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Osamu Dazai (1909–1948)

Author of No Longer Human

88+ Works 4,432 Members 69 Reviews 23 Favorited

About the Author

Born into a near-aristocratic family whose declining world he depicts in The Setting Sun (1947), Dazai had the means to become an accomplished dilettante and rake. Around 1933 he began to think seriously about writing, but his life was complicated by drug addiction, a string of affairs, and two show more attempts at suicide. The end of the war brought a change in Dazai, and he produced his finest works, even though his own life was ending because of alcoholism and tuberculosis. The darkness of his works reveals his tortured existence, which he ended by suicide. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
Image credit: Tamura Shigeru(田村茂)

Works by Osamu Dazai

No Longer Human (1948) 2,331 copies
The Setting Sun (1947) 920 copies
Schoolgirl (1939) 235 copies
Self Portraits (1991) 91 copies
The Flowers of Buffoonery (1935) 77 copies
Run, Melos! (1984) 57 copies
Early Light (2022) 36 copies
Pandora's Box (1973) 25 copies
Villon's Wife (1947) 18 copies
Later Years (1997) 13 copies
Eight Scenes of Tokyo (2012) 9 copies
Farewell (1989) 9 copies
Als mens mislukt (2023) 8 copies
A New Hamlet (2016) 6 copies
Roman Lantern (1983) 5 copies
Repudiados (2016) 5 copies
Word of Araki (1982) 4 copies
La Déchéance d'un Homme T01 (2021) — Contributor — 4 copies
Grasshopper (1974) 4 copies
Um Homem Em Declínio (2023) 3 copies
もの思う葦 (2002) 2 copies
New Hamlet (1974) 2 copies
奇想と微笑 (2009) 2 copies
No Longer Human [manga] (2007) 2 copies
Cuentos de cabecera (1900) 2 copies
太宰治全集. 1 (1988) 2 copies
Recuerdos (2015) 2 copies
Günün İlk Işıkları (2022) 2 copies
正義と微笑 (2009) 1 copy
December 8th 1 copy
Nữ sinh 1 copy
Soytarı Çiçekleri (2023) 1 copy
Nečovjek (2023) 1 copy
Izopstenik (2022) 1 copy
海 [Umi] 1 copy
Tà Dương 1 copy
Mulheres 1 copy
Owoce wiśni 1 copy
Tsugaru Communication (2004) 1 copy
Alte Freunde (2017) 1 copy
Waiting 1 copy

Associated Works

No Longer Human (2019) — Original novel — 433 copies
The Oxford Book of Japanese Short Stories (1997) — Contributor — 226 copies
Modern Japanese Stories: An Anthology (1962) — Contributor — 161 copies
No Longer Human, Volume 1 (2009) — Original story — 63 copies
No Longer Human, Volume 2 (2010) — Original story — 50 copies
No Longer Human, Volume 3 (2011) — Original story — 43 copies
Japans verhaal elf moderne Japanse verhalen (1983) — Contributor — 8 copies

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fiction - novella orig. published in 1935, translated from Japanese

short story about the absurd feelings one might feel in a sanitarium following a failed suicide attempt, punctuated by the narrator's self-deprecating/self-loathing humor about how he's failing as an author/storyteller, written by a renowned author who would himself commit suicide 13 years later.

a fairly bizarre reading experience; I'm not sure what to make of it, frankly, but the good news is it's really short.

takes place in 1930s Japan, winter.
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½
 
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reader1009 | 1 other review | Mar 1, 2024 |
Stupidly absorbing. A 20th-century Notes from the Underground and everything Diary of an Oxygen Thief wanted to be but couldn't muster. An intimate portrayal of the heaviness of depression, isolation, and addiction. Amazing narrative framing, adroit prose, and meaningful structural irony. I can't wait to read more of Dazai's work.
 
