Aristocracy in Decay

Throughout the novel, Kazuko contrasts the high social position her family used to enjoy with their current poverty and obscurity. Naoji ends his suicide note by claiming that he is still an aristocrat. In life, he tried and failed to renounce this title and often denigrated the hereditary aristocracy of Japan; in death, however, he claims it. His claim to this heritage is interesting when contextualized with his disdain for other aristocratic men. Once, he observes that an aristocratic young man he knows is “more vulgar than any pimp you might meet in the streets” and feels intimidated by artists and writers, who must work to achieve their distinction.

Dazai depicts the aristocracy as in both moral and financial decline. The two are related because, without their wealth, the aristocrats have no claim to superiority. Naoji is continually embarrassed when he has to accept drinks that others pay for with their rather than their inherited wealth, resentful of the idea that all men are alike but unable to find a reason to place himself above others. Their aristocratic background has provided them with neither social ease nor a moral code, and once their wealth has evaporated, they have nothing to elevate or protect them, leaving them lost and unmoored. In the case of Naoji, this displacement leads to suicide and, for Kazuko, leads to revolutionary thought. 

Breaking Codes of Etiquette

Early in the first chapter, Kazuko says that her mother is the only member of the family who has the gracious manners of a natural aristocrat, though she continually departs from conventional etiquette. When she thinks of her mother urinating in the garden, she connects this with the stories she has read of ladies at the French court who “thought nothing of relieving themselves in the palace gardens or in a corner of the corridors.”

Kazuko’s departure from the standards of etiquette governing the Japanese aristocracy is far more radical than her mother’s. When she writes to Mr. Uehara, offering herself as his mistress and asking to bear his child, she acknowledges that her conduct “may appear extremely dubious from the point of view of the usual Etiquette for Young Women.” By the end of the book, however, she has jettisoned any pretense of adhering to the codes against which her mother and brother also rebelled, albeit in less extreme ways.

The Ability to Survive 

When Kazuko accepts that her mother will soon die, she reflects on the differences between the two of them:

From now on, I must struggle on with the world. I thought that Mother might well be the last of those who can end their lives beautifully and sadly, struggling with no one, neither hating nor betraying anyone. In the world to come there will be no room for such people. The dying are beautiful, but to live, to survive – those things somehow seem hideous and contaminated with blood.

This is a theme that first appears at the very beginning of the novel when Kazuko refuses to believe that her brother is dead. She explains that scoundrels like him always survive while beautiful, selfless souls like her mother die, as they cannot cope with the coarseness and vulgarity of the world.

As it turns out, Kazuko was wrong about Naoji. In his suicide note, he describes himself as a plant too delicate to live in this difficult, rapidly-changing world. His desperate attempts to survive led him to opium, while Uehara turns to alcohol in his struggle to cope. By the end of the novel, both Kazuko’s mother and brother are dead, and...