By Damian Flanagan

Someone contacted me recently and told me that there was a new book out called "Retrograde", which contained translations of stories by the iconic author Osamu Dazai (1909-48), and would I be interested in writing anything about it? I hesitated slightly because I am never quite sure if I will find a book particularly stimulating or not, but something in the blurb for this book immediately caught my eye. It stated that Dazai had as a young man worshipped the writings of famous short story writer Ryunosuke Akutagawa (1892-1927), someone he held up as an idol and sought to emulate.

This was news to me -- I always tend to think of Dazai either in connection with his wartime wanderings in his native prefecture of Aomori found in "Return to Tsugaru", or else in terms of the brilliantly sardonic tone of his mature masterpieces "The Setting Sun" and "No Longer Human", preceded, even before publication, by his own suicide. That Dazai had passed through a youthful phase of infatuation with the writings of the equally world-weary and perennially teetering-on-suicide Akutagawa is a detail I had completely missed, but one that, upon reflection, made complete sense.

This detail, however, provided me with the last piece of a jigsaw that I had been contemplating for some time, as I saw that nearly all the major writers of modern Japan stood in a chain of descending influence, where what they tried to achieve was profoundly affected by contemplation of the literary achievements of the previous generation. Sometimes this was expressed as out-and-out adulation and other times as a bitter denial of any connection whatsoever, and yet it's easy to see each new generation of writer emerging like a Russian doll from the figure that had gone before.

Take for example Yukio Mishima (1925-1970). It is pretty obvious that his breakout novel, "Confessions of Mask", published when Mishima was only 24 in 1949, owes a lot to Dazai's best-selling masterpiece, "No Longer Human", published the previous year. Mishima closely observed the devastating frankness Dazai had applied to his description of male-female relationships, freed from any semblance of trite morality, and decided to apply the same unrestrained honesty to his depiction of homosexual desire.

Yet Mishima was anything but complimentary about the literary debt he owed to Dazai -- in fact he always claimed that he profoundly despised his literary forebear. But Dazai had Mishima's number and the solitary encounter between the then famous Dazai and the then unknown Mishima in an izakaya in 1946 is one of the most famous in the history of Japanese letters. A group of student acolytes including Mishima had tagged along with Dazai, treating him like a god while he held forth and drank copiously. The students were all thrilled to be introduced to the author personally, but when it was the 21-year-old Mishima's turn, he burst out, "I hate you". Dazai looked him up and down and coolly responded, "And yet you are here".

What comes around, goes around. When a young Haruki Murakami first started publishing novels in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the enormous shadow cast on him by Mishima was blindingly obvious. His first novel, "Hear the Wind Sing" (1979), refers to a Mishima-like nationalist who has committed suicide by clutching a portrait of Hitler and throwing himself off the Empire State Building. His third novel, "A Wild Sheep Chase" (1982), opens on the day of the Mishima Incident in 1970, when Mishima and a small group of cadres took a general hostage before he and his presumed lover committed a sensational ritual suicide. Much of Murakami's early easy-to-read, Americanized writings seem to be penned in a distinct reaction to the densely poetic, intensely Japanese style of Mishima. Yet Murakami still claims that he has "hardly read Mishima at all".

Mishima could sometimes be coy about his influences and in turn those affected by him have been less than frank, but more usually the "influence" between generations of authors has been more generously recognized. Contemporary novelist Mieko Kawakami, expressing the feelings perhaps of an entire generation of modern Japanese writers, has noted that Haruki Murakami provided for them "the right kind of oxygen", making them feel that the literary heights would no longer be occupied solely by male graduates of the University of Tokyo. You can easily follow the flow of influence back through time, from Mieko Kawakami to Haruki Murakami to Yukio Mishima to Osamu Dazai to Ryunosuke Akutagawa ... and then you can keep on going.

Because Akutagawa himself was of course a famous disciple ("deshi") of literary master Natsume Soseki (1867-1916), who attempted to nurture the young man's precocious talent and sent him some famous letters of advice on how to succeed as an author. ("Be like a cow, not like a horse", Soseki counselled, meaning that Akutagawa should not rush along in a race with other writers, but stubbornly pursue his own path.)

And Soseki himself was in turn greatly influenced by his best friend, the haiku poet Masaoka Shiki (1867-1902), with whom he had a voluminous correspondence and to whom he exchanged thousands of haiku before Shiki died at the age of 34, when Soseki still languished in complete literary obscurity. And Shiki? He was in daily communion with all the great haiku poets of the past -- Basho, Buson and Issa.

There is a neat concept in David Peace's book about Akutagawa ("Patient X: The Casebook of Ryunosuke Akutagawa"). Soseki presents Akutagawa with an empty biscuit tin from England, an emblem of Soseki's attempts to save money on meals by eating cheap biscuits and buying books instead. But the empty biscuit tin is also a symbol of literary obsession. A symbolic vessel like that was being passed not just from Soseki to Akutagawa but from Shiki to Soseki and onwards from Akutagawa to Dazai to Mishima to Murakami and Kawakami. They all stand in one long literary chain, simultaneously emerging out of the shadow of previous influence and then profoundly influencing others in turn.

@DamianFlanagan

(This is Part 76 of a series)

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Damian Flanagan is an author and critic. He studied English Literature at Cambridge University and has a PhD in Japanese Literature from Kobe University. He is based in both Nishinomiya, Hyogo Prefecture, and the North-west of England. He is the author of "Natsume Soseki: Superstar of World Literature", "The Tower of London: Tales of Victorian London" and "Yukio Mishima".