Paper short abstract:

Kirsten Cather examines the case of Dazai Osamu to ask what happens when the promise of autobiographical literary criticism and tourism meets an author whose work was as much about his death as his life.

Paper long abstract:

In Dazai Osamu's birthplace of Aomori, visitors are invited to "walk through the town where he left his scent." In Mitaka, monthly tours operated by the local arts council allow visitors to see his favorite unagi shop where he ate and drank, the places where he wrote and met with editors, as well as the locales that he incorporated into his autobiographical fiction. Visiting these haunts, a word that appropriately suggests the ghostly remains of this long dead author, we are assured that "'Dazai' is standing just around the corner." But what kind of spectral presence is available in these locales and in these literary works that he wrote, and sometimes also set, in these places? What kind of promise is offered here? Nothing less than the promise of autobiographical literary criticism: to merge with the long dead author through creative acts of reading that firmly locate the author in a world that is at once fictional and real. Literature and landscape offer what the philosopher Robert Pogue Harrison has called the "multitude of recesses where the shadow images of the dead maintain a privative presence."

Since early 2000, city officials have promoted literary tourism in Mitaka, nominally as the "town where Dazai Osamu lived" (Dazai ga ikita machi), but they are also clearly capitalizing on its status as the place where he committed suicide in 1948. This paper considers what happens when autobiographical modes of literary criticism meet the literal death of an author, particularly one like Dazai whose writing focused on his own death as much, if not more, than his life. I ask: where do we choose to find "Dazai" today and where did he locate himself in life, death, and beyond? And why are we still looking?