This article is written by Da Yan
"Human Disqualification" and "Slanting Sun" are called the "double bi" that represents the aesthetic works of Japanese writer Osamu Dazai, and after watching "Human Disqualification" in the previous paragraph, it is natural to be full of strong desire to see another masterpiece of mourning culture, "Slanting Sun".
I also finished reading this book in one sitting. It feels that the language is much brighter, not as obscure as "Human Disqualification"; there are also some depictions of beautiful environments, so it is not like "Human Disqualification" is full of decadent and hopeless atmosphere throughout. But the tone of this "Slanting Sun" is still bleak and mournful, although it is lightly fluttering in the hand (because it is printed on light paper), but after covering up, the heart is heavy.
Before writing this novel, Osamu Dazai declared with great ambition: "I want to write a masterpiece, a masterpiece." I wanted to write Japan's "Cherry Orchard", a tragedy of the fall of the nobility. Even if I have thought of the title, it is called "Slanting Sun"." "Xieyang" was written in June 1947, and as the author wished, this work received a lot of praise as soon as it was published, not only ranking fifth in the "excellent post-war works", but also giving birth to the popular phrase "Xieyang", which swept Japan.
After the end of World War II, Japan's defeat led to social chaos, the values that the people had always believed in fell apart, the faith and spiritual pillars that underpinned them collapsed, and people became confused and empty. The government's agricultural land reforms deprived the aristocratic class of its economic resources, and the famous nobles were defeated. It is in this historical context that "Slanting Sun" is written in this historical context, and it composes an elegy for the decline of the old Japanese aristocracy through the depiction of the mental state and survival status of the aristocratic family represented by The Son and his mother and brother.
Kazuko's mother is a true nobleman who is elegant to the bone, and she shows the elegant and charming temperament of the noblewoman with a smile and a hand. From eating, reading, and knitting yarn, to the death of her husband, her son taking drugs, and her daughter starting a fire, she has all been generous and understanding.
From the bustling city to the remote countryside, from pampering to self-reliance, in the face of the huge changes in the cliff-like lifestyle brought about by the fall of the family road, the mother is powerless to change the status quo, and can only passively accept it.
When his younger brother Naoji returned from the battlefield, Kazuko asked him, "Do you think your mother has changed?" Naoji replied, "Changed, changed." The man was very emaciated, and it was better to die quickly. In today's world, people like my mother can't live at all..." Sure enough, my mother died soon after, "without quarrel with the world, without hatred, without jealousy, beautiful and sad for the rest of her life." The arrival of the mother, japan's last noblewoman, also symbolizes the complete end of the Japanese aristocratic era.
It was not war that took Naoji's life, but the social reality that he was powerless to fight. Returning from the battlefield, Naoji still has bad habits, smokes opium, indulges in alcohol, and lives a life of wandering skeletons with the money exchanged for his family's clothes, jewelry, etc., and finally chooses to commit suicide by taking medicine because he can't see the meaning and hope of living.
I thought that Naoji was such a little who was not filial to his mother, did not understand his sister, and self-exiled and sinking in drunken dreams and death, but after reading his suicide note, you will have sympathy and understanding for his life experiences.
"As nobles, is it our sin? Just because we were born into that family, we have to live forever like Judas's family, cowering, constantly apologizing, and living in shame." In order not to be excluded and isolated by society, Naoji was eager to escape from the shadow of his own nobility and integrate into the ordinary commoner class. But the coarseness and hypocrisy of the commoner class is what he resists from his bones, and even if he becomes a vulgar person as he wishes, in the eyes of the commoners represented by the above yuan, he is still a pretentious and pretending to be serious guy, and they will never open up and communicate with him frankly. And he could no longer return to the aristocratic society that had been abandoned, so Naoji became a "marginal person" spurned by both worlds. Losing the direct treatment of the goal and direction of life, he had to rely on the dizziness of wine and anesthetics to relieve his inner bitterness and loneliness, escape from reality, and disguise himself.
He wanted to maintain spiritual nobility and to gain the acceptance of the commoners, and this ideal could not be sought, so that Naoji could not be his true self in real life. Coupled with the lack of ability to survive, and the desire for love that is carried is only an unrealistic fantasy... The desperate emotion of no way out invaded Naoji's fragile nerves, making him feel that he had no love for him, and he was eager to get complete relief from the real life that bored him. "Sister, I'm a nobleman." This is the last sentence of the suicide note, and Naoji declares in an incomparably resolute manner that he is a spiritual nobleman!
"What is the most painful thing about people? It is not the poverty of life, the emptiness of the spirit, but the fall from a state of existence to a lower state of existence. In the face of this kind of "pain" that needs to be reborn, compared with the mother's resignation and the brother's direct rule, the sister and son are showing their faces as "warriors" who dare to face the bleak life. From a Miss Qianjin who "does not dip her hands in the spring water of the sun", to a female worker wearing rubber-bottomed socks to do ramming, and a village woman doing farm work, she gladly accepted the arrangement of fate.
Although she knows very well that "there are many things in this world that cannot be resisted by human beings", "since people are born into this world, they cannot but live", even if "living is a great cause that is unbearable and even makes people die", she still decides to "work harder and live more steadily" and "fight the world to the end to achieve her wishes".
Her wish is to find a way out through "revolution and love", to marry the person she likes, and to have children for him. She reads progressive books and gains the courage to break old ideas; her dedication and unremitting pursuit of love are both sighing and convincing. She would not be forced to marry someone she did not love as an economic backer for a living, even if he was rich enough to rival the country. Although the writer Uehara, who fell in love with Kazuko, was a husband with a wife from the bottom of society, poor and debauched, she loved love, and with this shocking courage, she challenged the worldly moral revolution and finally completed her own redemption. There was no light in her world, and she lived herself as light.
After writing "Oblique Sun", Dazaiji wrote a semi-autobiographical novel "Human Disqualification", and died shortly thereafter. If Yezang in "Human Disqualification" is a portrayal of Dazai's real life, then Naoji and Uehara in "Slanting Sun" are Dazai's doppelgangers, representing different aspects of him.
With the defeat of Japan, Dazai's Tsugaru hometown, as the leading local landowner, declined due to the reform of farmland, which brought a great impact to Dazai, and his actual life is the story behind the story presented in "Slanting Sun".
Different from the lovelessness of "Human Disqualification", "Oblique Sun" places a touch of brilliance of life on Kazuko and the fetus in her belly, expressing a desire and yearning for life, so that people can see a dawn in the disillusioned dusk. Uehara, who had fallen into despair, said: "Being alive makes me sad beyondbear... It's too late, it's already dusk..."; but Kazuko, who still has ardent expectations for life, said, "It's clearly morning." Morning is dawn, anticipation, hope!
It is said that the title "Slanting Sun" originated from Chekov's play "Cherry Orchard", which depicted the life of the declining russian nobility. The protagonist, Nya, says to her mother, "The cherry orchard has been sold, and it is no longer ours." But there is no need to cry, Mom, there is still a long unfinished life in front of you, and you yourself have a pure and lovely soul. Let's plant a new garden, more beautiful than this one, and you will see it, and you will feel how beautiful it is, and a calm, deep joy will come to your soul, like the sunset slanting at dusk. ”
Live hard, live tenaciously, find hope in despair, and only by living can there be hope, just like the sunset shining obliquely at dusk...
PS: The film version of "Oblique Sun" is very bad, the score is very low, and it can be directly ignored. However, the above picture still chose to match the stills in the film version.
Or go to the book, the original version is really good, not a waste to read.
(Image from the Internet, copyright belongs to the original author)