Osamu Dazai: The Final Years - (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

"Osamu Dazai wrote, better than almost anyone, about the thin line between isolation and belonging" --The Atlantic

The acclaimed Japanese writer Osamu Dazai, often described as the "bad boy" of Japanese literature, is enjoying a cultural moment. Known today in the West primarily as a novelist, Dazai first made his name in Japan through dazzlingly different and inventive short stories that experimented with radically unconventional styles, from stories based on fantasy and legend to deeply personal subject matter drawn from his own struggles with suicide, addiction and depression.

The Final Years (Bannen in Japanese) was Dazai's first book, published in 1936 and later described by him as a kind of "suicide note" to the world, though more than a decade would pass before his death in 1948. Rich in diverse styles, voices and plots, the book shows there is more to the "saint of negativity" than his legions of contemporary fans might expect: encounters with ghosts and gods, slapstick fistfights, and visions of warring butterflies that fit together in ways both amusing and shocking and contribute to the charm and lasting legacy of The Final Years. Some of the stories draw on his personal struggles--fraught family relationships, sordid love affairs, infidelities, addictions--with great humor and empathy. These enduring concerns continue to resonate with contemporary readers. The Final Years serves as an astonishing re-introduction to a figure we thought we knew.

This collection of fifteen stories contains several published for the first time in English, as well as new translations of some of Dazai's most famous works. The stories include:

• Memories: A semi-autobiographical piece in which the narrator recalls incidents from his childhood, including struggles to please a domineering father, self-disgust at his own appearance, and unrequited love for a household maid that his brother is also in love with.
• The Flowers of Buffoonery: The novella in which Oba Yozo, the protagonist of Dazai's most famous work No Longer Human (1948), makes his first appearance. A young man enters a suicide pact with his lover, but survives while she dies; an imaginative reconstruction of events that Dazai himself experienced.
• Metamorphosis: A fable about a girl living alone with her father, a poor charcoal gatherer. After an argument, she runs away and throws herself into a waterfall, where she is transformed into a carp and drawn deeper into the waters below.
• Pillow Book of a Creep: The intimate musings of a depressed writer struggling with debt and a disintegrating marriage. The narrator strikes a friendship with a troubled teenager and finds an unlikely source of inspiration in the whimsical names of the flowers planted in the garden of his unhappy home.

The introduction by translators James Garza and Irena Hayter explores the roots of Dazai's writings, and examines Dazai's mastery of different storytelling modes.

About the Author

Osamu Dazai (1909-1948) was the pen name of Shuji Tsushima, the tenth of eleven children born to a wealthy landowner and politician in the far north of Japan. Dazai studied French literature at the University of Tokyo, but never received a degree. He first attracted attention in 1933 when magazines began to publish his work. Between 1930 and 1937, he made three suicide attempts, a subject he deals with in many of his short stories. Despite his troubled life and rebellious spirit, Dazai wrote in simple and colloquial style, conveying his personal torments through literature. Dazai's life ended early in a double suicide with a married lover.

James Garza is a poet and literary translator whose work has appeared in Asymptote, Modern Poetry in Translation and Poetry, among other places. He holds a Ph.D. in Translation Studies from the University of Leeds. A past winner of the Stephen Spender Prize for poetry in translation, he has also served as a judge for the John Dryden Translation Competition. He is Assistant Professor of Translation Studies at International Christian University in Tokyo.

Irena Hayter is Associate Professor of Japanese Studies at the University of Leeds, UK. Her work on the literature and cultural politics of the interwar years in Japan has appeared in journals such as Japan Forum, Japanese Language and Literature, and positions: asia critique, among others. She's the co-editor of Tenko: Cultures of Political Conversion in Transwar Japan (Routledge 2021). She is completing a monograph on women, urban spectacle and cinema in imperial Japan.