The principal focus of this dissertation is the work produced by Japanese novelist Dazai Osamu from the end of the war in 1945 until his suicide in 1948. It posits a discrepancy between the kind of critical tradition which has grown up about Dazai, and the subversive potential of his actual writing.

The introductory chapter reviews the concepts by which Dazai has been interpreted within Japanese critical discourse. It traces, by contrast, the manner in which Dazai created for himself an intellectual context based upon non-Japanese models.

The second and third chapters give readings of Dazai's two full-length novels, The Setting Sun and No Longer Human, respectively. Both are analyzed in terms of their heretofore largely unrecognized power to problematize social orthodoxy and a cultural ethos. Much attention is paid to Dazai's idiosyncratic rhetorical methods.

The fourth chapter discusses Dazai's shorter postwar fictional writings, including the story "Villon's Wife." Since many of these works take as their central issues orthodox Japanese family life and male-female relations, Dazai's narrative constructions are also given a feminist reading.

The final chapter suggests a new theoretical directionality for the reading of Dazai. Dazai's 1948 essay, "Thus Have I Heard," written as a last denunciation of the Japanese literary establishment, is also taken up. It is shown how, deprived of the rhetorical configurations of his fiction, and forced by the essay form into a direct address requiring reliance upon a culturally-intelligible vocabulary, Dazai regresses into the petulance of social particulars.

The dissertation argues for the need to examine fundamental issues related to Japan's interpretations of art, the artist, and the Self. Its overall purpose is to demonstrate Dazai's revolutionary potential, particularly in relation to his own tradition--a tradition which even now confines his potential within such descriptive terms as "weak," "typically Japanese," and "self-indulgent." Dazai's work itself is shown to stand in clear opposition to the critical rhetoric which claims to explicate him.