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Who Are You to Speak in My Name?
Authors, Translators, and Stolen Voicesin Pre-War Japanese Literature
Isabelle LAVELLE
Abstract: Current trends in literary studies aim to rehabilitate the status of derivative texts
which are generally considered of less cultural importance than “creative writing”. However,these concerns stem from a Eurocentric approach to text production: in Japan, translators havebeen given a high status since the Meiji era and seem far from being “ invisible.” This paper
analyzes the negotiation and appropriation of authorial authority in texts with several origins.
It presents the case study of Dazai Osamu’s re-writings or hon’an focusing on power dynamics
related to authorial status and gender.
Introduction
In the spring of 2021, the translation into European languages of Amanda Gorman’s poem
“The Hill We Climb” has reignited long-standing debates over the ownership of voice(s) heard
in literary texts and the ethics of translation. Gorman, an acclaimed young black spoken word
artist, made history in 2017 by being named the ﬁrst National Youth Poet Laureate (Eppolito)
and received further international attention when she became the youngest person to read at apresidential inauguration in United States history in January 2021. Since then, Gorman has
remained in the spotlight as a poet, a black rights activist, and a fashion icon (Hess), but also
through the controversies surrounding the choices of translators for her work. Two translators
had been chosen and rejected by their publishers based on their race and/or sex: non-binary
white author Marieke Lucas Rijneveld for the Dutch translation and male white translator
Victor Obiols for the Catalan version (“Not suitable”). In the age of the Me Too and Black Lives
Matter movements, can a white and/or a male translator carry the literary voice of a black
woman?
Rijneveld, who also writes poetry, was the youngest author to win the International Booker
Prize in 2020. They explore in their debut novel The Discomfort of Evening (2018, English
translation 2020) the challenges of growing up non-binar y in a society that enforces strict
gender identities on young children. As such, one would have expected Rijneveld to be deemed

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Who Are You to Speak in My Name? Authors, Translators, and Stolen Voices in Pre-War Japanese Literatureknowledgeable enough about the contemporary youth’s rebellion against imposed identities
and commitment in support of negated voices. It seems that it was Gorman herself who chose
Rijneveld as her Dutch translator, but Rijneveld withdrew from the project after criticism
accusing them of perpetuating the silencing of Black voices in the over whelmingly white
European literary scene (Holligan). Victor Obiols, the second translator to be removed fromthe project because of his “wrong proﬁle,” has stated: “If I cannot translate a poet because she
is a woman, young, black, an American of the 21st-centur y, neither can I translate Homerbecause I am not a Greek of the eighth century BC. Or could not have translated Shakespeare
because I am not a 16th-century Englishman” (“Not suitable”).
Comparing two archetypes of established Western literary canons̶the proverbial “deadwhite men”̶to a contemporar y young black female author is somewhat misleading.
Nevertheless, Obiols’ comment is interesting in the way it reveals the expected “invisibility” ofthe translator in the Western literar y context, as analyzed by Lawrence Venuti; who thetranslator is as a person should not matter as long as we operate from the preconception thatthe distinctive characteristic of a “good translation” is that his/her voice should not be heard.
However, translation and literary studies scholars such as Venuti, Susan Bassnett, or Gayatri
Spivak have denounced the erasure of the translator as an illusion detrimental to theunderstanding of how literary texts are created and read. Moreover, as Antoine Berman has
seminally argued, an ethical sharing of authorship presupposes subjects free to make choices
on both sides.
A major trend within translation studies today thus advocates for a “critique of the ﬁgure of
the translator as an assembler of linguistic equivalences obtained from a dictionary” (Loffredo
and Perteghella 7). When a text relates to one or several previous texts, and whatever degreeof closeness they might have, the relationship can never be neutral nor impartial. Translation
thus crystallizes the much larger problematic of derivative texts̶texts based on or derived
from one or more already existing texts. Gérard Genette coined the term “hypertextuality”,
which “refers to any relationship uniting a text B (which I shall call the hypertext) to an earlier
text A (I shall, of course, call it the hypotext), upon which it is grafted in a manner that is notthat of commentary” (11-12).
This paper aims to discuss the co-existence of voices within hypertextuality by displacing thedebate to pre-war Japan. Indeed, the current approach remains centered on Western literarycultures while the Japanese understanding of literary creativity allows for more ﬂexibility interms of co-authorship. Starting from a brief overview of the speciﬁcities of Japanese translation
culture, we will look at the ways the works of Dazai Osamu negotiate their acknowledged and/or unacknowledged hypertextuality and the place they create and/or deny to his co-author(s).

