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 were now able to write naturally, without concern over captious censorship.

With the removal of restrictions, writers were free to criticize national military traditions. Emperor worship, the family system—the entire structure, indeed, which nationalists had described as being ‘flawless like a golden chalice’, but which appeared to have brought the country to ruin. The breakdown of constituted authority and of old social traditions induced in many young writers a mood of thoroughgoing scepticism, which frequently took the form of nihilism, hedonism, irresponsibility and despair.

Shortly after the war there was a vogue (which continues until this day) for French existentialism, introduced to Japan through translations of Sartre and Camus. As so often happens in the case of Japanese importations, the content of existentialism was frequently oversimplified and misunderstood. Its main effect was to give certain writers a specious philosophical basis for their prevailing nihilistic mood.

A number of the apurē (après-guerre) writers lived in a state of desperate disorder of a type that Rimbaud had made familiar at an earlier stage of European development. Alcohol, drugs, sexual promiscuity, nihilism and thoughts of suicide played a large part in their lives and in their writing. To express the complexities and confusions of the new rootless age these writers attempted to break away from such literary tradition as existed and to create new and freer forms of literature. Apart from Dazai Osamu, however, few of them succeeded in producing works of much literary value; and Dazai, with his personal, ‘confessional’ approach, was in many ways less of an innovator than is often imagined.

1948, the year in which Dazai Osamu committed suicide, may be regarded as marking the end of the turbulent apurē