To wait. In our lives we know joy, anger, sorrow, and a hundred other emotions, but these emotions all together occupy a bare one percent of our time. The remaining ninety-nine percent is just living in waiting. I wait in momentary expectation, feeling as though my breasts are being crushed, for the sound in the corridor of the footsteps of happiness. Empty. Oh, life is too painful, the reality that confirms the universal belief that it is best not to be born.
Osamu DazaiThe world, after all, was still a place of bottomless horror. It was by no means a place of childlike simplicity where everything could be settled by a simple then-and-there decision.
Osamu DazaiI have no desire for others to take it on themselves to analyze my thoughts. I am without thoughts. I have never, not even once, acted on the basis of any doctrine or philosophy.I am convinced that those people whom the world considers good and respects are all liars and fakes. I do not trust the world.
Osamu DazaiOne day, I went to a soba restaurant outside town, and while I was waiting for the zarusoba I opened an old graph magazine. There was a picture of an exhausted, lonely kneeling woman who wore a checked patterned yukata after the tradegy of a large earthquake. With the intensity of my chest ready to burn up, I fell in love with that poor woman. I also felt a horrifying desire for her. Maybe tragedy and desire are back to back to one another.
Osamu DazaiI thought, โI want to die. I want to die more than ever before. Thereโs no chance now of a recovery. No matter what sort of thing I do, no matter what I do, itโs sure to be a failure, just a final coating applied to my shame. That dream of going on bicycles to see a waterfall framed in summer leavesโit was not for the likes of me. All that can happen now is that one foul, humiliating sin will be piled on another, and my sufferings will become only the more acute. I want to die. I must die. Living itself is the source of sin.
Osamu DazaiPeople talk of โsocial outcasts.โ The words apparently denote the miserable losers of the world, the vicious ones, but I feel as though I have been a โsocial outcastโ from the moment I was born. If ever I meet someone society has designated as an outcast, I invariably feel affection for him, an emotion which carries me away in melting tenderness.
Osamu Dazai