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Translation as creative (re)writing
In The Translator as Writer, Susan Bassnett argues for a re-evaluation of the task of thetranslator while denouncing a strict hierarchization between the writer and the translator:“Some writers are lionized and critics write endlessly about their achievements, but no matter
how productive they may be, translators are generally ignored, they are invisible beings whoseliterary skills are obliterated by the reputation of the writer whose work they translate” (173).
One cannot but notice how little this applies to the Japanese context. The names of Mori ƿgai,Akutagawa Ryǌnosuke, Tanizaki Jun’ichirǀ, or Murakami Haruki, stand tall next to the Western
literary giants they translate̶Johan Wolfgang von Goethe, Théophile Gautier, Thomas Hardy,
or Truman Capote (Inoue). Obviously, all Japanese translators are not famous authors, but
within the Japanese translation culture, translators are authors. Many scholars have dated theprestigious status of translation to pre-modern Japan (Clements) and have noted that it stems
in part from the structure of the Japanese written language itself. “The co-existence andcommingling of ‘Chinese’ and ‘Japanese’ scripts, within a historical context that invested thelion’s share of cultural capital in Chinese writing, produced a condition of linguistic hybriditythat has no parallel in other part of Asia, much less the West” (Levy 2).
During the Meiji era, the basis of modern Japanese as a literary language was laid throughthe translation of Western texts (Cockerill). Japanese translations from this era deploy a wealthof neologisms and linguistic innovations that create new modes of literar y expressions inparallel to introducing new genres and reading practices. John Wixted underlines in his studyon ƿgai’s translations how much translation and creation are intertwined in modern Japanese
literature:

These texts prompted creative analogues [...], creative adaptations [...], and other creative
writing [...], which in turn helped occasion much of the best in modern Japanese literature.
Recovering these lost traces by examining the other two stages in the process of literaryinﬂuence̶the original sources of inspiration and the works into which they were recast̶enriches understanding of all three stages and of all of the works concerned. Translation,
as illustrated by ƿgai, can transform readers’ linguistic, literary, and lived worlds. (109)Modern Japanese literature is thus highly suitable as a starting point for the extension of theconcept of translation to include a multitude of hypertextual phenomena. These texts indeed
cover an array of ver y different degrees of resemblance to the source text; drawing a line
between translation, adaptation, and re-writing is a difﬁcult if not impossible task, and Wixted

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Who Are You to Speak in My Name? Authors, Translators, and Stolen Voices in Pre-War Japanese Literaturerightly claims that “between translations and so-called creative writing stands a vast middle
ground, one especially important in modern Japanese literature” (104).
The concept of “translation” needs therefore to be re-evaluated within the Japanese context.
The term hon’yaku can be associated with what we understand today as a faithful translation,with some degree of equivalence between the hypotext and the hypertext being expected. The
alternative term hon’an covers the looser translations that are closer to adaptations. Some may
consider hon’yaku as the natural successors of hon’an, in other words, that Japanese translators
graduated from an adaptative approach that preserves the target language at the expense of theoriginal to a more modern literalist approach that preserves the original text, sometimes to theexpense of the target language. However, this evolutive vision does not correspond to thehistory of Japanese literature, as texts belonging to the hon’an category keep being produced
after the hon’yaku translative techniques had been firmly established. As J. Scott Miller has
analyzed, considering hon’an as a primitive form of translation would therefore be incorrect:“ This deference towards hon’anmono was not, I suggest, due to an incomplete concept of literaltranslation; nor was it simply a matter of linguistic incompetence. [...] Writers appear to haveseen hon’anmono as a valid, alternative genre to literal translations (hon’yaku), and valued thecreative liberty and critical forum hon’an provided” (4). Within the Japanese literary context,
hon’an, therefore, co-exist with hon’yaku and creative writing as an alternative locus of
expression for the author’s voice. Inoue Ken has suggested that it is by writing these derivative
texts, ranging from translation to adaptation, that modern Japanese authors “learn theirpenmanship and establish their own mode of narration and style” (35).
The work of Dazai Osamu is a case on point. As a writer who gained visibility during thebungei fukkǀ (artistic and literary renaissance) of the mid-1930s (Hira 10-13), Dazai was wellaware of the long-standing tradition of the hon’anmono and employs metatextual devices to hint
at the debt many of his texts owe to other texts. In one of his earliest short stories Kyǀgen no
kami (The God of Comedy, 1936), a narrator who ostensibly presents himself as “Dazai
Osamu” draws the self-portrait of a writer without an original voice: “I have decided to borrowthe style of a famous Japanese author to make him speak about me, Dazai Osamu. I, sufferingfrom a loss of the self, cannot utter a single word about myself without borrowing the voice ofanother” (2: 289). Many of Dazai’s texts fall into the derivative category, “in a gradation ofworks inspired by other material(s) to works made up of quotes borrowed elsewhere. [...] Onemight be tempted to say that all of his texts are hon’an in one way or another” (Kimura 4). Joel
Cohn thus underlines that “As various critics have pointed out, Dazai’s imagination was notsuited to the task of fabricating stories; his characteristic method of composition was to takeexistent material (from the circumstances of his own life, diaries or letters of acquaintances, orWho Are You to Speak in My Name? Authors, Translators, and Stolen Voices in Pre-War Japanese Literature

