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. His 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.

In these short stories, collected and translated by Ralph McCarthy, we can see just how closely Dazai’s life mirrored his art, and vice versa, as the writer/narrator falls from grace, rises to fame, and falls again. Addiction, debt, shame, and despair dogged Dazai until his self-inflicted death, and yet despite all the lies and deception he resorted to in life, there is an almost fanatical honesty to his writing.

No Longer Human (1948, Ningen Shikkaku / A Shameful Life / Confessions of a Faulty Man) 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 Ōba Yōzō, whose calm exterior hides his tormented soul. Osamu Dazai was a Japanese author who is considered one of the foremost fiction writers of 20th century Japan. A number of his most popular works, such as Shayō (The Setting Sun) and Ningen Shikkaku (No Longer Human), are considered modern-day classics in Japan.

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.

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 listener a new window into the mind of one of the greatest Japanese authors of the 20th century.

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.

In Gezeichnet, dem meisterhaften Roman von Osamu Dazai, navigieren wir durch die zutiefst persönlichen Aufzeichnungen von Yozo, einem Mann, der sich von der Menschheit entfremdet fühlt. Dieser introspektive Rückblick auf ein Leben voller Missverständnisse und Fehlinterpretationen lädt uns ein, die Facetten der menschlichen Existenz zu betrachten, die oft im Verborgenen liegen. Mit feinsinnigem Witz und einer beklemmenden Offenheit erkundet Dazai die Dunkelheit, die sich hinter der Fassade des Lächelns verbirgt.

Ocho escenas de Tokio reúne, por primera vez en castellano, nueve relatos de uno de los escritores con más talento de la literatura nipona del siglo XX.

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.