Bücher von Osamu Dazai

The Flowers of Buffoonery opens in a seaside sanatorium 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 light-hearted, even clownish atmosphere: playing cards, smoking cigarettes, vying for attention, cracking jokes and trying to make each other laugh.While No Longer Human delves into the darkest corners of human consciousness, The Flowers of Buffoonery pokes fun at these same emotions: the follies and hardships of youth, of love and of self-hatred and depression. A glimpse into the lives of a group of outsiders in pre-war Japan, The Flowers of Buffoonery is a darkly humorous and fresh addition to Osamu Dazai's masterful and intoxicating oeuvre.

A classic of Japanese literature, brought to life in English & manga for the first time! This is the first manga edition in English of The Setting Sun, Osamu Dazai's classic novel, often considered his masterpiece. Set in the aftermath of World War II, this is the story of Kazuko, a strong-willed young woman from an aristocratic family that has fallen into poverty since the war. The book follows Kazuko's journey as she and her family struggle to survive and adapt to the harsh new conditions. In addition to having to move from Tokyo to the countryside, where she is forced to work in the fields to support the family, she has to deal with a difficult divorce, the birth of a stillborn child, and the return of her drug-addicted brother from the war. This gripping and inspiring portrait of one woman's determination to survive in a society that is in the grip of a social and moral crisis tells one story in a fast-changing world, with universal themes that resonates with readers today. After Soseki Natsume, Osamu Dazai is Japan's most popular writer. Dazai is enjoying a surge in interest among young people today thanks to the success of the manga, anime and film series Bungo Stray Dogs, whose protagonist, a detective named Osamu Dazai, is based on the real-life author.

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 cruelties of life and its fleeting moments of human connection and tenderness.

Place: Tsugaru in Aomori Prefecture, Japan Time: Spring 1944As World War II was coming to an end, Osamu Dazai (born Shuji Tsushima) returned to his home in the northern tip of Honshu, Japan on assignment from a publisher to travel and write about the part of Japan where he was born and raised.He writes with humor and warmth about old friends, the people (family and servants) who nurtured him, his obsession with crabs, and his worries over sake in times of rationing. He writes with pride about his home even as he learns about some of its customs and history for the first time. This travel journal is part travelogue, part history lesson, and part love story.Osamu Dazai (1909-1948) was a twentieth century Japanese author. He is best known for the novels The Setting Sun and No Longer Human.

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 Chino house, they all burned up," "Yeah, they all burned up," she said, still smiling."One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji," another autobiographical tale, is much more comic: Dazai finds himself unable to escape the famous views, the beauty once immortalized by Hokusai and now reduced to a cliche. In the end, young girls torment him by pressing him into taking their photo before the famous peak: "Goodbye," he hisses through his teeth, "Mount Fuji. Thanks for everything. Click."And the final story is "Villon's Wife," a small masterpiece, which relates the awakening to power of a drunkard's wife. She transforms herself into a woman not to be defeated by anything, not by her husband being a thief, a megalomaniacal writer, and a wastrel. Single-handedly, she saves the day by concluding that "There's nothing wrong with being a monster, is there? As long as we can stay alive."

From Wikipedia:No Longer Human (

From Wikipedia:The Setting Sun (

A new translation of one of the greatest works of postwar Japanese literature, acutely capturing modern anxiety and alienation