153

older works of literature) and transmute it into something new and entirely his own” (101).
Dazai’s hon’an have the characteristic of borrowing from a wide range of hypotexts that can bebroadly classified into two categories. The first contains recognizable literar y works, from
Shakespeare ̶Shin-Hamuretto (New Hamlet, 1940)̶ to Ihara Saikaku̶Shinshaku
Shokokubanashi (New Tales from the Provinces, 1941) and many others (Kimura). The second
are source texts that are either unacknowledged or ambiguously referred to within thehypertexts, such as personal letters̶Kyokǀ no haru (Fictional Spring, 1936)̶or diaries ofothers̶Joseito (Schoolgirl, 1939), Seigi to bishǀ (Right and Smile, 1942), and Shayǀ (The SettingSun, 1947).
Given the translation culture alluded to above, Dazai’s reputation as an original author never
suffered from the hypertextual nature of his work. If anything, it became part of his brand as aburai (decadent) author, the repeated performance of a failed artist blending seamlessly withwitty displays of self-awareness and self-deprecation. Dazai’s works thus illustrate the“uncomfortable distinction between writing and translating, which starts to break down once it
is scrutinized closely” (Bassnett 174). Indeed, making a clear distinction between which texts
are actual hon’an and which texts are merely displaying intertextuality is a nearly impossible
and ultimately pointless task.
Rewriting as reinvesting authorial voices
Derivative texts exacerbate and make explicit the intertextuality inherent to literary texts̶
these “tissue[s] of quotations”, to borrow Roland Barthes’ expression (146). Within these texts
stemming from different origins, the co-existence of several authorial voices comes withdifferent power-sharing strategies depending on the reception context and the statuses ofrespective authors. Discourse analysis specialist Dominique Maingueneau states that
hypertextual phenomena are characterized by “reinvestment strategies” of a text or a type of
discourse into another text or another discursive category (155). In other words, when one
literary text quotes another, power relations between authors can be established according tomany different patterns.
In the case of a literalist translation, the target text is supposed to maintain a type of
discourse similar to the source text, the reinvestment strategy being based on faithfulness. The
hypertext’s author must in some way or other defer his authority to the hypotext’s author. A
parody, on the contrar y, displays a strategy of subversion, which aims to disqualify the
hypotext, often by switching to a different discursive category. Parodies operate by inversing
noble and mundane matter or styles, in a spirit of independence or irreverence displayed by thesecond author toward the original author and are, therefore, “often called ironic quotation,

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Who Are You to Speak in My Name? Authors, Translators, and Stolen Voices in Pre-War Japanese Literature

pastiche, appropriation, or intertextuality, [...] [and are] considered central to postmodernism”(Hutcheon 93).
Dazai’s hon’an Hashire Merosu (Run, Melos!, 1940) seemingly falls into this second category.
Its hypotext, Friedrich Schiller’s “Die Bürgschaft” (“ The Pledge”, 1798), is a ballad that uses
lyrical and dramatic tones to celebrate self-sacrificing love and the drive for freedom. It
resonates with its historical context as Schiller develops themes of anti-feudalism andrepublican righteousness “with an eye to the failure of the French Revolution, and the need toelevate the minds of the European population, in order to make a successful, American-style
revolution against oligarchism” (Wertz and Gallagher 85). Dazai’s hypertext is positioned in ahighly ambiguous relationship to Schiller’s poem, its deceptively simple narration telling asimilar story but stripped of any clear moral and/or political message. English translator James
O’Brien qualifies Dazai’s short story as “mock-heroic tale” (17) while Dazai specialist SǀmaShǀichi considers it a “parodification” (“Hashire” 170). Even though Dazai’s text does not
explicitly refute the ultimate message of Schiller’s poem nor has comical elements, it indeed
subver ts the discursive categor y by transposing the epic poem into a prosaic tale withpessimistic overtones.
However, as Joel Cohn has underlined, Run, Melos! does not correspond to a stereotypicalparody: “ The point of Dazai’s retellings was not to ridicule his original materials [...]. If thesestories are ‘parodies’ of anything in particular, it is not of the anterior texts but some elementsof the author’s own character, or some of the less admirable ways of the worlds̶in otherwords, the usual objects of Dazai’s comic attention” (102). Rather than trying to negate theoriginal author’s voice, Dazai’s strategy relies on superimposing his own to highlight the gap
between the different societies the two authors live in and their respective worldviews. Within
the reception context of Schiller’s ballad, optimism about social reform and the betterment of
humankind was not in vain, while Dazai, writing under an oppressive political regime in the
midst of the Second World War, presents himself as a disillusioned idealist who cannot in
earnest believe in the moral message contained in the hypotext, however much he tries.
In this sense, Dazai’s “parodies” are best understood in the etymological meaning of theword, “a parallel ode”, rather than a mocker y of the hypotext. Maingueneau notices that“subversion always implies an acknowledgment of the value attached to the discourse that isbeing re-invested” (94) and many of Dazai’s hon’an belong to the grey zone between deference
and defiance that can characterize the relationship between authors within hypertextuality.
Dazai therefore often capitalizes on the reputation of previous authors and the authority that
their texts carry̶a strategy that Maingueneau calls “captation”̶while maintaining a distancethat allows his authorial voice to never come second. This strategy is identifiable andWho Are You to Speak in My Name? Authors, Translators, and Stolen Voices in Pre-War Japanese Literature155

announced as such in several of his titles: New Hamlet or New Tales from the Provinces. While
re-using the same title as the hypotext can be considered an homage and/or show of humility,
adding that these iconic texts have been made “new” or “updated” implies a position of
authority equal to the previous author.
In his tales adapted from 17th-century Chinese author Pu Songling, Dazai uses the paratext
to establish his independence toward the original. Seihintan (A Tale of Honorable Poverty, 1941)is preceded by a long paragraph where he justiﬁes the freedom he took in adapting the originaltext.

