Friends in Solitude: Dazai Osamu's Sekibetsu and Local Cultural Movements

Abstract

Dazai Osamu's Sekibetsu (1945.9, Asahi Shimbun), designated as a ‘biographical novel’, depicts Lu Xun, as a foreign student in Sendai, and there are expressions related to ‘rural areas’ veneered in it. This paper pays attention to such points and examines Sekibetsu in context to the ‘Local Cultural Movements’ active during the war. The contemporaneous discourses related to this movement acknowledge the idea of expanding culture from the local culture of Japan to the whole of Asia, however, this paper will show how the narrator ‘I’ in this text is someone that rejects such ideologies. This work is characterized by its apolitical position telling the story of a person from an individual standpoint only, and this paper will clarify the Dazai's stance while responding to contemporary literary landscape by examining it from the perspective of a wartime ‘biographical Novel’ which was expected to contribute to the state of affairs of the time.