who didn't know heat or cold, to the extent of walking around in a wool sweater in midsummer. I had put my sister's gaiters on both arms, letting them peek out from the sleeves of my yukata, making it look as if I was wearing a sweater.

My father was a man with many errands in Tokyo, and he owned a villa in Sakuragicho, Ueno, where he spent most of the month. And when he returned, it was almost a hobby of his to buy a great many souvenirs for his family and relatives.

The night before my father's trip to Tokyo one day, he gathered his children in the drawing-room and, laughing, asked each of them what kind of souvenir they would like him to bring back this time, jotting down their answers in his notebook. It was unusual for my father to be so close to his children.

"What about Yozo?" he asked, and I stammered.

When asked what I wanted, I suddenly didn't want anything. The thought that it didn't matter, that nothing would ever truly entertain me anyway, would suddenly cross my mind. At the same time, I couldn't refuse things given to me by others, even if they didn't suit my taste. I couldn't say "no" to things I disliked, and I would timidly acquire things I liked, all while harboring a bitter feeling and agonizing over an unspeakable sense of dread. In other words, I didn't even have the power to choose between two options. I believe this was one of the propensities that later became a major cause of my "life of shame."

As I remained silent and fidgeted, my father said with a slightly displeased expression,

"You still want books, don't you? They were selling the lion dance masks for New Year's at the Nakamise in Asakusa, just the right size for a child to wear and play with. Don't you want one?"

When asked if I didn't want it, there was nothing I could do. I couldn't give a playful answer and could only remain silent. As a jester, I was a complete failure.

"Books would be good," my eldest brother said with a serious face.

"Is that so?" my father said with a disappointed look, not writing anything in his notebook, and snapped it shut.

What a failure. I had angered my father. His revenge would surely be terrible. I thought, trembling in my futon that night, that I must do something now to prevent things from becoming irreparable. I quietly got up and went to the guest room, opened the desk drawer where my father must have put the notebook earlier, took it out, and flipped through the pages to find the section for souvenir orders. Then, I licked the pencil from the notebook, wrote "Shishimai," and went to sleep. In truth, I didn't want that lion dance lion at all. In fact, I would have preferred a book. However, realizing that my father wanted to buy that lion for me, and in my eagerness to appease him and improve his mood, I dared to undertake the adventure of sneaking into the guest room in the middle of the night.

This desperate measure of mine, as it turned out, was a great success, just as I had hoped. Soon, my father returned from Tokyo, and I heard him loudly telling my mother from the children's room:

"When I opened this notebook at the toy store in Nakamise, it said 'Shishimai' here. This isn't my handwriting. I tilted my head, wondering, and then it hit me. This is Yozo's prank. He was grinning and silent when I asked him, but later he must have desperately wanted the lion. After all, he's an unusual boy. He pretended not to care, but he wrote it down properly. If he wanted it so badly, he should have just said so. I laughed at the toy store front. Call Yozo here quickly."

Meanwhile, I gathered the houseboys and housemaids in the Western-style room and had one of the houseboys pound on the piano keys haphazardly. Although it was in the countryside, the house was equipped with most things. I danced an Indian dance to the cacophonous tune, making everyone laugh heartily. My second elder brother took a flash photograph of my Indian dance. When the photo was developed, a small penis was visible from the seam of my loincloth (which was a calico furoshiki), which again caused great laughter throughout the house. For me, this might have been another unexpected success.

Every month, I would order more than ten new boys' magazines, along with various other books from Tokyo, and read them silently. As a result, I was very familiar with Dr. Mechara Kuchara and Dr. Nanjamonja, and quite knowledgeable about ghost stories, kōdan, rakugo, and Edo kobanashi. Therefore, I never lacked for lighthearted remarks delivered with a serious face to make my family laugh.

But oh, school!

