Author: Osamu Dazai
This work feels very tender and vulnerable, like a trembling deer or an unanchored creature, floating listlessly through a vast sea. It’s like it’s saying “please, look at me, but be careful, for I am fragile and delicate.” Depravity, tenderness. A hand reaching out to the distant, glimmering light amidst the darkness.
notes
- The snake serves as a symbolism for guilt. It indicates a bad omen.
- The burden of guilt and shame the challenge of transitioning from a period of naivety to responsibility
- There is beauty and small acts of kindness and mid suffering that are shining and refulgent, like the soldier who let Kazuko rest
- She projects resentment towards bad circumstances on her mother
- Mother reminds me of my own. Gentle, caring, hides all troubles, cute, easy-going, loving, kind. The narrators fear is parallel mind. I don’t like thinking that mom will someday go, though it is inevitable.
- I think Kazuko has gone mad in sending these letters, but it mirror Naoji’s statement about logic, and I can relate to the claustrophobic feeling she expresses
- Kazuko is actually delusional
- Mother reminds me too much of my own mom. It makes me want to swim Against The Current of time or rip a hole in the space that separates us. But that is just how life happens.
- Naoji knew only bottomless suffering from not being able to fit in. Resentful towards life, yet so full of love for those around him. Hope. The painter’s wife was a glittering gold in his river of sorrow, yet he was not good enough for her. Empty pleasures.
- Mother and child. The beauty of nature, of the life. The meaning. The spark, that ignite compassion, love, and hope. Love, in it’s purest form.
- Parallels between Kazuko and Uehara, Naoji and Suga
- The depravity Naoji sees in people might be tenderness and suffering. All the same, the experience of being alive.
- Though after destruction building a new and perfection are not guaranteed destruction is still sought
- Struggle in a transitional period. Shame. Humiliation. Suffering. Death. Life. Mother. Growth. Morality, sin, love.
- The suffering and realization of the nature of living are similar to The Count of Monte Cristo
highlights
A sensation of helplessness, as if it were utterly impossible to go on living. Painful wave speed relentlessly on my heart, as after a thunderstorm, the white clouds frantically scud across the sky. – p. 53
Logic, inevitably, is the love of logic. It is not the love for living human beings. – p. 62
Perhaps that depravity he actually meant tenderness. – p. 78
I can’t stand anyone who puts on those ponderous airs of a man of character. – p. 93
I am without thoughts. I have never, not even once, acted on the basis of any doctrine or philosophy. – p. 98
I had the feeling that were Mother to die, my own flesh would melt away with her. – p. 107
I was so overjoyed at Mother’s charm, at her being alive, that my eyes filled with tears of gratitude. – p. 109
Man was born for love and revolution. – p. 114
I suddenly wondered… Whether the sensation of happiness might not be something like faintly glittering gold something at the bottom of the river of sorrow. – p. 123
I cannot go on living unless now I clean with all my forced to love. – p. 129
To be alive. An intolerable immense undertaking before which one can only gasp in apprehension. – p. 142
Now that my desire has been fulfilled, there is in my heart, the stillness of a marsh in a forest. – p. 172
Victims. Victims of a transitional period of morality. – p. 173
The Revolution is far from taking place. It needs more, many more valuable, unfortunate victims. – p. 174