Showing results by author "Osamu Dazai" in All Categories

Portraying himself as a failure, the protagonist of Osamu Dazai's No Longer Human narrates a seemingly normal life, even while he feels himself incapable of understanding human beings. Oba Yozo's attempts to reconcile himself to the world around him begin in early childhood, continue through high school, where he becomes a "clown" to mask his alienation, and eventually lead to a failed suicide attempt as an adult. Without sentimentality, he records the casual cruelties of life and its fleeting moments of human connection and tenderness.

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.

Set in the early postwar years, it probes the destructive effects of war and the transition from a feudal Japan to an industrial society. Ozamu Dazai died, a suicide, in 1948. But the influence of his book has made "people of the setting sun" a permanent part of the Japanese language, and his heroine, Kazuko, a young aristocrat who deliberately abandons her class, a symbol of the anomie which pervades so much of the modern world. 

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.

No Longer Human was an attack on the traditions of Japan, capturing the postwar crisis of Japanese cultural identity. Framed by an epilogue and prologue, the story is told in the form three notebooks left by ba Yz, whose calm exterior hides his tormented soul. 

This book contains the following works: 1. Edgar Allan Poe: The Pit and the Pendulum, 2. William Shakespeare: A Midsummer Night's Dream, 3. Frances Hodgson Burnett: The Secret Garden, 4. Fyodor Dostoevsky: The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, 5. Robert Louis Stevenson: Treasure Island, 6. H.P. Lovecraft: At the Mountains of Madness, 7. Jack London: The Call of the Wild, 8. Mary W. Shelley: Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus, 9. Osamu Dazai: No Longer Human (Confessions of a Faulty Man)....

As we edge toward the 75th anniversary of Osamu Dazai's death, much of his masterful prose remains surprisingly unknown to most English-language audiences. This observational vignette written by a youthful Dazai offers a lovely introduction to the introspective master widely known and loved in Japan. This updated translation in English provides a fresh look at this masterful vignette.

Una colección de cuentos del afamado enfant terrible de la literatura japonesa del siglo XX. Las tendencias suicidas del autor están presentes en estos cuentos amargos pero marcados por un sentido del humor existencial y crudo a la vez que poético. Osamu Dazai experimenta con numerosas técnicas narrativas y sale airoso de todas ellas en una antología crucial para entender la literatura japonesa de principios del siglo pasado.

Una historia tan mágica como fabulosa, tan lúcida como pertinente, que sin duda influenció en cierta manera La vida es bella de Roberto Benigni. Tokyo, 1945. Mientras las bombas caen sobre la ciudad, un padre lee en voz alta un libro de cuentos para sus hijos, mientras adereza las historias con todo tipo de fantasías surgidas de su imaginación; fantasías más cercanas a la realidad de lo que están viviendo y a la naturaleza humana.