kit kat’s Reviews > Suicidal Narrative in Modern Japan: The Case of Dazai Osamu > Status Update

The frequent parallels drawn between Dazai, Dostoevsky, Kafka or Camus are also part of this process at a vital juncture […] It is somewhat ironic that these comparisons had as their intent to project an individuality and nonconformism to counter the image of a robotic collective Japan while the existentialist Western writers invoked were concerned to dramatize the oppression of their modern societies.

[R]epresentations of death will always prove . . . to be complex displacements of an indirect, symbolic meditation about something else” —Fredric Jameson, Fables of Aggression

“Suicide is art. . . . Suicide activates a writer's entire works” —Mishima Yukio, quoted in Nakamura, Taidan: ningen to bungaku