Osamu Dazai

"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...

"This powerful novel of a nation in social and moral crisis was first published by New Directions in 1956. Set in the early postwar years, The Setting Sun probes the destructive effects of war and the transition from a feudal Japan to an industrial society. The influence of Osamu Dazai's novel 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,...

"'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...

"Best-known for his novels No Longer Human and The Setting Sun, Dazai was also an acclaimed writer of short stories, experimenting with a wide variety of styles and bringing to each work a sophisticated sense of humor, a broad empathy for the human condition and a tremendous literary talent. By turns hilarious, ironic, introspective, mystical and sarcastic, these stories present a fully rounded portrait of a talented writer who tried several times...

"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,...

A young biker discovers superhuman strength in a time where disease has been conquered and economic disparity has grown.

In this final volume Yozo has been lulled into a sense of comfort with his new life and young wife. All that he holds dear is completely destroyed when he finds out that the person he loves is even potentially worse off than he. After his wife is sexually assaulted by a business acquaintence, Yozo can no longer envision her as the beautiful pure woman that tamed his soul many months before. Now his wife is little more than a doll for charming men,...