Osamu Dazai and Suicide
On Osamu Dazai, suicide and other humane matters...
One: There exist people who are born with a transparent wall between their feelings and consciousness, and their vessel that is of flesh and bone.
Two: The only two absolutes for these people are to be born and to die by their own hands.
Three: Suicide is not an emergency button that is born of an evolutionary error.
I have not been writing on matters that contain spirituality since forever. I am also not the best at getting my thoughts together, and I am also unable to stay focused on a single matter. I am also not great at correlating between concepts. For example, the first concept that comes to my mind when talking about human behavior is the concept of suicide. But today, I wish for us to try to perceive death as a concept that has nothing to do with us. Together, you and I.
If I were a motivational speaker, I would be talking about the etymology of suicide and of suicidal acts that have left their marks on history and then, the reason why we should not commit such an act. (The human behavior that is based on flying away from something before fully realizing what it is and fighting against it, unfortunately, is the sole instinct that denies humanity from destruction and provides me with the opportunity to compose these lines.)
But then, I thought that it would be doing a great injustice on my part to compose a text on suicide in a think piece form while there exists a guide to committing suicide of such great quality, one whose standards are as high as Vergillius: Osamu Dazai. And then the idea just spiraled on and on in my mind, ever-growing.
As I am in a good mood today, I would like to present the Wikipedia-level encyclopedic information that can be reached by conducting a short research in a single paragraph: Osamu Dazai is a post-war Japanese author, who filled his life which lasted for about thirty-nine years with countless literary works and five acts of suicide, with one of them being successful. The Setting Sun and No Longer Human are counted as a sociological review of Japan in the 1940s, as well as being the autobiography of the author. The suicide of Ryunosuke Akutagawa also acts as a literary catalyst to Osamu Dazai, along with being one of the biggest inspirations of him. (I would like to add parentheses for Rashomon, to remind us to talk about in another article.) Osamu Dazai has drawn a portrait of a suicidal 20th-century antihero both with his own life and with the characters that he has created in his works.
...But we are going to be reviewing this author not by his life, but by his death. With the introductory behind us, I would like to begin.
“Horiki at heart did not treat me like a full human being. He could only consider me as the living corpse of a would-be-suicide, a person dead to shame, an idiot ghost.”
- Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human
The autopsy of the double suicide that was committed on the 13th of June, 1948, by Osamu Dazai and his lover, Tomie Yamazaki was performed by being introduced as a sensational matter. It is a war crime against the human mind to specify the reason to commit suicide as alcohol and substance addiction, the inability of the person to blend in with the society; the nihilism, the desperation, and the contradictory mindset of the person compared to the rest of its kind. Suicide is not an act that has a particular reason, as opposed to popular belief. To try and establish a cause-effect relationship between life and suicide is to deny the very nature of mankind. I would even go out on a limb here and argue that thinking the people that committed suicide were born dead to begin with, is not quite a faulty way to do so. On No Longer Human, the impressionist autoportrait of Van Gogh was likened to a painting of a ghost. Osamu Dazai has shown deep appreciation to artists that face a ghost while looking at a mirror because of them gaining the ability to see other ghosts that walk amongst us in the society and their ability to bravely picture them on their works of art.
The works of art that were created with this specific goal in mind are human diseases that the author defines as “...A state of mind in which the people who are overly afraid of people are, contrary to their aforementioned state of mind, longing to see even more horrifying monsters with their own two eyes” and that I choose to define as spiritual ghost hunting, which is also an exposure therapy against death.
“I felt sure that something more obscure, more frightening lurked in the hearts of human beings. Greed did not cover it, nor did vanity. Nor was it simply a combination of lust and greed.”
It is dangerous to feed on the Seven Deadly Sins except when working up the instinct to sustain yourself. Especially if you are a ghost just like Osamu Dazai, it is inevitable for this to cause a devastating self-destruction. So, why does not the pain people inflict on themselves just stay as the pain they inflict on themselves? There exist many who claim that the act of suicide is one that is selfish. Suicide brings destruction, nobody wants to upset their loved ones, and so on. Taking this into consideration, I am changing my question.
Why did Osamu Dazai choose to die with his lovers and not alone, in more than half of his acts of suicide?
Because people do not like suffering alone.
Because people get frightened when they realize that they could escape from the pain that they suffer if they are alone. Recognition, being understood and the will to establish a connection over anything is so strong on some people that they feel the need to salute to even the silhouettes they see in the dark just before falling to sleep at night.
With whom would you want to die?
p.s. By the way, people have the right to be selfish. Especially, you do.
* It should not be forgotten that literary censorship began to disappear slowly after World War II. Do not expect anything too surprising or contrarian.
*This article was originally written in Turkish and translated by Orhan Dincsahin.