What is written below comes from the famous Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio. The
original [...] is extremely short, but while reading it many fantasies came to me [...] and I
just wrote these down as they were. I am certain there is much to debate about whether
this way of proceeding is indeed suitable for creative writing, but for me the Strange Stories
from a Chinese Studio are closer to oral traditions [...] than literary classics; I see no real
sin in a Japanese writer from the 20th-century presenting the personal fantasies inspiredby these old stories to the readers as his own creation creative writing. (5: 127)

In Dazai’s second hon’an from Pu Songling, Chikusei (Blue Bamboo, 1945), there is no suchparatext but the opening lines contain a clear display of independence toward the original: “Onceupon a time in some district of Hunan, there was a poor scholar named Yu Rong. It seems thatfor whatever reason, it has always been the convention that scholars must be poor” (7: 385).
Dazai’s literar y hon’an have suf ficient inter ventions from the author to be marked as
rewriting rather than translation. This is made explicit in the introduction to the short stories
inspired by Saikaku: “I have entitled this collection New Tales of the Provinces but am tempted
to give it the subtitle My Saikaku. Whatever it is, it is not a modern translation of Saikaku.
Modern translations of classics are, generally speaking, pointless endeavors̶certainly nothingthat anyone who calls himself an author should undertake” (7: 244). It is worth noting that the
disdain against modern translations of Japanese classics proclaimed here was not universallyshared; famed authors Yosano Akiko and Tanizaki Jun’ichirǀ translated The Tale of Genji intomodern Japanese to great acclaim. Dazai’s somewhat provocative and repeated declarations of
independence might reflect a real uncertainty concerning the authenticity and status of theauthor’s original voice.
Co-existing voices and competing authors
Run, Melos! or the Pu Songling’s hypertexts, despite belonging to the hon’an category within

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Who Are You to Speak in My Name? Authors, Translators, and Stolen Voices in Pre-War Japanese Literature

the Japanese literary context, present themselves as free adaptations which do not owe any
allegiance to their hypotexts. As such, the power dynamics between respective authors are
relatively clear: the original author is made to appear as worthy of respect but obsolete. In thissense, the authorial voice we hear in these texts is overwhelmingly Dazai’s. However, some ofDazai’s derivative texts are structured around a much more unusual sharing of voices. His
ﬁctions based on personal documents, mingling voices of characters real or ﬁctional, famous or
unknown, truly illustrate the experimental and postmodern dimension of the parody underlined
by Linda Hutcheon (93).
Fictional Spring is one of the ﬁrst texts by Dazai based not on published literary works but
personal documents. This experimental novel made up of 83 letters announces the main
themes in its title: the limits of ﬁction and its reality. All of the letters are addressed to “Dazai
Osamu” and signed by several authors, without “Dazai Osamu” himself ever writing any. They
differ in tone and discursive styles, some being extremely deferential̶the addressee beingreferred to not only as “Dazai Osamu-sama” but also “Dazai Osamu sensei” or “Dazai Osamusama kika”̶while others are aggressively apostrophizing the addressee as “Dazai!”. Some of
the letters are signed enigmatically as “S.” or “From the Woman in Hell”, but many aresupposedly written by contemporar y authors who were, in fact, connected to Dazai, SatǀHaruo, or Ima Harube among them. As Dazai himself wrote in his correspondence with mentor
Ibuse Masuji, “about three-quarters of the many letters in my novel are ﬁctional, while about 30
are real” (12: 310).
This “self-portrait drawn through the gaze of others” (Noguchi 62) thus emerges via apolyphonic narrative device, which, as Mikhail Bakhtin has seminally argued, re-enforces thetruthfulness of ﬁction by creating the illusion of an open-ended dialogue that carries a truth
shared by a multiplicity of consciousnesses. Phyllis Lyons underlines how “in the case of Dazai[...] whose writing was almost entirely in the autobiographical-ﬁctional mode known in Japan as
the watakushi shǀsetsu [I-novel], the question of the ‘self ’ [...] is intimately tied in with the issue
of narrative voice: who it is, whom it addresses, what it says, and what signiﬁcance that has forthe effectiveness of the work as a whole” (94). The co-existence of distinct voices unmerged
within the author’s monologic utterance is crucial to this polyphonic and indirect self-portrait
as “their separateness is essential to the dialogue: even when they agree, they do so fromdifferent perspectives and different senses of the world” (Morson and Emerson 234).
Dazai uses polyphonic narratives several times in his work, most famously in The Setting Sun
where the main narration by female protagonist Kazuko is combined with her brother Naoji’s
diary and her own letters addressed to the character Uehara. Ningen shikkaku (No Longer
Human/A Shameful Life, 1948) similarly opens with a letter written by an unknown character

Who Are You to Speak in My Name? Authors, Translators, and Stolen Voices in Pre-War Japanese Literature157

who has no part in the main narrator’s story and who utters a very different version of the main
narrator’s struggles. However, it is his lesser-known novel Onna no kettǀ (A Women’s Duel,1940) that displays the most unusual polyphonic device that can be seen as a collage of different
authorial voices competing for the ultimate control over the ﬁctional truth. The text starts in a
discursive style reminiscent of the essay:

I would like to try and demonstrate to you the way I write a story. [...] For example, here
are the Complete Works of ƿgai. [...] I do believe it is absurd that even writers believe,
naively, that just reading the works of ƿgai is good enough to prove them highbrow [...].
We will read a work by ƿgai together. However, you do not have to be nervous. [...] I
recommend you to read this work with me while you relax and lie down. [...] Let’s open
volume 16, Translations. (4: 176-178)

