Osamu Dazai

Osamu Dazai's No Longer Human, this leading postwar Japanese writer's second novel, tells the poignant and fascinating story of a young man who is caught between the breakup of the traditions of a northern Japanese aristocratic family and the impact of Western ideas. In consequence, he feels himself "disqualified from being human" (a literal translation of the Japanese title).

Donald Keene, who translated this and Dazai's first novel, The Setting Sun, has said of the author's work: "His world … suggests Chekhov or possibly postwar France, … but there is a Japanese sensibility in the choice and presentation of the material. A Dazai novel is at once immediately intelligible in Western terms and quite unlike any Western book." His writing is in some ways reminiscent of Rimbaud, while he himself has often been called a forerunner of Yukio Mishima.

No Longer Human

Novel of present day Japan. Reaction of an upper-class family to the war and the resultant cultural impact.

The Setting Sun

Allison Markin Powell

The novella that first propelled Dazai into the literary elite of post-war Japan. Essentially the start of Dazai's career, Schoolgirl gained notoriety for its ironic and inventive use of language. Now it illuminates the prevalent social structures of a lost time, as well as the struggle of the individual against them--a theme that occupied Dazai's life both personally and professionally. This new translation preserves the playful language of the original and offers the reader a new window into the mind of one of the greatest Japanese authors of the 20th century.

Schoolgirl

Osamu Dazai's No Longer Human, this leading postwar Japanese writer's second novel, tells the poignant and fascinating story of a young man who is caught between the breakup of the traditions of a northern Japanese aristocratic family and the impact of Western ideas. In consequence, he feels himself "disqualified from being human" (a literal translation of the Japanese title). Donald Keene, who translated this and Dazai's first novel, The Setting Sun, has said of the author's work: "His world … suggests Chekhov or possibly postwar France, … but there is a Japanese sensibility in the choice and presentation of the material. A Dazai novel is at once immediately intelligible in Western terms and quite unlike any Western book." His writing is in some ways reminiscent of Rimbaud, while he himself has often been called a forerunner of Yukio Mishima.

NO LONGER HUMAN

For the first time in English, Osamu Dazai’s hilariously comic and deeply moving prequel to No Longer Human The Flowers of Buffoonery opens in a seaside sanitarium where Yozo Oba—the narrator of No Longer Human at a younger age—is being kept after a failed suicide attempt. While he is convalescing, his friends and family visit him, and other patients and nurses drift in and out of his room. Against this dispiriting backdrop, everyone tries to maintain a lighthearted, even clownish atmosphere: playing cards, smoking cigarettes, vying for attention, cracking jokes, and trying to make each other laugh. While No Longer Human delves into the darkest corners of human consciousness, The Flowers of Buffoonery pokes fun at these same emotions: the follies and hardships of youth, of love, and of self-hatred and depression. A glimpse into the lives of a group of outsiders in prewar Japan, The Flowers of Buffoonery is a darkly humorous and fresh addition to Osamu Dazai’s masterful and intoxicating oeuvre.

The Flowers of Buffoonery

Donald Keene

Flowers of Buffoonery

Seven short stories by one of Japan's pre-eminent postwar writers and prose stylists. These imaginative stories are full of water spirits, ghosts, and a mixture of fantastic allegory and affecting romance.

Japanese Tales of Fantasy

Blue Bamboo

Indigno de ser humano

The post-war period in Japan was one of immense social change as Japanese society adjusted to the shock of defeat and to the occupation of Japan by American forces and their allies. Osamu Dazai’s The Setting Sun takes this milieu as its background to tell the story of the decline of a minor aristocratic family. The story is told through the eyes of Kazuko, the unmarried daughter of a widowed aristocrat. Her search for self meaning in a society devoid of use for her forms the crux of Dazai’s novel. It is a sad story, and structurally is a novel very much within the confines of the Japanese take on the novel in a way reminiscent of authors such as Nobel Prize winner Yasunari Kawabata – the social interactions are peripheral and understated, nuances must be drawn, and for readers more used to Western novelistic forms this comes across as being rather wishy-washy. Kazuko’s mother falls ill, and due to their financial circumstances they are forced to take a cottage in the countryside. Her brother, who became addicted to opium during the war is missing. When he returns, Kazuko attempts to form a liaison with the novelist Uehara. This romantic displacement only furthers to deepen her alienation from society.

THE SETTING SUN

Run, Melos! and Other Stories

The war is over. Japan is defeated. As his country rebuilds, a young man must fight disease and rebuild his life. He will start at a peculiar sanatorium, where everyone gets a nickname, and where he is surrounded by an odd assortment of patients and caregivers.

Pandora's Box

Twenty autobiographical stories describe with honesty and self-deprecating humour the women, the suicide attempts, the drinking and the struggle against a staid literary establishment of Japan's enfant terrible.

Tales from the Life of Japan's Great Decadent Romantic

Self Portraits

Yesil Bambu ve Diger Fantastik Öyküler

Dazai Osamu wrote The Fairy Tale Book (Otogizoshi) in the last months of the Pacific War. The traditional tales upon which Dazai's retellings are based are well known to every Japanese schoolchild, but this is no children's book. In Dazai's hands such stock characters as the kindhearted Oji-san to Oba-san ("Grandmother and Grandfather"), the mischievous tanuki badger, the fearsome Oni ogres, the greedy old man, the "tongue-cut" sparrow, and of course Urashima Taro (the Japanese Rip van Winkle) become complex individuals facing difficult and nuanced moral dilemmas. The resulting stories are thought-provoking, slyly subversive, and often hilarious. In spite of the "gloom and doom" atmosphere always cited in reviews of The Setting Sun and the later No Longer Human, though, Dazai's cutting wit and rich humor are evident in the entire body of his work. His literature depicts the human condition in painfully blunt and realistic terms, but, like life itself, is often accompanied by a smile.

The Fairy Tale Book of Dazai Osamu

Otogizoshi

Early Light offers three very different aspects of Osamu Dazai’s genius: the title story relates his misadventures as a drinker and a family man in the terrible fire bombings of Tokyo at the end of WWII. Having lost their own home, he and his wife flee with a new baby boy and their little girl to relatives in Kofu, only to be bombed out anew. The father explains to his daughter: “‘Everything’s gone. Mr. Rabbit, our shoes, the Odagiri house, the Chino house, they all burned up.’ ‘Yeah, they all burned up,’ she said, still smiling.”

“One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji,” another autobiographical tale, is much more comic: Dazai finds himself unable to escape the famous views, the beauty once immortalized by Hokusai and now reduced to a cliche. In the end, young girls torment him by pressing him into taking their photo before the famous peak: “Goodbye,” he hisses through his teeth, “Mount Fuji. Thanks for everything. Click.”

And the final story is “Villon’s Wife,” a small masterpiece, which relates the awakening to power of a drunkard’s wife. She transforms herself into a woman not to be defeated by anything, not by her husband being a thief, a megalomaniacal writer, and a wastrel. Single-handedly, she saves the day by concluding that “There’s nothing wrong with being a monster, is there? As long as we can stay alive.”

N. J. Thrift

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