Processing: How Sam Bett Translated Osamu Dazai

On translating comedy, men as erratic and emotional creatures, and "the original bad boy of modern Japanese fiction"

On a semi-regular basis, I interview authors about their writing processes and the craft behind their books. You can find previous entries here. As a dedicated reader of translated literature, I’ve been meaning to expand this series into translation. And this week I’m excited to be talking with Sam Bett, translator of The Beggar Student by Osamu Dazai, which was recently published by New Directions.

Osamu Dazai (1909-1948) was a major writer in pre- and post-WWII Japanese literature. His reputation in America is something of an “emo” writer—primarily for his last novel, No Longer Human, which was published a month after his suicide at 38. But what The Beggar Student—and Bett’s other Dazai translation, The Flowers of Buffoonery—show is that Dazai was also a great comedic writer and was equally at home joking as moping. I talked to Bett over email about translating comedy, Mishima’s revealing disdain for Dazai, and how Dazai was “the original bad boy of modern Japanese fiction.”

Osamu Dazai is a fascinating and important Japanese writer from the early 20^th century who has had a somewhat roundabout resurgence among American readers recently thanks in part to—or so I’ve heard—TikTok and an anime show, Bungo Stray Dogs, that includes a character named after and inspired by Dazai. Can you explain a little about who Dazai was, his reputation, and what draws you to his work?

Dazai could be described as the original bad boy of modern Japanese fiction. He lived very hard and died relatively young, at thirty-eight, after years of heavy drinking, periods of drug use, and five suicide attempts, the last of which ended his life in 1948.

As a high-profile literary celebrity, he was perhaps before his time, but he was very much a product of his age. Much of his large body of work (over ten hardbound volumes of stories, essays, and novels) was composed just before or during World War II, making it hard to classify him as a prewar or postwar author. I’d argue that his focus is so personal because the circumstances of his era were at times too harrowing to comprehend, one of those equal and opposite reactions. By working from the perspectives of socially and morally shortsighted characters, Dazai is able to engage with themes of isolation, hopelessness, and the absurdity of being human from a highly personal perspective that’s somehow hard to dislike and easily relatable, maybe because it feels so much like how media-savvy people relate to one another now online.

What keeps his work from feeling solipsistic is he doesn’t shut us out. “Mine has been a life of much shame,” No Longer Human famously begins, and yet the lament that follows is so shameless that it’s liberating. His comic novels, which are more my speed, achieve a similar effect by highlighting the very human tendency to lie or posture, even among friends, in the hopes of shutting out deep pain or making ourselves likable.

I think what makes Dazai’s work resonate so naturally with the young readers discovering him today is the pervasive lack of sarcasm or ironic delivery, things that drenched the books and films that I saw as a kid. Dazai represents a different way of being. If a character is miserable, they get to spend pages upon pages telling you, in entertaining or engaging detail, just how miserable they are. The dark books help us share the pain, spreading it out, while the comedies manage to make this sort of thing hilarious.

The Beggar Student is comic, at times almost slapstick, novella. Translation is always tricky, but comedy in particular is famously hard to translate. How did you approach translating the jokes and comedy of the novella?

People always say that comedy is hard to translate, but I think the real problem is that comedy is hard to write, since a big part of what makes anything funny is a sense of naturalness or effortlessness, like of course, this had to happen. Translators don’t need to write the comedy from scratch. Instead, it’s our job to wrap our heads around what makes the original funny and to use the tools at our disposal to create a similar effect.

For me, the key to comedy is usually finding the voice, which I’d define as a combination of pacing, vocabulary, and register. Since it often takes the humor out of things to unpack why something is funny, I find it helpful to consider, instead, how something is funny, and in practice, this might involve thinking up examples of other works of art, literature, or film that are funny in a similar way, then asking myself what they “sound like,” or what voices they employ.