Scholars have underlined that the publishing outlet of this text, the magazine Gekkan bunshǀ,being primarily addressed to readers who were themselves aspiring writers, justifies thissomewhat unusual opening sentence (Kobayashi 58; Fujiwara 240). The narrator then suggests
having a closer look at one of the translations by Mori ƿgai, a short story by German author
Herbert Eulenberg, Ein Frauenzweikampf, titled Onna no kettǀ in Japanese. This is the moment
when the narrative voice switches to ƿgai translating Eulenberg, as Dazai’s text directly quotes
whole paragraphs from the hypotext. The ﬁrst narrator who calls himself “DAZAI” (in Latinalphabet within the Japanese text) interrupts the quoted hypotext from time to time to add hiscomments and impressions. At one point however, he decides that he must disagree with thedirection the story is taking. He declares that the way the main character, Constanze, is being
treated lacks kindness and an alternative interpretation needs to be provided in order tounderstand this aspect of the story. He warns: “Beware, reader: from now on, this novel isgradually becoming mine (DAZAI)” (4: 188). “DAZAI”s alternative storyline posits that theoriginal author, Eulenberg, far from being the impartial observer his third-person narrationsuggests, is actually a character in his own story and harbors personal feelings of resentment
against the main female character: “It is possible to make the interesting hypothesis that thisnovel was written based on authentic documents and that its author was in no way a stranger toa very real scandal. To be absolutely clear, I smell in this novel a terrible secret: it is the author
himself, HERBERT EULENBERG, who was married to Constanze” (4: 189).
One might argue that Dazai is re-reading/re-writing Eulenberg’s story as one of his own,
which is to say as an I-novel that intricately blends the reality of the author’s personal life withﬁction. The co-exitance of three authorial voices, ƿgai’s words being left untouched, is the most158

Who Are You to Speak in My Name? Authors, Translators, and Stolen Voices in Pre-War Japanese Literature

remarkable feature of this palimpsest-like work “in which three texts̶Eulenberg’s original
work, ƿgai’s translation, and Dazai’s re-told stor y̶are layered on top of one another andcorrespond to one another but still represent each text’s individual features” (Fujiwara 250).
This has prompted scholars such as Sekii Mitsuo to declare that Dazai’s hon’an represent an
innovative turning point within the Japanese tradition of literar y adaptations, his creative
rewritings being resolutely more modern than, for instance, Akutagawa Ryǌnosuke’s (55).
However, the borrowing of others’ texts in a technique that is indeed reminiscent of a postmodern collage raises issues related to plagiarism and theft of others’ voices.
Borrowed voices or stolen voices?
Two of Dazai’s most famous novels are derived from personal documents written by otherpeople: Schoolgirl and The Setting Sun. Both of these texts are notable for belonging to anarrative genre widely exploited by Dazai usually referred to as josei dokuhakutai, “femalemonologic style”, or josei kokuhakutai, “female confessional style”. As the name suggests, thesenovels are based on the intimate ﬁrst-person narration of a female protagonist. Dazai published
16 of them, starting from Tǀrǀ (The Lantern, 1937) (Tǀgǀ). The writing in these texts is
noticeable for displaying a linguistic performance of gender that has been much praised. For
example, when Schoolgirl appeared, Kawabata Yasunari, who had himself published a novel
using the “female monologic style” titled Jojǀka (Elegy, 1932), wrote an extremely laudatory
review in the literary magazine Bungei shunjǌ despite his on-going public feud with Dazai.
Schoolgirl and The Setting Sun have established themselves as classics of 20th-century Japanese
literature and are not only highly regarded but very much loved by readers of the original
Japanese version and translations alike.
Both of these novels have real women’s diaries as hypotexts and borrow whole passages
from them. The diar y of Ariake Shizuko upon which is based Schoolgirl has been closely
studied by Dazai specialist Sǀma Shǀichi while The Setting Sun’s hypotext, ƿta Shizuko’s diary,
has been published after the publication of The Setting Sun under the name Shayǀ nikki (The
Setting Sun Diary, 1948). Comparisons between hypotexts and hypertexts show in each casethat Dazai added only minor modifications, especially when it comes to Schoolgirl. Sǀma’s
article on the subject has a signiﬁcant subtitle: “Sǀsaku to mohǀ no aida (Between a Creation
and a Copy)” and in it, he concludes that

Four passages can be unambiguously attributed to Dazai. Aside from the opening andclosing lines, there are the scene where the narrator looks at the picture of then Prime
Minister Konoe Fumimaro in the newspaper and the one where she cooks a “rococo-style”

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159

meal for her guests. However, even within these four passages, many sentences areborrowed from the diary. [...] As the novel uses so much of the diary, both in content andin style, it can hardly escape being labeled a “copy”. Dazai’s creative talent resides in theway he re-organized the timeline of a diary covering over three months into a single day[...]. (“Joseito” 173-174)