I was on the verge of being respected there. The concept of being respected also terrified me greatly. To almost completely deceive people, only to be seen through by one omniscient being, utterly crushed, and subjected to a humiliation worse than death. That was my definition of being "respected." Even if one deceives people and is "respected," someone knows. And when people eventually learn from that one person and realize they were deceived, what kind of anger and revenge would they unleash? Just imagining it makes my hair stand on end.

Rather than being born into a wealthy family, I was able to earn the respect of the entire school by being recognized by those around me as "capable." I was sickly from childhood, sometimes spending a month or two, or even most of the school year, bedridden and absent from school. Nevertheless, when I would go to school in a rickshaw with my recovering body and take the year-end exams, I was always evaluated as more "capable" than anyone else in the class.

Even when I was feeling well, I hardly studied, drawing manga during class and showing it to my classmates during breaks, making them laugh. I only wrote comical stories in my essays, and even when warned by the teacher, I never stopped. This was because I knew that the teacher actually looked forward to my comical stories.

One day, I deliberately wrote a sad story about a mishap where I peed in a spittoon in the aisle of a train on the way to Tokyo with my mother, and submitted it. Confident that the teacher would surely laugh, I quietly followed the teacher as he went up to the staff room. As soon as the teacher left the classroom, he picked out my essay along with those from other classes and began reading it as he walked down the hallway. Chuckling, he entered the staff room and burst into loud laughter, then had other teachers read it, which made me very satisfied.

I succeeded in being seen as "mischievous." I was able to escape being respected. My report card showed ten points in all subjects, but my conduct was only seven or six points, which also became a source of laughter for my family.

However, my true nature was completely opposite to such playfulness. At that time, I was being taught sad things and hurt by the maids and servants. I now believe that doing such things to a child is the most heinous and base crime, but I endured it. I even felt as if I had seen another human characteristic, and I smiled weakly. If I had had the habit of telling the truth, I might have been able to report their crimes to my father or mother. However, I couldn't fully understand my father and mother. I had no expectation of appealing to humans at all. I thought that whether I appealed to my father, my mother, or the police, I would ultimately just be overruled by the arguments of those who were good at getting along in the world.

Knowing that appealing to humans was futile, I felt I had no choice but to endure without telling the truth and continue to play the fool.

Some might scoff, "Are you talking about distrust of humanity?" but I don't believe that distrust of humanity necessarily leads to a religious path. In fact, humans, including those who scoff, live perfectly well amidst mutual distrust, without God in mind.

When I was a child, a celebrity from my father's political party came to town to give a speech, and I was taken by the servants to listen at the theater. The venue was packed, and I saw the faces of people close to my father, who were applauding enthusiastically. After the speech, the audience walked home along the snowy night road, complaining about the rally. Among them were voices of people particularly close to my father, who said in an angry tone that my father's opening remarks were poor and that the celebrity's speech was incomprehensible. Nevertheless, those same people stopped by my house and happily told my father that the rally had been a great success. When my mother asked the servants how the rally was, they also said, "It was very interesting."

However, this is just one example. It seems to me that human life is filled with truly vivid examples of distrust, where people deceive each other without anyone getting hurt or even realizing they are being deceived. But I don't have a particular interest in mutual deception. I myself deceive people from morning till night through my clowning. I have little interest in the justice and morality found in ethics textbooks. I cannot understand people who live purely, brightly, and cheerfully while deceiving each other. They never taught me their profound secret. If I had understood it, I wouldn't have feared humans or needed to desperately serve them. I would have been able to live without conflicting with human life and without experiencing the nightly torments of hell.

In other words, I believe that the reason I never reported the hateful crimes of the servants and maids to anyone was not out of distrust of humans, nor because I was a Christian, but because humans had firmly closed the shell of trust against me. Even my parents sometimes showed me things that were difficult for me to comprehend.

At that time, I believe that the lonely scent of my inability to appeal to anyone was instinctively detected by many women. And, looking back, I feel that this became one of the triggers for me to be used in various ways.

In short, I was a man who could keep the secrets of love for women.