Home to Tsugaru
Osamu Dazai, Shelley Marshall (Translator)
Copyright (c) 2018 Shelley Marshall
First Printing: 2018
Published by Shelley Marshall
For maps and pictures related to this book, take a look at the photo album Tsugaru by Osamu Dazai.
For more translations by Shelley Marshall
www.jpopbooks.com
Introduction
Introduction
The Snows of Tsugaru
Powdered snow
Grainy snow
Cottony snow
Wet snow
Packed snow
Crystalline snow
Icy snow
(from The Eastern Ou Almanac)
For the first time in my life, I spent three weeks one spring touring the Tsugaru Peninsula at the northern end of Honshu. It was the most important event of my thirty plus years of life. I was born and raised my first twenty years in Tsugaru. I was only familiar with the towns of Kanagi, Goshogawara, Aomori, Hirosaki, Asamushi, and Owani, and knew next to nothing about the other towns and villages.
I was born in the town of Kanagi. It is located almost in the center of the Tsugaru Plain and has a population of five or six thousand. This town boasts of no special features but puts on airs as if it were a city. On the good side, it is plain and simple like water. On the bad side, the town is shallow and conceited. A little over seven miles to the south along the Iwaki River lies Goshogawara. As the distribution center of local products, its population surpasses ten thousand. With the exception of the two cities of Aomori and Hirosaki, no other towns in the area have a population over ten thousand. On the good side, those towns are bustling. On the bad side, they are noisy. They lack the smells of farming towns, but the dreadful loneliness, a characteristic of cities, is already creeping into these small towns. I admit the comparison may be a bit exaggerated, but Kanagi could be likened to the scenic Koishikawa in Tokyo and Goshogawara to the entertainment district of Asakusa.
My aunt lives in Goshogawara. As a child, I was more attached to this aunt than to my birth mother. In fact, I often stayed at my aunt's home. Until my middle school days, you could say I was ignorant about any town in Tsugaru other than Goshogawara and Kanagi. When I traveled to Aomori to take the entrance exam for middle school, the trip lasted a mere three or four hours but felt like an expedition to me. I chronicled the drama of my excitement at that time in a novel. That depiction was not necessarily true and filled with fictional buffoonery, but, for the most part, my feelings were as written.
My lonely chic known only to me grew richer in design year by year. When I graduated from the village grammar school, I rode in a swaying horse-drawn carriage board a train to the small city of the prefectural capital in order to take the middle school entrance exam. My boys' clothes at that time were eccentric. My white flannel shirt was, by far, the most pleasing article to me. Of course, I wore it. The large collar attached to this shirt resembled the wings of a butterfly. The shirt collar stuck out far enough to cover the collar of my kimono in the way the collar of an open-neck summer shirt covers the collar of a suit jacket. It may have looked like a bib. But the youthful me was pathetically nervous and my custom was to think I favored a young nobleman.
I wore short hakama trousers made from a white-striped Kurume-kasuri fabric, long socks, and shiny black, high-laced shoes. I also wore a cloak. My father was already dead, and my mother was sick. As a result, this youth was cocooned in the compassion of my older brother's kind wife. The youth took advantage of this sister-in-law and forced his shirt collar to be larger. She smiled but was actually angry. The youth's grief nearly brought him to tears because no one understood his sense of beauty.
"Chic. Elegance." The aesthetics of the youth were exhausted. No, every living thing, the entire purpose of life was exhausted. I didn't button my cloak on purpose and wore it so that it slid off my narrow shoulders. I believed that was stylish. Where did I learn that? I had no model to follow and may have naturally developed this instinct for style.
The reason I presented my tasteful appearance for once in my life was my debut at a real city for the first time in my life. The moment I arrived in this small city on the northern edge of Honshu in a state of overexcitement, the drastic change left my young self speechless. I taught myself to speak the Tokyo dialect from boys' magazines. But when I went to the inn and heard the maids speak, they spoke in the Tsugaru dialect, exactly as they did in my hometown. The experience was a little anticlimactic. Twenty miles separated the town where I was born and that small city.
This small coastal city was Aomori. Here are some facts you may not know. As the premier seaport in Tsugaru, the Sotogahama magistrate began administration of this port in the first year of the Kan'ei era (1624), roughly three hundred and twenty years ago. In those days, one thousand houses already existed. The most successful ports were located in Sotogahama. Departing boats traveled to places like Omi, Echizen, Echigo, Kaga, Noto, and Wakasa, and its prosperity steadily grew. Aomori Prefecture was established by the order abolishing feudal domains and creating prefectures in Meiji year 4 (1871). The city of Aomori became the prefectural capital, now protects the northern gate to Honshu, and has a railway ferry service to Hakodate in Hokkaido.
Today, Aomori boasts more than twenty thousand households and a population exceeding one hundred thousand. Probably, no traveler finds this town friendly. The houses are unavoidably shabby because of frequent fires. The traveler hasn't the slightest clue about the location of the city center. Bizarrely sooty, expressionless houses line the streets and do not welcome the traveler who, feeling uneasy, dashes through town. However,
