Osamu Dazai
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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...
2) Early light
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"'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. 'Everything's gone,' the father explains to his daughter: 'Mr. Rabbit, our shoes, the Ogigari house, the...
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"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...
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"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."--Provided by publisher....
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""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 estab- lishment, 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 world-in all its self-involved, self-conscious, and self-hating...
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"This manga version of novelist Osamu Dazai's masterpiece NO LONGER HUMAN--the #2 bestselling novel of all time in Japan--tells the story of Yozo Oba, a young man growing up in Japan in the immediate aftermath of World War II, who finds himself caught between the disintegration of the traditions of his aristocratic provincial family and the impact of the new postwar world. Oba is tormented by a failure to find any value in himself or in human relationships,...
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"'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.' Plagued by a maddening anxiety, the terrible disconnect between his own concept of happiness and the joy of the rest of the world, Yozo Oba plays the clown in his dissolute life, holding up a mask for those around him as he spirals ever downward, locked arm in arm with death. Osamu Dazai's immortal, and supposedly autobiographical work...