9Japan Academy Prize to:Hiroshi AndoEmeritus Professor, The University of Tokyo
Visiting Professor, The Open University of Japanfor Dazai Osamu: The Work and Life

Outline of the work:
In Dazai Osamu: The Work and Life (The University of Tokyo Press, 2021), the author, Prof.
Hiroshi Ando, appreciates the uniqueness of Dazai’s “verbose and too self-conscious” narrative
style, and analyzes the process through which his peculiar self-image and forms of expression –his “dramatized self-presentation” – were conceived and developed. The author achieves this bydividing Dazai’s novel-writing career into four periods, taking up important works from each inturn.
“Part I: The Cradle” discusses Dazai’s childhood and upbringing, tracing the ascent of hislandowning family, the Tsushimas, up the social ladder. In his hometown of Tsugaru, the adolescent Dazai published juvenilia in local literary magazines. In these sketches, Dazai is driven byhis own sense of guilt to denounce the sinful “blood of debauchery” running in the landowningclass. According to the author of the book, Dazai’s eﬀort in this direction ended in failure, andhe moved on to thematize the despair and downfall of his own clan.
“Part II: The Landscape of The Final Years” focuses on the said novel collection (publishedin 1936), which includes Dazai’s works subsequent to his relocation to Tokyo. There, following
a failed suicide attempt with a woman and a period of drug addiction, he became a professional
author. Dazai’s expulsion from his birth family and his departure from leftist activities, however,plunged him into an identity crisis. His destroyed self-esteem, combined with his novelistic
theme of downfall, led him to be obsessed with the representation of death as is apparent in The
Final Years, and to woefully poeticize it as one who has lost his home.
“Part III: The Middle Years” discusses Dazai’s works from the late 1930s through the early
1940s, when he was in his 30s and trying to write while struggling to rebuild his life after hisdivorce and remarriage. Dazai’s novels during this period brought to the fore his awareness ofsin, as he examined himself in perspective of the chasm that lay between him and his family,
and attempted to justify himself through telling his narratives. The author uncovers Dazai’s
psychological landscape as such through an analysis of the collections On Love and Beauty andSchoolgirl (1939) and Eight Views of Tokyo (1941).
“Part IV: Through and Beyond the Wars” examines how Dazai’s views on war and his experiences during the Sino-Japanese War and World War II figured in his works from 1941 throughthe postwar period, up until his suicide by drowning in 1948. Dazai came during the war years
to conceptualize “the family state”, a community of the Japanese people with the imperial family

10at its center, as a frame against which his own position in it should be made clear. The author
argues that Dazai sought to rebuild within this fictitious frame his spiritual ties to his clan and hishometown. It is reported that Dazai described such a narrative as being born out of the “pathos ofdistance”, which arises from recognizing the gap between the great and the low, the protector andthe protected. This is exemplified in Tsugaru (published in November 1944), a novel considered
to be the culmination of Dazai’s wartime writings.
However, Dazai’s conceptual framework described above collapsed upon Japan’s defeat,and the “vertical” relationships that supported his wartime narratives lost its validity. Dazai thenattempted to create “horizontal” dialogues by positing new binaries, such as the city and thecountry and men and women. When this vision also failed, he transformed himself into a writer
who spoke downfall and despair in the first person. The works produced in this period include
The Setting Sun (1947) and No Longer Human (1948), which are regarded as Dazai’s postwar
masterpieces.
This monumental work of criticism includes an introduction, 43 articles, and 48 mini-essays
discussing the historical background and other information pertaining to Dazai’s oeuvre. Conducting a thorough review of the dauntingly voluminous existing literature on Dazai, this bookadds further depth to it by adopting a still wider cultural and literary perspective. It is outstanding
in that, in addition to discussing the themes and sources of Dazai’s novels, it investigates how
Dazai’s narratives are structured, why he needed to construct them in such a peculiar manner,
and what eﬀect the narratives produce. The author achieves this feat by what may be called adiachronic questioning – that is to say, by conducting a close analysis of the individual works
while also tracing the arc of their transformation, and thus successfully illuminates the path ofDazai’s career through the vicissitudes of his life, all the way to his destined end as a man andwriter.
Furthermore, instead of discussing these issues as exclusive to Dazai, the author of this booklinks them to a larger question relevant to the entirety of modern Japanese literature: the questionof what narrative style makes the expression of “I” possible. It has been explored already inthe author’s previous books such as Kindai Shosetsu no Hyogen Kiko (Iwanami Shoten, 2012)
and “Watashi” wo Tsukuru (Iwanami Shinsho, 2015), both of which have received high criticalacclaim.
In conclusion, there is no doubt that the accomplishments of this book have broken new
ground in the study of modern Japanese literature, making it worthy of the Japan Academy Prize.