The case of The Setting Sun, a much longer novel, is more complex, as the female
protagonist’s narration based on ƿta’s diary alternates with her brother’s. Nevertheless, manyof the novel’s most striking episodes and phrases are directly quoted from The Setting Sun
Diary: the leitmotiv of the snake representing both motherhood and death, the reﬂections on
revolutions and revolutionary ﬁgures such as Rosa Luxemburg along with the famous sentence“Man was born for love and revolution”, the episode of the houseﬁre and the apologies that
follow, the episode where Kazuko is sent by the government to help with the war efforts byperforming physical labor, the mysterious expression “M.C.”̶later elaborated upon as “My
Comedian”, “My Child”, “My Chekhov”̶to address her lover

to list but a few (Nohara“Shayǀ”). Dazai specialist Chiba Shin’ichi concludes that “The Setting Sun should be [...]
considered as co-written by Dazai Osamu and ƿta Shizuko” (117).
These two texts indeed raise issues surrounding plagiarism and theft of intellectual property
that Dazai’s other hon’an do not. When a text derives from a previously published text
recognized as a literar y work through its reception, the hypertext’s author needs to makeexplicit a discursive position toward the hypotext, as we have seen above. The intertextual
dialogue and, often, show off of literary prowess between the two authors become the main
paradigm of the hypertext and the reader is aware of what is at stake. In the case of Fictional
Spring, the personal letters, which were not previously published literar y hypotexts, arenevertheless clearly presented as real letters within the hypertext itself, re-creating a somewhat
similar situation where the reader is made aware of the text’s hypertextual dimension. The lackof transparency that characterizes the status of the hypotexts in Schoolgirl and The Setting Sun
is what makes the hypertextuality of these works problematic.
It seems however that neither was considered plagiarism at the time of publication nor arethese texts being widely re-evaluated today. The pre-war Japanese literary context plays a rolein the ways the two novels are to this day quasi-unambiguously attributed to Dazai alone. Rewriting has always been accepted as creative writing within modern Japanese literature, as wehave seen above. Moreover, numerous authors, even after the Meiji Restoration, openly kept on
the practice of daisaku or ghostwriting, widely accepted during the Edo period. As analyzed byKǀno Kensuke, the reputations of major authors such as Kikuchi Kan, Tokuda Shǌsei or

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Kawabata Yasunari never suffered from the fact that they openly used texts prepared for themby deshi or apprentices. Far from being considered theft, this practice was accepted as a way
for an established author to help launch the career of aspiring writers by “lending” the prestigeof their name and by providing their disciples with paid writing jobs. It is only gradually, with
the idea of the original genius taunted by European Romanticism becoming widely accepted,
that using daisaku became a frowned-upon practice in Japan.
Another aspect to be taken into account is the two female writers’ position toward Dazai
using their diaries. The manners in which Dazai came into possession of the two diaries as wellas the personalities of the two authors are indeed very different. Ariake Shizuko was 19 years
old when she sent her diary to Dazai whom she did not know personally. Her exact motivations
are unknown; Sǀma notices that she writes in her diary: “I will write in this notebook as muchas I can and if it were ever to appear somewhere, even in a very cheap magazine, it would be
wonder ful!” (174). Her reaction to Schoolgirl being published and meeting critical andcommercial success is unknown, but Dazai wrote a short story, Zoku tenshi (The Vulgar Angel,1940) which features a letter written by a young woman to an established author. Readers canrecognize the narrator from Schoolgirl through telling details such as her dog’s name, “JappƯ”.
In this letter appears the following passage: “This evening, mother said she read Schoolgirl. [...]
Lately, I put on all sorts of airs. Thanks to you writing so well about me, I am known in thewhole of Japan” (4: 123-140). Dazai’s wife Tsushima Michiko recalls in her memoir that her
husband really did receive a letter with similar content, but there is no way to confirm this
(Sakurada 48).
ƿta Shizuko, on the other hand, was Dazai’s lover and mother of his illegitimate daughter,
Haruko. It seems that Dazai, who knew about ƿta’s writing, actively sought out her diary. Dazai
had announced in letters to friends, prior to getting the diary, that he intended to write a newnovel which would be “the Japanese Cherry Orchard”̶in the January 14, 1946 letter to Ibuse
Masuji (12: 342) as analyzed by Nohara Kazuo (Kaisǀ 32). In other words, Dazai, who had
always been fascinated by the aristocracy, but whose provincial albeit wealthy origins were far
from this milieu, wanted to write about its disappearance after the war but did not have muchpersonal material to go on. ƿta, on the other hand, came from an urban destitute bourgeois
family with high culture and had always called her mother “Madame Ranevskaya” after themain aristocratic character in Chekhov’s play. It seems therefore that Dazai knew he would ﬁnd
in her diar y the material he needed to create his great novel about Japanese aristocracy’s
decline.

