A monochromatic blue beach, with sea and sky melting into each other. At the perfect intersection between sand, sea and sky, a young girl stands in a school uniform. That’s the cover of “Schoolgirl” by Osamu Dazai.
Though renowned in Japan, modern Japanese writer Osamu Dazai has only recently emerged as a popular name among younger Western audiences, in part due to a character that takes his name in the anime series “Bungo Stray Dogs.” Readers have been captivated by his brutally intimate approach to alienation in a postwar Japan.
I was one of these people. After reading his novels “The Setting Sun” and “No Longer Human,” I was impressed by how Dazai was able to write characters that were cruel and immoral, yet still tragic and vulnerable. For a while, Dazai was all I talked about at home.
So, for my 16th birthday, my mom gave me “Schoolgirl.”
Published in 1939, the novella follows the thoughts of a young girl as she goes about her day. We don’t know much about the girl, like her name or age. But as we follow her stream of consciousness, we do learn that her father has recently passed away.
Before reading the novella, I was curious as to how Dazai would put the reader in the shoes of a young schoolgirl. However, when I first read “Schoolgirl” I was a little disappointed.
Unlike many of Dazai’s other female characters, this girl was too … flat. Her thoughts felt childish and mundane: She speaks of bus stops and what she had for lunch. The way her character was written seemed empty, too — I had no idea what she looked like or how others perceived her.
Seeking to understand if my perspective was unique (or possibly confirmation bias), I opened Goodreads and scrolled through reviews of the book. Other people were also uncomfortable with this character, but they gave it a very specific name: misogyny.
I’d seen Dazai get called misogynistic before. There’ve been many contemporary debates regarding his depictions of women. It’s hard to pin down exactly who a “Dazai Woman” is. Sometimes she’s young, frail, naive and reliant on men. Other times, she’s old, harsh, knowledgeable and independent. The accusations of misogyny, though, don’t arise necessarily from the female characters themselves, but from how they interact with male characters. When she’s naive, she tends to fall prey to men. When she’s not naive, she tends to be disrespected by men.
The girl from “Schoolgirl,” however, is isolated in her own void of existence. We don’t see her interact with anyone other than herself. Does this still qualify as a misogynistic depiction? I didn’t know.
So I forgot about it. That is, until last year when, in a cruel twist of fate, my mother — the person who gifted me the book — passed away.
I found myself thinking more about the novella. It’d been the last birthday present my mom had ever given to me, and its monochromatic blue cover seemed to haunt me in my dreams. So I decided to reread it.
And then, less than a year after I first read “Schoolgirl,” I found myself feeling exactly like the book’s main character: a young girl floating through routine feeling dazed and hollow and riddled with grief.
“Dazai neither sanctifies nor demonizes women — he humanizes them”
At one moment in the book, the girl talks about how she likes taking her glasses off because “everything goes hazy, as in a dream.” People’s faces “seem kind” and she doesn’t have to “argue with anyone at all.” I was instantly reminded of the time I told a friend that I liked to take off my glasses, because I’d be so busy trying to make out people’s faces that I couldn’t even begin to think about anything else.
Later on in the novella, the girl begins to feel happy. But, as she stares at herself in the mirror and sees “an animated face, liberated from [her own] sadness and pain and seemingly disconnected from such feelings,” she instantly feels bad about having a good time and falls back into her melancholy.
How could a 30-something-year-old Japanese man in the 1930s possibly capture the guilt that a grieving 16-year-old Brazilian girl in the 2020s was feeling?
That’s just what literature does. Somehow, I found an unexpected solace across culture and time in Osamu Dazai’s novels.
I still can’t tell if Dazai’s writing is misogynistic. Nobody can for certain. But here’s what I know: “Schoolgirl” is the closest I’ve felt to being represented in literature. Dazai neither sanctifies nor demonizes women — he humanizes them. And these flawed, insecure and genuine women feel real to me.
Anna Ripper Naigeborin PO ’28 is from São Paulo, Brazil. She’s recently been into watching Éric Rohmer movies.
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