Due to its commission by the military government, Dazai Osamu's wartime novel _Sekibetsu_ (Regretful Parting, 1945) has received little critical attention and what attention it has received has been largely negative. It is in this context that some questionable claims have long been accepted as definitive evaluation of the novel and remain unchallenged even today.
This paper challenges the negative but extremely influential comments on Regretful Parting made shortly after the war by Takeuchi Yoshimi, Japan's leading scholar on the prominent Chinese writer Lu Xun, that Lu Xun, the protagonist of the novel studying medicine in Japan, was Dazai's own self-portrait. The paper begins by demonstrating that the young Lu Xun as presented in the novel is anything but Dazai's self-portrait. Lu Xun's noble motivation for studying medicine in Japan and his eventual decision to abandon medicine to pursue literature, make him a young man entirely different from Dazai, whose turbulent life has been told, better than anyone else, by Dazai himself. This is followed by an argument that the narrator of the novel, rather than the protagonist, can be more justifiably identified as modeled on the author.
Finally, the paper analyzes the context in which Takeuchi Yoshimi made such an unfounded judgment and how we should account for the widespread influence of such a claim in Japan and the West alike. I argue that Takeuchi made such a comment because it was politically correct during the years shortly after the war to condemn works commissioned by the military government. On the other hand, the so far unchallenged authority of Takeuchi's comments should serve as a reminder that facts must be revered more than authority if we are to reach a more accurate understanding of Japanese literature.