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Voicing or silencing?
ƿta wrote an autobiographical novel after Dazai’s death where she records thedisappointment of the main character “Sonoko” upon discovering that the famous writer she isin love with has an ulterior motive for wanting to meet with her: “All he wanted was the diary;
Sonoko felt deep within her heart the despair of her situation” (Chiba 112). Aside from thispersonal conﬂict, it is not clear whether ƿta resented Dazai publishing part of her diary under
his own name. It is nevertheless signiﬁcant that ƿta seems to have been someone with literary
ambitions. Her diary contains numerous reﬂections on the act of writing and its signiﬁcance;
she writes that the celebrated New Zealand author Katherine Mansﬁeld was a great inspiration
to her. Mansﬁeld’s diary, published in English in 1927, had been translated into Japanese in1943 by Sano Ɯichi. Mansfield and ƿta shared many similarities in terms of social milieu,
education, passion for Chekhov, and both being women whose literar y voices were being
overlooked in favor of men’s. Aside from Mansﬁeld, ƿta’s diary contains many references toauthors whom she presents as models to both emulate and surpass: John Steinbeck, Fyodor
Dostoevsky, Romain Rolland, Madame de La Fayette, Marcel Proust, Leo Tolstoy, and Friedrich
Nietzsche (Chiba 113).
Moreover, these Western literary inspirations came on top of the preexisting tradition of
female literary voices expressed through the mean of diaries or nikki and ƿta’s diary quotes
such classics as Sarashina nikki and Murasaki Shikibu nikki. If we are to consider that a text
becomes literature in part through intertextuality, that is to say by displaying its belonging to
the same discursive realm as previously established works of literature, ƿta’s writing clearlymakes the effort to be recognized as such. If we are to consider ƿta’s writing as literature, her
text being used by another author without any acknowledgment cannot but be seen as theft. It
cannot be considered as mentoring on Dazai’s par t either. Dazai never seems to haveencouraged ƿta to write nor publish and never paid her for the diary, according to ƿta herself(Chiba 112). Far from providing an outlet for ƿta’s voice to be heard, Dazai conﬁscated hervoice by making it his own, effectively silencing her.
We cannot therefore but question whether her being a woman played a signiﬁcant role in her
writings appearing under Dazai’s name. Within the reception context of late 1940s Japan,
women writers were not non-existent. Following in the footsteps of such Meiji giants as Higuchi
Ichiyǀ or Yosano Akiko, Hayashi Fumiko or Nogami Yaeko were professional authors with solid
reputations. However, as many scholars have examined, women writers always occupied asomewhat uneasy position within a literary discursive regime where the default mode was
acknowledged to be a male. Women thus had to constantly re-afﬁrm their rights to be integral

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Who Are You to Speak in My Name? Authors, Translators, and Stolen Voices in Pre-War Japanese Literatureparts of a literary ﬁeld dominated by men while being expected at the same time to express a
gendered literary voice, that is to say, a voice easily recognizable as specifically “feminine”(Seki; Nakamura; Odaira).
A telling anecdote reports that when Higuchi Ichiyǀ was emerging as a writer, her malementor Nakarai Tǀsui suggested she copied the mannerism of onnagata kabuki male actors
impersonating female characters to develop a truly feminine style. Kano Ayako analyzes how it
was “believed that onnagata performed an idealized notion of femininity on stage, and people
doubted whether female performers could in fact act like a woman” (15), highlighting the long
tradition of normative reinforcement on how to act/speak like a woman performed by men
upon women in patriarchal societies. In many ways, the “female monologic style” novels of the
1930s-1940s partake in this tradition.
It is therefore signiﬁcant that Dazai published Schoolgirl when texts expressing young female
voices were especially celebrated within the Japanese literary establishment. This trend started
with the surprising success of the book Tsuzurikata kyǀshitsu in 1938. It was a collection of
texts written by a 16-year-old girl from a modest background, Toyoda Masako, assembled andpublished by her two male elementary school teachers. Kawabata Yasunari was particularly
impressed with the work. Kawabata was a contributor to the famous female magazines Fujin
kǀron and wrote several articles in the late 1930s asking female readers to send writingscelebrating speciﬁcally “feminine” traits such as women’s “innocence and graciousness” as wellas their “purity and nobility” (419; see Negishi). It seems very likely that Dazai saw in Ariake’s
diary the perfect material to show his talent to Kawabata, with whom he had a literary rivalry
and personal feud since he failed to get the 1935 Akutagawa Prize on which Kawabata was amember of the jury (Ka).
This renewed interest within modern Japanese literature in the literary expression of young
women’s voices can be interpreted in two opposite ways: as an occasion for an underrepresented group to gain visibility within a male-dominated milieu or as the appropriation by
the dominant group of voices that usually receive little exposure. These two interpretations are
not mutually exclusive. By encouraging young women to write, an established male author
such as Kawabata was widening the literary ﬁeld within which he held power to accommodate
new incarnations of the authorial ﬁgure, people with proﬁles until then at the opposite of thereadership’s expectations concerning the figure of the author. Even when a text such as
Schoolgirl was published under Dazai’s name, it did contain the message that a young girl’s
voice deserved to be heard on issues concerning her daily life and the society she lived in andcould be therefore considered as worthy of literature.
On the other hand, the voicing of such concerns was happening within the limits of pre-

