Baylina Pu
The Flowers of Buffoonery by Osamu Dazai, translated by Sam Bett, New Directions, 96 pp., $14.95
In June 2019, Twitter user @indeprive tweeted, “what if I… put my Minecraft bed… next to yours .. aha ha, just kidding.. unless..?” Derivatives, imitations, and parodies quickly followed, often featuring the text alongside a pair of images: the first, a depiction of an iconic character like Pikachu laughing offhandedly (“just kidding”) and the next, that same character side-eyeing the viewer to gauge their reaction (“unless?”). It’s become a fixture in the Gen Z vernacular, to the point where any semi-risky proposition can now be seamlessly incorporated into the phrasing of the original tweet. “What if we held hands in the stacks? Haha, jk,” one college student might joke to another. “…Unless?”
In his 1935 novella The Flowers of Buffoonery, the Japanese author Osamu Dazai writes, “Young people never say anything straight. You can tell they’re being honest if they hide behind a laugh.” In Flowers, the young protagonists laugh and joke and mock and play cards as Yozo, bedridden in a Tokyo sanitarium, recovers from a failed double suicide. The word “laugh” appears fifty-nine times in ninety pages and varying parts of speech, not including synonyms like “giggle” or “crack up.” The core incident of the story — the suicide by drowning which Yozo survives but his lover, a married woman, does not — occurs before the story actually begins. Yozo and his friends, Kosuge and Hide, spend the novella doing mostly nothing, least of all discussing the incident. Instead, they smirk at the two girls in Yozo’s ward or tell stories of failed attempts at seduction. Their laughter echoes through the halls of the sanitarium, disturbing the head nurse so much that she orders Yozo’s assigned nurse, Mano, to go shut them all up. It’s a demand that shatters the boys’ illusion of pleasure. For them, “[L]aughing was safe, but not laughing posed a serious risk.” To have their fun spoiled isn’t merely an annoyance, but a threat.
Dazai’s work has experienced a recent resurgence on TikTok, as noted by articles in The New York Times and Dirt. His newfound popularity among Zoomers doesn’t surprise me. Our generation is defined, among other things, by our collective nihilism, self-deprecating humor, and mental health crisis, all of which feature prominently in Dazai’s writing. The same month of @indeprive’s tweet, another meme was going viral across Twitter: a dialogue in which a therapist asks, “And what do we say when we feel like this?”, to which any number of absurd, avoidant responses might be given, from “rip” to “a ha ha” to “that’s show biz, baby.” Our brand of self-aware yet still deflective comedy means that a ludicrous punch line — in other words, buffoonery — is the only tolerable response to an emotionally vulnerable situation. In many ways, The Flowers of Buffoonery is an anthem — or perhaps a cry for help, though it’s hard to tell — of a generation raised by the internet.
As a work, The Flowers of Buffoonery is not nearly as fully fledged as its literary successor, No Longer Human, which Dazai published in 1948 and which also features Yozo as its protagonist, though it is told from Yozo’s perspective and chronicles much of his life before and after the drowning attempt mentioned in Flowers. Flowers frequently feels gimmicky, especially the character of the unidentified author-narrator, who repeatedly inserts himself at the end of every chapter to do exactly what his characters are doing — i.e., obsess over how others perceive him, which for him means agonizing over his failure to achieve literary greatness. Flowers is where the seeds of the concerns of No Longer Human first germinate — in both, characters attempt to use ‘playing the clown’ as a tactic for self-preservation. Yet the characters seem more concerned about maintaining the appearance of levity than genuine enjoyment: “The sad thing about all of this, however, is that none of them could laugh from the bottom of their bellies. Even as they doubled over laughing, they took notice of the way they looked to one another.” In Flowers, Kosuge laughs about a time he postured in his fancy overcoat at midnight to impress a girl, only to look down and realize he had his long johns on the whole time. By making fun of his own concern with his appearance, Kosuge portrays himself as self-aware to his peers, yet his interest in appearing self-aware to them only further betrays that same concern with others’ perceptions. When we curate a persona (on or offline), whether we’re seeking to appear perfect or relatable, what we’re really seeking either way is validation.
TikTok and influencer culture have only exacerbated young people’s obsession with appearances. Gen Z’s predominance on the internet has made us the most observed generation, due to both the ease with which a massive public audience can gain access to our content as well as our own willingness (or eagerness) to be seen. On the internet, where one’s public image can be so easily manipulated, it’s nearly impossible to differentiate between authenticity and performance. You can’t tell which of our claims or complaints or confessions are genuine and which are ironic, and that’s exactly the point — the evasive, absurdist nature of our humor allows our true feelings to remain safely obscured. We cannot express them directly — the invitation of an “unless?” can only exist when preceded by a “jk.” There’s a fine line between humor in the face of fear and humor in avoidance of fear. The latter, however, carries the danger of closing ourselves off to our emotions until the only possible outcome is apathy.
Yozo calls himself a “master of caricature” in Flowers. The internet makes us masters of the same art. We caricature celebrities, Congress, our peers, ourselves, Karens, the “cringeworthy,” the mainstream, the fringe; we make memes about our insecurities, but also war, the coronavirus, death, violence. Online, comedy and tragedy are what spread the fastest — horrible news stories circulate with the same urgency as TikTok trends and are forgotten just as quickly. Famous people are beloved one moment and abhorred the next. In its worst incarnation, the internet is a circus: it is distraction and exaggeration and entertainment, where all tragedy is absorbed into comedy, where the things that matter and the things that don’t blur together until nothing we say seems to hold meaning anymore. The characters in The Flowers of Buffoonery play games and crack jokes so they do not have to think about why Yozo Oba, aged twenty-five, would attempt to drown himself with a married woman he might have loved or tried to kill, or both. All of these are symptoms of an unwillingness to commit — to our feelings, to our lives, to being in the world. We can’t avoid ourselves forever. We can’t, like the characters in Flowers, like Dazai himself, allow ourselves to succumb to apathy.
Then again, maybe it isn’t taking off the mask that enables us to be honest with each other. Maybe it’s keeping it on. For someone like a Twitter user who can’t express themselves in a way that isn’t charmingly facetious and <280 characters long, humor is not a way to avoid the truth — it is the truth. Our methods of covering up our vulnerabilities say more about how insecure we are than our individual insecurities ever will themselves. If irony is the only way we can reveal a small glimmer of our honest selves, maybe that can be enough, at least until we’re ready to give more.
Only towards the end of The Flowers of Buffoonery do any scenes take place outside the confines of the sanitarium. In the last chapter, on the morning of his official release, Yozo walks with Mano up a grassy hill to see Mount Fuji at sunrise. Despite the circumstances under which the two became acquainted, Yozo invites her to visit him in Tokyo for New Year’s. The offer is casual, but glistens with sincerity like the frost on the hillside. At the summit, Mano is disappointed when clouds block Fuji from view. The two stand there in the breeze, looking out at the mist over the sea. Is it hope that Yozo feels, or is he only fooling himself? Is this a story about nihilism or youthful innocence? Or is it the former pretending to be the latter? Maybe that’s what matters more in the end — not what the story really is, but how it wants to be seen.
Or maybe I’m wrong about all this. But even if so, it’s cool, because I wrote this whole thing as a joke anyway. Right?