Women’s Duel: Dazai Osamu’s Literary Experiments

Abstract

Dazai Osamu, a watakushi-shōsetsu author, did not restrict himself to using only the “autobiographical” kind of literature materials. Seeking new plots for his writings, Dazai often referred to the stories of classical Japanese literature, and also tried to find an inspiration in Western literature, especially in works by European writers.

His work “Women’s Duel” (1940), a literary adaptation of the eponymous story (1911) by a German author Herbert Eulenberg, became an attempt to create a novel literary phenomenon (which was somehow barely noticed by literary critics and scholars) of “adapted confessional metafiction”. Although this work has a complicated genre structure, it still contains the majority of the typical themes of Dazai’s writing and also discusses some tendencies in Japanese literature the writer himself witnessed. Although Dazai did not make any major changes to the plot of the original story, he managed to challenge the indifference and objectivity of descriptions that are typical for the literary school of naturalism. While Eulenberg is describing his characters in a third-person narrative, Osamu gives the floor to every character, making them play a role of “conduits of subjectivity”.

As it is known, Dazai read the Japanese translation of Eulenberg’s story made by Mori Ōgai. A comparative analysis of the original story and its Japanese translation made by the researcher Kuzumi Kazuo makes us assume that Ōgai’s original intention was not to make a translation as such but rather to make an adaptation in order to expand the original text. This fact makes the genre structure of Dazai’s work even more complicated.

A structured analysis of “Women’s Duel” based on the explanation of the work’s genre, compositional, and thematic features will let us take a step away from Dazai’s image of a watakushi-shōsetsu’s writer and focus on his features of a distinctive literary stylist.