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Eavans | 39 other reviews | Feb 5, 2024 |
I was surprised to read that this remains one of the best selling novels in Japan. I guess it’s hard to know what will resonate with something from a different culture, especially when reading that work in translation. About a year ago I guess, i read George
Scialabba’s How To Be Depressed and William Styron’s Darkness Visible in succession - this book here would make a fitting triumvirate of depression literature. I might have mentioned this in one of the reviews I wrote for those books, but it seems to me that depression is a horribly narcissistic disease - the depressive episode makes all the world bend inward towards the black void swirling inside you. Everything seems designed to stab and poke at you in particular, and every perceived slight on the part of others is taken to be a sweeping criticism of your who existence. Perhaps this book’s greatest contribution is it’s title, whose English translation doesn’t seem to capture the feeling it has in the Chinese characters that constitute its original Japanese title 人間失格, approximately disqualified from humanity. It’s a great way, if a bit untranslatable, to describe the truly depressed person’s way of interfacing with the world. The fact that this act of disqualification is carried out and enforced by the depressive himself is an irony not lost on Osamu Dazai. The final lines of the book, where the narrator Yozo is described by one of the many women he was involved in over the course of the story as “a good boy, an angel,” far from the depiction Yozo himself gives as an alcoholic, alienated, good for nothing loser. It can often be bewildering for those around the depressed person, who they might see as a fine (qualified?) person, spiral into self destruction. If they could only just be happy like a normal person, they might say. Despite the criticism this kind of statement would get in the current climate of “accepting” mental illness, it’s actually true, and I think most depressed people would agree. I also think most depressed people are fighting every second of every day to be happy, and it’s only when they become too exhausted to fight anymore that depression wins.

All that being said, Yozo has really serious case of Main Character Syndrome. You may say, well sure, he’s the fucking main character of the book. What I mean is, we are presented with the unbroken ramblings of someone who is clearly self obsessed, with his good points (we hear a lot about his spectacular good looks and sense of humor) and his bad points. He only has to walk into a room for women to be falling all over him, and his emotion instability seems to spread like fire to anyone who draws near him. While this is a very accurate depiction of the depressed mindset, it can also be frustrating to spend a book’s length listening to someone like that ramble on. It makes you want to reach out and shake the bitch, saying shut up! You are so up your own ass that you can realize the great gift it is to be alive! You are small and insignificant in a way you can hardly imagine, and that is actually the most liberating realization you can have in life! Of course, Yozo can’t hear you; he’s a character in a book by an author who died long ago. But if you are depressed sometimes too (and I would venture most people who come to this book are) the things you might say to Yozo could equally be said to yourself. Don’t expect to come away from this with some transcendent knowledge about how to continue living in the face of the yawning void of melancholy - if anything, this is more a paean to desolation, a manifesto of someone too tired to keep fighting. But maybe you can think of this book as mirror for all the bad habits and cycles of thinking that keep you trapped, and next time you feel the black void opening again, do everything in your power not to be like Yozo.
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hdeanfreemanjr | 39 other reviews | Jan 29, 2024 |
The idea of framing these stories as embellished retelling as diversion for the author’s children as they hide in an air raid shelter during a bombing was enough to get me interested in this book. To cast fairy tales against the backdrop of modern warfare is fruitful territory, Dazai probably wasn’t the first to do it and certainly won’t be the last. Where this this book is really special is the way that it plays with the narrative - by specifying from the outset that these are off the cuff, improvised renditions of (apparently) famous fairy tales give the author all kinds of room to fit in his own flights of fancy, alterations, and commentary. If the author is a good writer, it’s nice to read these kind of free flowing books, where the lack of itinerary is the point of the journey and you can sort of just hang out for a bit and see where it all goes.

Having just finished Dazai’s No Longer Human, it’s nice to see a more whimsical side of his work. Sometimes the most morose and depressive people have the best sense of humor, when they are up to it.
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hdeanfreemanjr | Jan 29, 2024 |

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Rating
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