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.

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)....

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. 

This carefully compiled collection includes 15 masterpiece titles.

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. 

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.