Going into the new year, I’m still continuing my recent obsession with Osamu Dazai’s literature, and I plan to read at least a few more of his works before moving on to something else. Which is why today I’ll present another one of his stories that I finished on the cusp of the last year – Schoolgirl.
Schoolgirl is a short novella depicting one day in the life of a young girl in Japan, just before the outbreak of World War 2. While there is no high stakes plot or extraordinary happenings in the story, we instead get a glimpse of the ordinary musings and feelings of the young pupil as she goes through her daily activities, going to school and talking to her friends there, coming home and entertaining house guests, cooking, talking to her mom, and then retiring for the day in her room.
Each step of the way though, we get to experience various random thoughts and emotions that pop up in the nameless protagonist’s mind as she works on her duties, ranging from ironic observations about subjects taught in school, to sudden flare ups of loneliness and sadness that accompany her as she tries her best to don a socially acceptable mask in front of her guests.
A lot of these swings in emotions are quite typical of teenage life – who hasn’t had the thought before that social rules are stupid, and the world of adults is oppressive, and why aren’t we just allowed to do what we want, but instead we have to go to school, and act nice and pretend everything is fine, and hide our real thoughts and feelings, and live our life according to a predetermined path that society paved for us?
Our teenage years are filled with moments of wafting through these thoughts, and trying to make sense of how we feel about them. Rebelling against the norms of society therefore is a natural consequence of that. Our protagonist shares with us her grievances in several forms. During the day, she will randomly exclaim her disgust at something she will see, like calling an author she read as stupid, or calling a woman she saw on the train with heavy makeup as vile. Learning ethics in class, she will exclaim how the ethics taught in school are nothing like the ethics of the real world. Entertaining house guests, she will talk shit about them in her mind, hoping they finally leave, while giving them a warm and appeasing smile. The girl’s rebellion in mostly mental and contained in her thoughts, as she observes and criticises what she sees around herself, while still acting according to society’s rules.
It is no surprise then, that the schoolgirl also wrestles with feelings of loneliness and sadness. A solitary moment will suddenly release the floodgates for ruminating about how alienated she feels, how she wished adults were more understanding and helpful, how nobody seems to explain the things that she is going through, and all that people will tell you is to just keep at it and trust them that once you grow up, you will understand everything, even though that all sounds like empty promises. Back in her room, she will ruminate about the lack of happiness in her life, and how she will never feel happy, and how happiness will never come her way, but she has to live every day hoping or pretending that happiness will surely come tomorrow. Besides this statement, I would say there is no real conclusion or lesson that we can derive from this story about how we “should” live, more so we just get a description that this is the society we live in, and this is what people really think about in their hearts.
The subject matter of this novella is reminiscent of its American counterpart, Catcher in the Rye, and I saw many parallels between these two books while reading Schoolgirl, although this book came out some 10 years before Salinger’s novel. The big difference I noticed though is probably the cultural influence that affects how people rebel against the said culture. While Catcher in the Rye‘s Holden was more outspoken in his criticisms, speaking his mind out loud to the people he met up with, and was more actionable, like leaving for New York City, smoking cigarettes, and hiring prostitutes, Osamu Dazai’s Schoolgirl protagonist is more reserved in her rebellion, still having that harsh and cynic tone in her mind though (and, honestly, even harsher than Holden’s in some cases), but not daring to actually speak out, or move out of line and act in ways deemed unacceptable. This further emphasises the struggle of growing up in an Eastern society, where the breaking of social rules is judged much more harshly than in the West, not to mention how women are expected to adhere to these social rules much more rigidly than men often have to.
Osamu Dazai once again manages to perfectly capture the thoughts and feelings of a person living in his contemporary society, and even then, many of these sentiments have barely changed in the 86 years since the novel has been published. For whatever reason, I end up falling for artists who have written at least one coming-of-age story, which I always end up loving and heavily relating to. Maybe it’s the sign of a good writer, who as an adult, can masterfully capture the feelings and grievances of a teenage mind, since it’s such a messy and confusing time in our lives? Or, at least my recent observations lead me to believe so.