I found the voice for The Beggar Student almost instantly. The first time I read the opening rant in Japanese, I could hear the rhythms of this grandiose and goofy phrasing in my brain, as if they already had a home in English. Why is that so familiar? After playing around, I decided I could summarize the effect as “cartoonish.” The book’s professions of outrage and misery reminded me of Looney Tunes moments like when Elmer Fudd is saddened at what he thinks is a dead Bugs Bunny or when Daffy Duck refuses to accept life for the way it is and, spraying lots of spit, declares the circumstance he’s in to be “preposterous.”

You also translated The Flowers of Buffoonery for New Directions, another short comic novel by Dazai. Flowers has a darker humor and subject matter as it centers around a failed suicide attempt. Did the darker humor of that book require a different approach when translating into English?

I don’t think the humor is darker, so much as functions differently and starts from different premises. To me, The Beggar Student is a comic meditation on how weird it is to grow old, knowing you were young once and could probably fake it again in the right light, with the right clothes, in the right mood…except who would you be fooling? The Flowers of Buffoonery is set in a seaside sanatorium, where the main character, Yozo Oba, is recovering in the wake of a “love suicide” that he survived, while his girlfriend did not. Most of the action centers on visits from Oba’s friends, who smuggle cigarettes into the room, slip out for drinks, and take stock of the women on the floor. It feels a little bit like M*A*S*H spiked with Three Stooges humor and a bit of the comedic social commentary later epitomized by the films of Juzo Itami in the 1980s. What makes all this comedy, and not just slapstick or a sitcom, is the abscess at the center of the story. It’s like that eerily jangly song off Sandinista! by The Clash: “Somebody got murdered / Somebody’s dead forever.” The loss is unfathomable, so the boys try to ignore it, making jokes and acting like it’s no big deal. In the process, they make a giant ring around the loss, showing us how massive it really is while maintaining a sense of its inviolability. It’s terrifying, which I credit wholly to the comedy.

At the launch party I attended, you made an interesting connection between The Beggar Student and the current autofiction trend. Dazai self-consciously plays around with his identity in the book and the main character is a writer named Dazai. Can you talk a bit about the novella’s relation to the Japanese “I-novel” and autofiction?

If autofiction is a kind of freewheeling autobiography that indulges in fictitious detail, then the “I-novel” is a work of fiction based on real life, where the artifice or the “fake” part is the sense of order imposed by the efficient novelistic structure. While the idea of “autofiction” as we see it today didn’t exist in Dazai’s time, I think The Beggar Student actively resists both of these stylistic conventions.

The most potent example comes midway through the book when the thirty-something narrator, a proxy for Dazai, comes to the funny realization that he’s yet to introduce himself to his new friend, the high school dropout Saeki. He tells the boy his name is Takeo Kimura, while confessing, in what seems to be a genuine aside, that “Dazai is just a pen name.” This second part is true, but the bit about Takeo Kimura is not; Dazai was born Shuji Tsushima. I think he put this here as a reminder for his readers that he wasn’t limiting himself to the facts of lived experience. The references to hairy shins throughout his work, though? Those are real. From what I’ve read, it was apparently common knowledge that he had the hairiest shins around. Sort of like George Clooney and the pig.

The Beggar Student opens, “Not even the wisest reader knows the anguish of the writer who has sent a truly awful piece of writing to a magazine in order to survive.” This is followed by some pages of grumpy moping. I loved this opening! At the launch, you mentioned (IIRC) how this is the kind of opening that would never be allowed in contemporary publishing. Was this an unusual opening in Dazai’s time and place? What else about Dazai’s work do you find refreshingly out of step with current trends?

I went over that opening so many times! Really glad you liked it. My goal was for it to be utterly lucid and yet hopelessly melodramatic, hitting that super serious register you sometimes hear from villains on a show for kids, which goes back to the cartoonish aspect. Honestly, I think a lot of people really like this opening. It still makes me laugh out loud, especially this part three pages in, where Dazai hints for a second that the whole thing’s one big joke: “My work will disgrace bookstore windows all across the land. Critics will sneer; readers will give up.” On one level, the narrator is lamenting the poor quality of the book that he’s just mailed off to his editor, but on another level, Dazai the author has adroitly reeled us in and shows no sign of giving up himself or fear that we, the real readers, will actually give up on him.

