2013 Volume 89 Pages 95-107
An overview of the history of critical studies of Dazai's Onna no ketto (A Women's Duel, published in Gekkan bunsho [Literary Monthly], 1976) reveals some felling aspects of the literary climate of the time-period in which Dazai's work was published. Dazai's work quotes the entire text of Mori Ogai's "Onna no ketto" (1912), which is a Japanese translation of Herbert Eulenberg's "Ein Frauenzweikampf" (A Women's Duel, 1911). Through Dazai's critique and comments on Ogai's text, the reader can examine the methodology of 19^<th>-century Realism, and how the discourse on the narrative subject "I" was constructed in the second decade of the Showa Period. In the context of the discourse on the I-Novel, the fact that Gekkan bunsho carried this work indicates that there was some methodological link between the journal and Dazai's work. Dazai's Onna no ketto was in fact a parody of the developmental process of literature of its time: Dazai casts a critical eye on the contemporary framework of the modern novel and the literary landscape of the time, and presents his views in a novelistic form.
