من تصميم Osamu Dazai
Fourteen tales selected from the breadth of Dazai's fabled career, some never before seen in English
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 complexities of life in a society whose expectations cannot be met without sacrificing one's individual ideals on the altar of conformity. The gravitational pull of his prose is on full display in these stories. In "Lantern," a young woman, in love with a well-born but impoverished student, shoplifts a bathing suit for him—and ends up in the local newspaper indicted as a crazed, degenerate communist. In "Chiyojo," a high-school girl shows early promise as a writer, but as her uncle and mother relentlessly push her to pursue a literary career, she must ask herself: is this what I really want? Or am I supposed to fulfill their own frustrated ambitions? In "Shame," a young reader writes a fan letter to a writer she admires, only to find out, upon visiting him, that he's a bourgeoise sophisticate nothing like the desperate rebels he portrays, and decides (in true Dazai style): "Novelists are human trash. No, they're worse than that; they're demons. . . They write nothing but lies."
This collection of 14 tales—a half-dozen of which have never before appeared in English—is based on a Japanese collection of, as Dazai described them, "soliloquies by female narrators." No One Knows includes the quietly brilliant long story "Schoolgirl" and shows the fiction of this 20th-century genius in a fresh light.
Fourteen tales selected from the breadth of Dazai's fabled career, some never before seen in English
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 complexities of life in a society whose expectations cannot be met without sacrificing one's individual ideals on the altar of conformity. The gravitational pull of his prose is on full display in these stories. In "Lantern," a young woman, in love with a well-born but impoverished student, shoplifts a bathing suit for him—and ends up in the local newspaper indicted as a crazed, degenerate communist. In "Chiyojo," a high-school girl shows early promise as a writer, but as her uncle and mother relentlessly push her to pursue a literary career, she must ask herself: is this what I really want? Or am I supposed to fulfill their own frustrated ambitions? In "Shame," a young reader writes a fan letter to a writer she admires, only to find out, upon visiting him, that he's a bourgeoise sophisticate nothing like the desperate rebels he portrays, and decides (in true Dazai style): "Novelists are human trash. No, they're worse than that; they're demons. . . They write nothing but lies."
This collection of 14 tales—a half-dozen of which have never before appeared in English—is based on a Japanese collection of, as Dazai described them, "soliloquies by female narrators." No One Knows includes the quietly brilliant long story "Schoolgirl" and shows the fiction of this 20th-century genius in a fresh light.
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March 1, 2025
A collection of stories featuring female narrators amid the turbulence and upheavals of mid-20th-century Japan. Though Dazai often drew from his own life in his novels--a life marked by alcoholism, drug addiction, and time in a mental institution--both the voice and perspective are different here. In every story, the first-person protagonist is a young woman, generally in her early-to-mid-20s. Or younger, as in the day-in-the-life of "Schoolgirl," one of the longest and best pieces. Proceeding chronologically, the stories cover an expanse from the late 1930s to the late '40s. Early on, the narrators struggle with the constraints of gender and class, or how the male author believes his female characters felt about such issues. (It can be difficult to tell whether some of the disgust expressed by his self-lacerating narrators represent their own or the author's attitude toward being female.) The pivot arrives with "December 8," a slice of Japanese life from the day after Pearl Harbor, when the everydayness seems pretty much the same as it did before. From here, it won't, as all hell breaks loose in the subsequent stories. Amid the bombing of houses, the disappearance of spouses, and the disintegration of familial relations, conventional morality pretty much collapses. There are no happy endings or glimmers of hope. In "Osan" (1947), a young wife tries to hold her home and family together as she suspects that her husband has embarked on an affair that brings him no happiness. It ends with the narrator lamenting, "I can't stop trembling--not with sorrow or anger so much as disgust with the absolute idiocy of it all." The author died by drowning in 1948 at the age of 38, seemingly in a double suicide with the lover for whom he had abandoned his own family. Some of the earlier and lesser stories are merely diverting, but the longer and later ones are devastating.COPYRIGHT(2025) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