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conceived definitions of gender, within which, as we have seen above, women needed to be
associated with innocence and beauty. Sǀma Shǀichi thus underlines how the modifications
made by Dazai on Ariake’s diary consist mainly of excluding passages, many of which containsharp criticism against society’s expectations on women and the militaristic education she
receives: “Dazai did not voice these social criticisms within Schoolgirl. It is possible he wastr ying to escape censorship, but it is equally probable that he deemed them [...] out ofcharacter with the ‘innocent and gracious young girl’ he wanted to portray” (“Joseito” 172).
Feminist scholar Shoshana Felman has expressed the inherent difficulty of any author,
female or male, to “speak in the name of ” a whole group of usually silenced people̶in thiscase, women. Elaborating on the writings of Luce Irigaray, French theorist of écriture féminine
or “female writing”, Felman wonders:If, as Luce Irigaray suggests, the woman’s silence, or the repression of her capacity to
speak, are constitutive of philosophy and theoretical discourse as such, from what
theoretical locus is Luce Irigaray herself speaking in order to develop her own theoretical
discourse about the woman’s exclusion? Is she speaking the language of men, or thesilence of women? Is she speaking as a woman, or in place of the (silent) woman, for the
woman, in the name of the woman? Is it enough to be a woman in order to speak as awoman? (12)We have seen that performing as a woman does not provide a solution to this problem either, as
the manifestations of gender performance are usually arbitrated by the dominant sex. However,
if we are to consider gender within literature as a linguistic performance first and foremost,
Dazai, as a male writer, should have as much legitimacy as any author to speak like a woman.
Dazai’s borrowings from Ariake’s and ƿta’s diaries remain nevertheless problematic for theunacknowledged nature of this borrowing and their celebrated contribution to the building of
Dazai’s authorial voice. Indeed, part of Dazai’s reputation has been built upon his “genius-liketalent to render women’s psychology”, as famed Dazai specialist Okuno Takeo puts it (242). Ina spirit of fairness, it is important to underline that Dazai published several “female monologic
style” novels with no known hypotexts, such as Kirigirisu (The Cricket, 1940) or Viyon no
tsuma (Villon’s Wife, 1947), and these can be considered proof of his capacity for un-prompted
creativity in cross-gender performance.
However, the function of these texts within the author’s work is ultimately to partake in thecreation of a male authorial self, as underlined above by Phyllis Lyons, and stealing others’
voices is paradoxically acknowledged as part of this self-fictionalization enterprise. Within

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Schoolgirl, a passage seems especially signiﬁcant. The narrator explains her love for books andhow quickly her taste and worldview can be inﬂuenced by her current readings: “I read one
book and become consumed by it; I trust it, identify with it, and try to emulate it within my
private life. Then, I read another book, and I completely change my mind. My only talent
resides in my ability to steal from other people and make mine what is theirs” (3: 160). These
sentences are borrowed untouched from Ariake’s diar y. Can they be understood as aconfession of guilt from Dazai? It seems that the author is announcing here that he is not somuch borrowing or emulating someone else’s voice but subsuming it within his own. He doesso by stating it and by doing so simultaneously, making Ariake’s words his. The reader nolonger hears the young girl’s voice but rather is made the witness of the male author’s virtuoso
control over the complex mechanisms of literary self-revelation and metatextual interplays.
It was in an article published more than 30 years ago, in 1988, that Chiba Sen’ichi wrote:“From an objective point of view, The Setting Sun is based on plagiarism from The Setting Sun
Diary” (116). Since then, the reception of The Setting Sun has not been affected by Chiba’s andother scholars’ questioning of Dazai’s authorship. The book is still published under his solename and contributes to his visibility within 20th-century Japanese literature, in Japan andabroad. How is this work going to be affected by the recent changes in the reception of literaryclassics, which indeed tend to be re-visited worldwide under the lights of contemporary events
such as the Me Too movement?
For instance, the Reclaim Her Name project re-published European canons such as
Middlemarch under the author’s real name, Mar y Ann Evans, alongside 24 other female
authors traditionally published under their masculine pseudonyms, such as Violet Paget(Vernon Lee) or Amandine Aurore Dupin (George Sand) (Flood). Some might consider this ascosmetic rebranding or anachronistic re-packaging with little impact on the actual texts.
Criticisms pointing out that the usage of pseudonyms has been justiﬁed throughout history formany different reasons and was willingly chosen by authors are also justiﬁed (McGreevy).
However, who writes a text is probably the single most determining criterium guiding
readers outside of the text itself, as seminally developed by Michel Foucault.

An author’s name is not simply an element in a discourse capable of being either subject orobject, of being replaced by a pronoun, and the like; it performs a certain role with regard
to narrative discourse, assuring a classiﬁcatory function. [...] The author’s name serves tocharacterize a certain mode of being of discourse: the fact that [...] this discourse is notordinar y speech that merely comes and goes, not something that is immediately
consumable. On the contrary, it is a speech that must be received in a certain mode andWho Are You to Speak in My Name? Authors, Translators, and Stolen Voices in Pre-War Japanese Literature

165

that, in a given culture, must receive a certain status. (210-211)

The author’s name is needed to create literarity and if a woman’s name is incapable to do so,literature loses all relevance within our contemporary societies.
Similarly, pretending that a text that has been re-written̶whether in a spirit of faithfulness
to the original or, on the contrary, of creative independence̶still unequivocally belongs to thesame ﬁrst author is simply untenable. In many ways, it is the concept of literary creation itself
that derivative texts put into question: “creativity is not an individualistic concept. [...]
Translational moment[s] display the richness of each subjectivity simultaneously entering into
relationships with the text and language, creating intriguing intertextual configurations;collaborations ultimately allow us to see how the people involved are all contributors, that is cowriters” (Loffredo and Perteghella 8). Within a literary world where some voices are less heard
than others, acknowledging the power dynamics at stake in hypertextuality is the ﬁrst step to
not only fairer reading practices but also a more accurate understanding of how literature is
being (re)created.
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