So why should an opening like this be hard to get away with today, in a work of fiction written in English from the start? This is a bit of a Hail Mary, but I think it may go all the way back to dramatic conventions. Kabuki theatre makes ample use of a stage move called mie, where the actor basically does a freeze frame to let the audience absorb a striking pose or expression. I think the narrative arts in Japan have a much higher tolerance for giving characters a chance to make an entrance. This way of introducing people to a reader, or a viewer, may feel dated or heavy-handed in a world where most people experience fictional storytelling primarily through heavily edited feature films and television shows, which have a tendency to enter scenes in medias res.

Something else I find incredibly refreshing about Dazai is that most of his work starts from the supposition that everybody knows men are highly erratic and emotional creatures. There’s a persistent belief in America, and in American art, that men are either not as governed by their emotions as women or not emotional at all. In stark contrast to Hemingway, born ten years earlier, and Salinger, born ten years after, Dazai isn’t stoically opposed to delving into his emotions or shielded from them by his cynicism. If anything, his characters seem to view their emotional eruptions as expressions of a masculine bravado. This doesn’t make them role models, or Dazai for that matter, but it’s great to read fiction where the men aren’t struggling with the very act of sharing their emotions, since this gives readers direct access to their emotional landscape.

You’ve also translated a work of Mishima, and Mishima famously insulted Dazai the one time they met. Mishima’s account of this interaction includes a quotation used as a blurb on the book: “What I despise about Dazai is that he exposes precisely those things in myself that I most want to hide.” How do you see the work of Mishima in relation to Dazai?

This quote says as much about Mishima’s tendencies as a writer and observer as it does about Dazai. It all hinges on the implications of the word “exposes.” Mishima was obsessed with projecting an aura of mastery. Dazai, on the other hand, made a name for himself by bemoaning his own flaws. They’re both amazing stylists with enviable knacks for spotlighting the artifice that stands between us and so many of our social interactions. The big difference between them is that Mishima turns his spotlight on the world, exposing others as he maintains a firm grip on the controls, whereas Dazai shuffles into the spotlight and exposes his emotions, or the dealings of a cast of characters we get the sense that he relates to very personally.

You are a writer as well as a translator. How does your translation work influence your fiction writing?

A funny thing about translating a novel is that you’re starting from a fully formed idea. Without your help, the work already exists. I see translation as a way of sharing a record of my reading of a book, allowing people who can’t read the book themselves to see it through my eyes. In that sense, every translation is both limited and embellished by my personal experience and perspective. But it isn’t strictly mine. So, sometimes I’ll think of something while I’m translating, maybe a phrasing or an image or idea, and there won’t be an easy way to let it out within the confines of the project. Ideas like this can pop off and take on a life of their own.

Here’s one example. One of my first translations, Star by Yukio Mishima, centers on a sort of Japanese version of James Dean who, at twenty-four, is going through what people today call a quarter-life crisis. Star isn’t a comedy as such, but I thought there was a lot of humor in this idea that someone so young could be so convinced that their life was over. In my first novel, I gave myself more space to explore this through the persona of a self-serious underwear model who, at twenty-four, gets fired from Calvin Klein for being “too old” and is forced to take a new job at a company that prides itself on cheesy boxer shorts. After all the edits, I’m not sure many people would see the overlap, but I do remember this as the first moment when I realized I could let myself run with ideas that occurred to me while translating. I spend so much time in these other books, it’s natural they’d become a major conduit of influence for me.

I also get the sense that translating has altered my idea of how fiction is supposed to be structured. Japanese fiction plays a lot with what we might call iteration, going back and back again to the same situations or ideas. Something I admire about Mieko Kawakami, whose work has taught me a great deal, is how she’s willing to repeat the same images over and over. I think we see this in Dazai, too, in these refrains where he comes back to a central obsession. Maybe it’s a bit more like a verse and chorus structure than the bell curve English readers are conditioned to expect. Probably the greatest gift I’ve received from my work as a translator is a skepticism toward the idea that any one way of storytelling is the best, or only, way to write.

Check out The Beggar Student at Bookshop.org

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