Self-Portraits: Stories
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4.3 • 3 Ratings
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Bringing together novelist Osamu Dazai’s best autobiographical shorts in a single, slim volume, Self-Portraits shows the legendary writer at his best—and worst
“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 world—in all its self-involved, self-conscious, and self-hating glory. “Art,” he wrote, “is ‘I.’”
In these short stories, collected and translated by Ralph McCarthy, we can see just how closely Dazai’s life mirrored his art, and vice versa, as the writer/narrator falls from grace, rises to fame, and falls again. Addiction, debt, shame, and despair dogged Dazai until his self-inflicted death, and yet despite all the lies and deception he resorted to in life, there is an almost fanatical honesty to his writing. And that has made him a hero to generations of readers who see laid bare, in his works, the painful, impossible contradictions inherent in the universal commandment of social life—fit in and do as you are told—as well as the possibility, however desperate, of defiance.
Long out of print, these stories will be a revelation to the legions of new fans of No Longer Human, The Setting Sun, and The Flowers of Buffoonery.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This revelatory collection of autobiographical stories by Dazai (1909–1948) lends context to his classic longer works, The Flowers of Buffoonery and No Longer Human. Often, the delightfully barbed musings feel like the remembrances of an aging rock star, as in "Eight Views of Tokyo," in which the narrator describes an attempt to write a story of his youth among the city's strivers, who are drawn to the "charmless, featureless plain" on which Tokyo was built to "regard one another with jealous, hostile eyes." "Canis familiaris" begins with a characteristically wry mix of bravado and resignation: "I have confidence when it comes to dogs. I'm confident that eventually I'll be bitten by one." In "Thinking of Zenzō," Dazai writes of getting scammed by a woman posing as a farmer who overcharges him for roses. For all the hijinks, stories like "Early Light," which finds Dazai and his wife and two children on the run from bomb threats in the spring of 1945, lend necessary gravitas. As acidic and addictive as a bag of sour candy, this smart selection of Dazai's shorts is one to savor.
