Osamu Dazai

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...

Mine has been a life of much shame. I can't even guess myself what it must be to live the life of a human being. 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...

No one really understands how we suffer. One day, when we’re adults, we may come to recall this suffering, this misery, as silly and laughable, but how are we to get through the long, hateful period until then? No one bothers to teach us that. Osamu Dazai was a master raconteur who plumbed, in an addictive, easy style, the absurd...

"Art dies the moment it acquires authority." So said Japan's quintessential rebel writer Osamu Dazai, who, disgusted with the hypocrisy of every kind of establishment, from the nation's obsolete aristocracy to its posturing, warmongering generals, went his own way, even when that meant his death—and the death of others. Faced with pressure to conform, he declared his individuality to the...

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,...

A fictional writer in his thirties named Osamu Dazai has just mailed his publisher an awful manuscript, filling him with dread and shame. Wandering along a river in a nearby park in suburban Tokyo, he meets a high-school dropout and the two get into an intellectual spat. Eventually, Dazai finds himself agreeing to perform in the boy's place that very...

The Setting Sun is set in the early postwar years, exploring the destructive effects of war and the transition from a feudal Japan to an industrial society.

This powerful novel of a nation in social and moral crisis was first published by New Directions in 1956. Set in the early postwar years, The Setting Sun probes the destructive effects of war and the transition from a feudal Japan to an industrial society. The influence of Osamu Dazai's novel has made "people of the setting sun" a permanent...

Dazai's brand of egoistic pessimism dovetails organically with the emo chic of this cultural moment and with the inner lives of teenagers of all eras. - Andrew Martin, The New York Times A journey to hell with Osamu Dazai, Japan's ultimate bad boy novelist - Damian Flanagan, The Japan Times No Longer Human is the story of Yozo Oba, who,...

A classic of Japanese literature, brought to life in manga for the first time! This is the first manga edition in English of The Setting Sun, Osamu Dazai's classic novel, often considered his masterpiece. Set in the aftermath of World War Two, this is the story of Kazuko, a strong-willed young woman from an aristocratic family that has fallen into...

Dazai's brand of egoistic pessimism dovetails organically with the emo chic of this cultural moment and with the inner lives of teenagers of all eras. — Andrew Martin, The New York Times Best-known for his novels No Longer Human and The Setting Sun, Dazai was also an acclaimed writer of short stories, experimenting with a wide variety of styles and...

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 during 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...

Osamu Dazai is one of the most famous—and infamous—writers of 20th-century Japan. A Shameful Life (Ningen shikkaku) is his final published work and has become a bestselling classic for its depiction of the tortured struggle of a young man to survive in a world that he cannot comprehend. Paralleling the life and death of Dazai himself, the delicate weaving of...

Here to slake the unquenchable thirst of Dazai's legions of loyal fans are eleven works of short fiction and vignettes, most of which have never before appeared in English. Beginning with "Memories" (which tells a tale of teenage love, based on the autobiographical events that inspired Dazai's famed No Longer Human), and ending with Good-Bye (the chapters of a comic...

A new selection of six short stories by one of Japan's most iconic twentieth-century writers. An adolescent girl narrates her day in an existential masterpiece that explores what it means to be a forming person in a fomenting society. A woman writes a farewell note to her husband, an artist who has driven her away with his counterfeit profundity and...